Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560-577)
WEDNESDAY 5 MARCH 2003
PROFESSOR DAVID
EASTWOOD AND
DR PETER
KNIGHT
560. Is the White Paper's level of prescription
over the HEFCE component of your budget more prescriptive than
the contract that you have with the Department of Health to deliver
that particular work? Is it just another kind of contract that
you have with the Government at the end of the day?
(Dr Knight) Well, Mr Jackson took the words out of
my mouth.
Mr Chaytor: What were the words?
Mr Jackson
561. That one is negotiated and the other is
not.
(Dr Knight) When you have a contract you have contract
negotiations. They can go on for 18 months. At the end of the
day everybody knows what has been given, what is conceded, what
is agreed, what has to be delivered for what price, how many and
when, and you are grown up and you sign and seal it, accepting
some bits you do not like and some bits you do. If the negotiations
happened in relation to the White Paper, I must have blinked and
missed it.
Mr Chaytor
562. It is just a different kind of negotiation.
As we heard earlier about certain universities treading a path
to No 10 and No 11, that is just part of the overall negotiation,
is it not? My point is do you reject the idea, moving on to the
question of access, that the Government has a responsibility to
set parameters for access given the high level of public funding
that goes into your institution? Is that a form of prescription
too far?
(Dr Knight) If we put to one side the access regulator,
which is a particular aspect of prescription, I do not have a
problem with the Government having social objectives about widening
participation, particularly as I happen to agree with them, and
then seeking to implement those objectives through the Funding
Council by the usual routine of carrots and sticks, using the
funding methodology, levers and pulls. I do not have any problem
with that at all. That objective actually predates the White Paper.
As to the access regulator, I think my position is that I am bewildered.
At one stage this is an important and essential component of the
White Paper and if you do not satisfy the access regulator, you
will not be able to charge the fees, so it looks important. On
the other hand, statements are made by ministers and the Secretary
of State currently that you do not need to worry about this, it
will all be straightforward, HEFCE will look after it and it is
not an issue. Well, either it is an issue or it is not an issue.
When somebody has decided which one of those it is, I feel I will
be in a better position to comment on it. I do have a reservation
about the too detailed involvement of Government in the admission
of students to universities. I fall into the path of the sort
of old traditionalists there. I think there were some things which
government are likely to do badly and getting involved in the
detail of admissions to universities is almost certainly one of
those characteristics.
563. At the moment the legacy of leaving it
to the universities is that we have a core group of leading research
universities which have an extremely exclusive body of students
and we have a group of the post-92 universities which have particularly
high drop-out rates and lack of completion, so you cannot argue
that the status quo, ie, leaving it to the universities, has been
a roaring success on either social inclusion or student completion.
(Dr Knight) The overall participation in higher education
at a time when the unit of funding for teaching has progressively
deteriorated, I think, leaves the university system as a whole
being able to say that it has succeeded. We have got more students
in higher education than we have ever had before and we have maintained
both standards because we have had the most intrusive and exhaustive
quality assurance system in operation over the last five years
and we have had good completion rates. UK higher education, if
you look at it as a totality, actually has a very good record
indeed. Different universities have different histories and different
missions associated with them largely determined by geography
apart from anything else. If you then start to direct individual
universities as to how their recruitment should be rebalanced,
I just feel uneasy.
564. But it is not the question of the increase
in student applications which is subject to a wide range of factors
outside the universities' control, but it is the question of the
accurate identification of talent and the distribution of that
talent between different universities.
(Dr Knight) The identification of talent is important,
it is a new initiative, we are getting support from HEFCE and
I would be surprised if you found a single university that said
that they were not signed up and committed to doing that. The
difficulty is persuading some students from particular social
backgrounds to participate in higher education and identifying
those students in the 16 to 18 age group. I suspect we are all
interested in doing that. There is no evidence that the university
system as a whole has deliberately sought to exclude particular
students from particular social backgrounds. By and large, as
Howard said, demand and supply at the moment for the full-time
undergraduate programme is reasonably in balance. That is not
to say that we cannot do more.
565. Finally, do both of your institutions deposit
your admissions policies with HEFCE, as Sir Howard suggested earlier?
(Dr Knight) That was a bit of a surprise to me. The
answer is no.
566. Do you know of any university that deposits
a copy of its admissions policy with HEFCE?
(Professor Eastwood) The answer to your question is
that I will find out the answer when I get back and I finish chairing
my senate this afternoon. I think that university admissions are
much more complex operations than some current press coverage
would lead some of your constituents believe. It seems to me,
and I am absolutely with Howard about this, that good practice
in university admissions is about identifying potential and that
was as true when I was a tutor in modern history at the University
of Oxford as it was when I was working at the University of Wales
in Swansea.
Chairman
567. In one sense in terms of this access problem,
would you rather the access to the universities be determined
by the editor of the Daily Mail?
