Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
WEDNESDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2003
BARONESS WARWICK
OF UNDERCLIFFE,
PROFESSOR RODERICK
FLOUD, DR
GEOFFREY COPLAND
AND PROFESSOR
ARTHUR LUCAS
CBE
180. But there is a difference between the number
of student places and the number of separate institutions and
the infrastructure that goes with those institutions.
(Professor Floud) Certainly. I am sorry to keep going
on about my own experience but it may be instructive in terms
of the opportunities for structural change. The business plan
of London Metropolitan University envisages, we think for good
reasons, no economies of scale or number in academic provision.
That is, we do not think we can economise on academic staff as
a result of the merger. We believe that it is possible to economise
to some extent on some of the support staff activities where there
may be economies of scale, but we actually do not envisage any
long-term reduction in the overall staffing of the university,
which is of course 60% expenditure, which is why I am concentrating
on that, because we think that we need more staff to support students
and teachers. In other words, we will not individually move people
from the finance department of the university to student services.
So, I think our view—and it is in the business plan which
was supported by HEFCE in terms of providing restructuring funding—is
that we do not see significant economies of scale in staffing
as a result of the merger. There may be economies in buildings,
but that is a different matter.
Chairman: We have strayed a little from
what we wanted to cover first, but I want to move now on to the
expanding provision of higher education.
Ms Munn
181. One of the aspects of the announcement
within the White Paper that surprised me was the statement that
the increased participation from 43%, which is the latest estimate,
to 50% would be predominantly met through foundation degrees.
What was your response to that?
(Dr Copland) I too was surprised by that statement,
but I think we have to tease out what is actually meant by foundation
degree. I think one of the issues that is not covered fully in
the White Paper is the existing diversity of the sector and it
was a quite interesting discussion this morning that, as with
all the other commentaries, focused entirely on full-time students.
There is of course a very thriving mixed economy provision for
part-time students. What I think is not picked up adequately here
is the fact that one can achieve widening participation, opening
up of opportunities through a series of routes, and putting them
all simply down the re-branded foundation degree may not actually
meet the needs of the economy or the aspirations of the students.
I think one thing that we need to be very careful of indeed is
that we do not fall into the trap of assuming that expansion equals
wider participation which is people coming from low socio-economic
groups, therefore they should go and do foundation degrees and
not have the opportunity to undertake the full honours degree,
which is the route of our higher education system. I think there
is a lot to be thought around that. One of the things which is
an indication here which we do need to think through is how we
might use more effectively credit accumulation transfer systems
in order to build qualifications to bring people in, whether they
are studying full time or part time, to enable them to have the
opportunity to start higher education and then build a qualification
through that. There have been systems which have been very successful
at doing that across the university sector and that, I think,
is the way you should achieve it. Some of those may well be foundation
degrees but some of them may well not be.
(Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe) I wonder if I might
add one point. I think there is an enormous amount of work to
be done with employers. I think that the white paper is rather
silent on this. It is the signals that employers give to potential
students that will determine whether they think that the foundation
degree route is a valuable route and, at the moment, I think the
jury is out on that. We have certainly been working with employers
and individual universities and FE colleges with whom we work
design their courses in conjunction with employers, but I think
that the signals are still quite faint in terms of the employment
opportunities that they are then offered as a result.
182. I did try to pin Margaret Hodge down on
this on Monday and I think I failed because what I was saying
was, if the main route for increasing numbers—and she rightly
pointed out that increasing numbers is not necessarily the same
as widening participation—is an expectation that some of
the sorts of, if I can put like that, students who are currently
doing three year honours degrees will shift to doing foundation
degrees and, as I said, I do not really think that I had an answer
on that. Do you see a demand for foundation degrees or do you
see a continuing demand which you would want to meet for, if I
can put it this way, the more traditional three year honours degrees?
(Dr Copland) Again, I think Diana has used the words,
"the jury is out". There are some very successful foundation
degrees, there is no question about that. There are some others
which have had a great deal of difficulty in getting off the ground.
So, there is demand certainly for some sort of employer related
sub-degree provision, but of course the concept of the foundation
degree set out by the previous Secretary of State, David Blunkett,
was that this should be seen as either a qualification in its
own right or an opportunity then to go on to an honours degree
route. My guess is that quite a lot of people who embarked on
foundation degrees will be looking to move on to top that up to
an honours degree either immediately or at a later stage. I do
not think we know enough yet about the demand for foundation degrees.
I do not think we are in a situation where students have, by and
large, gone into honours degrees because they see that as more
respectable and moved away from foundation degrees. It is very
early. We are only two years into this experiment.
183. In terms of the foundation degrees themselves
and how they are developing, is the view that they should be more
work-based? What would be the mix really of work and learning?
(Dr Copland) I think we do need to be looking at more
work-related and work-based degrees. I hope they do not get labelled
with pejorative labels that have been used occasionally about
work-based degrees and work-based courses. Different students
and different parts of the economy will have different approaches
to this and I think that laying down a single template is not
necessarily going to answer the need that we have.
(Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe) But we are working
with others including the Council for Industry and Higher Education
to try to identify better what employers want, either from foundation
degrees or indeed from honours degrees. There are often criticisms
that we do not respond as institutions to the needs of employers
and it is sometimes very difficult to find out precisely what
those needs are, so we are putting a lot of effort into trying
to work with both individual employers and at a regional level
with small and medium enterprises to try and ensure that we are
much more responsive to what they say they want from the new graduates.
184. Certainly there was a sense from the Minister
on Monday that she saw foundation degrees as being particularly
targeted at trying to fill the skills gap, but are you saying
that should be much as foundation degrees that are doing that?
(Professor Floud) Certainly not just foundation degrees
that are doing it. I think the vast majority of degrees in my
university are, in one way or another, vocational and it is simply
untrue that there are large numbers of degrees in British universities
which are not work related in some sense.
Chairman
185. The Minister said to this Committee only
on Monday that the Government were going to change the rules on
foundation degrees and that foundation degrees were no longer
going to be allowed to lead on to a three year degree. She said
very firmly, "We are going to change the rules. Foundation
degrees are foundation degrees; they are a qualification in their
own right and they stop after two years and there will not be
the right to go on to use that as a base of entry into a full
honours degree." She very clearly said that that was the
Government decision.
(Professor Floud) We had not heard that. I think that
is alarming and I, frankly, do not see how it is consistent with
the autonomy of university admissions decisions and I do not see
how it is enforceable.
186. I hope you will look at the transcript.
(Professor Floud) I would be very happy to look at
the transcript.
Ms Munn
187. What she said is that there is a difference
between there being the opportunity to study further and there
being a compulsory necessity. What she was saying was that you
did not have to but there might be an opportunity.
(Professor Floud) That is very different.
Chairman
188. I am sorry, I disagree with Meg Munn on
this. I think you should read the full transcript. We pressed
her several times on this and indeed I had a private conversation
with her afterwards and with DfES officials at an Open University
reception immediately following the Monday and I am very clear
in my own mind that what is envisaged is not the ability to carry
on to a full degree from a foundation degree, but I hope you will
push that because it is certainly not clear to this Committee
as shown by the difference between Meg Munn's interpretation and
mine.
(Professor Floud) We have several meetings lined up
in the next week or two with the Secretary of State and the Minister
and we will certainly take up that point with them.
(Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe) Is it not also worth
making the point that surely what we should be looking at in relation
to all these qualifications is the interests of the student and
the graduate and then the interests of the employment they can
go into? If, for example, a student chooses to take a foundation
degree, perhaps having gone through a further education college,
on the basis that they do not feel they are prepared to undertake
an honours degree, experiences a foundation degree, realises their
potential and chooses to go on to do something else, surely that
is something we should applaud and not something we should prevent.
189. That would be the view of this Committee.
(Dr Copland) Also, the White Paper made several references
to the credit accumulation transfer system and how that should
be developed. The statement that somebody could not proceed from
one qualification to another is entirely inconsistent with that
statement.
Mr Pollard
190. We are desperately short of plumbers—and
I am not going to ask any plumbing questions—but we are
also short of the next level of technicians. We are critically
short of the ones who work in the health service. The foundation
course would seem to be ideally suited for that level of technician
and, as Baroness Warwick has just pointed out, you could even
go on from that. Is that what the foundation course was designed
for? Is that the rationale behind it?
(Dr Copland) Certainly that was one of the objectives.
If you look at the successful foundation degrees, some of them
are very much technologically based skills areas. Some of the
other very successful ones are things like up-skilling classroom
assistants into full-blown teachers, which is also a shortage
area. Again, it comes back to the point that Diana was making:
it relates to what the employers actually want and, if they can
articulate what their needs are, the higher education system will
provide them. We have also had a very successful higher national
diploma/higher national certificate level which has provided that
route as well. I think students have responded to what they have
seen the market to be and if the market has been for higher qualifications
and higher level skills, then the students will qualify.
Paul Holmes
191. In terms of an expansion of the two year
foundation course, whether it is as a route on to three and four
year courses or not, do you envisage most of that taking place
within universities or within FE colleges? For example, there
are lots of pilots like Sheffield Hallam University which works
very well with Chesterfield College in my constituency.
(Dr Copland) I think that foundation degrees actually
provide a very good route for strengthening partnerships between
HE and FE and I think we will see more of that happening. Certainly
my own university is doing this and I think almost every other
university in the country will be doing this. It is partly qualification
delivered within the institution and partly with an FE college,
the balance will change according to the nature of the individual
arrangement.
Chairman
192. This Committee, when it had its seminar
on higher education last week, discussed with some leading experts
in the field the worry that most of the uptake, the goal of 50%,
is going to be through expansion of foundation degrees. That implies
a sort of cap on expansion of the rest of the university undergraduate
degree programme. If you had a demographic surge in terms of the
number of people wanting to come to the university, you may be
back in a cap situation where people seeking to get an undergraduate
degree will not be able to get them unless they go through the
foundation course. Is that something that worries and concerns
you? It does imply a cap, does it not?
(Professor Floud) The White Paper certainly implies
that.
193. Does it worry you?
(Professor Floud) Yes because we think that partly
because of the fact that the experience has been with the HNDs,
a substantial number of people do indeed wish to transfer from
them to honours degrees and closing off that route would actually
be closing the door on a substantial amount of potential talent.
(Professor Lucas) I would be very concerned if potential
students were restricted in the choice of the activity and the
goal that they are aiming for. A foundation degree is one of the
smorgasbord of choice available to people to suit their particular
needs. Sometimes it may be because of locality, sometimes it may
be because of family commitments or as you said before, trying
to get in to test out whether they are going to be able to cope
with these sorts of things. To produce an artificial cap of, putting
it in its most pejorative sense, quotas on various types of award
I think would be detrimental to society.
(Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe) Can I just emphasise
a point that I made earlier. I think so much of this depends on
the signals to which students or potential students respond and
if employers demonstrate and indicate through contacts both with
FE colleges and ourselves that they want to see more of their
potential employees coming through the foundation degree route,
then I think we are very happy to respond to that. I think we
are diffident about this because we know that, so far, there has
not been that great upsurge and take-up of foundation degrees
and therefore we see a cap as being a limit on student potential
and missed opportunities.
194. We have had a history of providing courses
in shortage subjects where the students have not turned up. We
know that in engineering and other related courses, do we not?
(Professor Lucas) I think it also may be salutary
to talk about some of my experience in the 1970s in Flinders University
in South Australia. There was a strong employer demand in the
period of exploration geology, a booming industry. We, unwisely
as it turned out, put on a course which was actually tailored
purely to exploration geology. Four years later, there were no
jobs in exploration geology and those people were not broadly
enough based to take other things. I think there is a very important
lesson to be learned in terms of the degree of specificity to
a particular employer demand at a given. Without providing general
skills, a programme aimed at one potential career where there
may be a short-term, or a cyclical demand, I think is dangerous.
That applies as much to foundation degrees as it does to honours
degrees.
Chairman: Can we now move on to access
to higher education.
Jeff Ennis
195. Going back to your opening statement in
terms of access, you actually state and it is a fairly obvious
statement, that the heart of the access problem is the low staying-on
rates at the age of 16 and that it is in this context that we
need a better understanding of the role and purpose of the access
regulator and what its added value might be. It appears to me
from that statement that you are actually blaming the secondary
school system for the lack of access, which to some extent I agree
is true, and you also appear to be waiting for the implementation
of the Access Regulator to bring about added value. What should
the universities be doing more of in the meantime to add value
to the widening access agenda anyway?
(Professor Floud) I think the universities are already
doing an enormous amount to widen participation. All of us can
point to initiatives of all kinds that have been taken in the
past few years.
196. So why are the Government having to introduce
an access regulator then, Professor Floud? Why are universities
like Oxford and Cambridge not meeting their targets already?
(Professor Floud) Firstly, there are no such things
as targets at the moment. There are averages/benchmarks which
are not targets. If I can go back to the Chairman's reference
to my book on quantitative methods for historians, one of the
things I learned is that it is stupid to make a target out of
an average and that is a mistake which has been made, I think,
in a lot of media discussion and indeed governmental discussion
on this particular topic. Of course, all universities should be
making and are indeed making efforts to widen participation and
it is true that, despite some statements to the contrary, we have
quadrupled the proportion of people from lower socio-economic
groups going to university over the past 20 years. It is still
not nearly high enough.
197. In overall numbers, not percentages, yes.
(Professor Floud) Yes. The percentage of people from
socio-economic groups 3B, 4 and 5 going to university has quadrupled.
That is not good enough because it is still way below the proportion
from middle-classes and talent is distributed equally across all
social classes, as we know, so we all agree that there is a great
deal more to be done and we are very happy to work further with
anybody, the schools, the colleges, the foundations and, if necessary,
with the Access Regulator to spread best practice. However, I
think we would be hostile to a bureaucratic system on the grounds
that we cannot really see what its added value might be. If we
can be convinced that it does have added value, then of course
we will work happily with it.
(Professor Lucas) I would like to add something to
that. I think it is quite important that people do not blame secondary
schools and I do not think there was any intent of putting blame
on a secondary school in this, but it is a fact that it is about
55/56% of those staying in secondary school at that age. So, if
you are looking at a 50% target and assuming a minimum qualification
level still, to get that up high, you are going to have to get
a higher retention in secondary schools. Universities play their
part in that. Just taking the specific example of King's, we have
a general access programme but also some highly targeted ones
to access to the professions: one into medicine targeted with
particular boroughs in the area where we operate where the is
a low going on to university rate. One advantage of that is that
we can get our medical students in particular to work as mentors
in schools and there is continuity over a five year period because
they have a long programme. Many of the students' aspirations
are raised; they will not necessarily come to King's but it is
helping them, encouraging them and giving them role models to
stay on in secondary school to actually think about applying to
higher education. We recognise that a great deal of the effort
we put in is not going to produce students for us and I think
that is quite an important point in all of this area. Certainly,
in terms of the benchmarks, we have some oddities in our benchmarks.
We meet our benchmarks in those social areas except in proportions
coming from state schools. We meet them in the postcode one and
we meet them in the family income ones but not in the state schools.
We think we know why that is: it is because of a particular group
of students who come in whose parents, wanting to get them into
professions, put money into private education in the last couple
of years. We work very hard at raising aspirations and every institution
that I know well works hard at it but do not necessarily expect
to get the students themselves into their own institution. I think
that when we are looking at any form of regulation or whatever
else it is, to actually look at who goes into where rather than
who is encouraged into higher education is a narrow view of that
process.
(Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe) It is quite frustrating
because we have produced two documents now giving examples of
what universities are doing and every university has its own access
strategy and there is no doubt that a huge amount right across
the sector is now being done and it is not seen, as I think it
is probably right to say it might have been seen in the past,
as the approach of only certain kinds of institutions. That clearly
is not the case any longer and, in answer to your specific question
about why it is perceived that this might be a good idea, I think
there is this lack of awareness of what is going on in universities.
That means that we have to do a great deal more and happily we
will do it through the Access Regulator but we will have to do
a great deal more to demonstrate not just to ministers but to
students themselves how open universities are and how willing
they are to work with schools in order to encourage them to perceive
that higher education is for them.
198. How successful do you think the new re-introduction
of maintenance grants will be seen as it has only been pitched
at £1,000? Do you agree with me that it ought to have been
based on the EMA model rather than a maintenance grant model?
(Professor Floud) We believe, as I said earlier, that
it is a good start. It gives certainty in a way in which the current
student support arrangements have not. Of course, we very much
welcome the fact that the Government have said that it will apply
to 30% of students and I think we would like it to be increased,
but it is a good start.
Chairman
199. How many people in your very large institution
earn £10,000 or less?
(Professor Floud) I do not know the answer to that.
I do know that 70% of my students currently pay no fees, so I
would expect that a substantial proportion of those will be eligible
for that grant.
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