(Professor Eastwood) The thing I think would do most
to promote widening participation is a recognition that universities
do not just operate on the 18-plus interface or the life-long
learning interface, but we are actually a part of creating the
culture of expectation in education. What is very interesting,
if you look at the pattern of funding for initiatives to widen
access and to increase participation, is that we are basically
normally allowed to operate down to 16-plus, but we get no funding
to send people out into schools to deal with people at Key Stage
2 or Key Stage 3 where there is quite a lot of evidence that that
is the key point in determining the children's ambitions. Now,
my institution does it and we do it in lots of shortage areas.
My mathematicians happen to be terrifically good at it, for example,
but I think it is that kind of Balkanization of educational policy
which says that HE comes come at the top end, and we are berated
when we do not get the numbers right. The key is partnerships.
568. You are happy, both of you, with your admissions
policies in terms of trying to identify students on the basis
of their potential?
(Dr Knight) I can detect difficulties here because
it is extraordinarily complex. I would like to see an admissions
system that did not involve interviews. If I feel uneasy about
part of the process, I feel uneasy about the interview because
it is the area where you are most vulnerable to the individual
eccentric academic. Now, there are no such people in UCE and I
speak with complete confidence. With some courses we are able
to say, "If you get 16 A-level points, we will offer you
a place", and it is straightforward. With a range of courses
you have to interview because of the statutory requirement in
relation to health and with another range of courses in art, design
and music, it is by portfolio and audition, so there are some
courses where there has to be an element of subjective assessment
on the basis of quality. With auditions we always seek to have
two people at the audition so that there is a balance of judgment,
but I worry about the individual tutor trying to socially engineer
admissions. I find that an area which leaves me uneasy in terms
of our ability to ensure that, as an institution, we comply with
the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, we comply with equal opportunities
and at the same time we are being reasonably consistent and fair
to all applicants.
(Professor Eastwood) Just to indicate the complexity
of admissions, if, for example, a university under-offers, a number
of potential students assume it is saying something adverse about
the quality of its course and so you get this constant trade-off
between universities in terms of where departments position themselves
in the market and what sort of offers they want to make. Students
themselves have a number of issues which relate to their own expectations
and self-perceptions and some of them of course want to go to
universities where the grades offered are high, so when you look
at what admissions tutors are doing, they are making a whole series
of calculations and I think they do those in a way which contributes
to the integrity of the process and of that I am confident.
(Dr Knight) Can I add one other complexity, which
is where I think we do sign up for positively discriminating.
We are aware that some students only apply to UCE. The reason
is that they come from home, cultural and social backgrounds where
it is not acceptable for them to leave home. We always seek to
pay particular attention to those applicants because we are their
only chance. Now, if that is unfair to other applicants, I think
I have to stand up and say that we are probably guilty of that,
but given the nature of the city environment in which we operate,
it seems to me a responsible and balanced admissions policy to
always seek to give an interview, if it is by interview, to a
student who has only applied to UCE as their only chance.
Mr Chaytor: As long as others do not
start boycotting you for that reason.
Mr Jackson: Chairman, I think that everything
which has been said about access is very reasonable and at the
expense of hitting a colleague, we have come back again to our
cloven hoof, that the access problem is really about access to
the research universities who of course have done absolutely nothing
and have a tiny proportion from state schools and that is very
bad. If I can put this in the form of a question to the witnesses,
the assumption behind the question and the way it was put was
that nothing has changed in universities and that is why they
are as they are. Is it not the case that actually the definition
of the schools that send people to universities has changed radically
over the last 30 years? Was it not the case when I was an undergraduate
that there was a substantially higher proportion of people from
state schools at Oxford and Cambridge than there are now and one
of the reasons for that is because the boundaries between the
state schools and the independent school sector has changed in
the course of that period?
Chairman
569. David, you are the historian.
(Professor Eastwood) Yes, I am or at least I was.
Yes is the answer. Of course the shift away from grammar school
education has had all sorts of consequences, some intended, some
not intended. I do not think that absolves us of the responsibility
of driving forward the agenda and dealing with where we are. I
would say just in response to the record of research-intensive
universities, that there are many research-intensive universities
that do actually drive out widening participation and there is
a minority that do not moreover there are some universities which
have a much poorer record, say, than mine on widening access which
are much less research intensive, so I do not think there is a
simple correlation between research effectiveness or research
intensity and the ability to have a balanced admissions profile.
Chairman: But there is no doubt that
the evidence given to this Committee when we looked at access
showed a huge difference within universities, within the University
of Oxford and within the University of Cambridge. Different colleges
had remarkable differences in terms of how successful they have
been in broadening access. That was what was interesting and we
took it up with HEFCE at the time.
Paul Holmes
570. I think we have had this question before,
but how effective do you think the access regulator is going to
be given the almost complete lack of information as to how it
is going to work?
(Professor Eastwood) With respect, I think you have
answered your question. We were concerned when news of the access
regulator was leaked out that it would be highly prescriptive
and prescriptive in a way which did not actually add value to
what the universities are doing, so I think if that there is going
to be an access regulator with its location in HEFCE, it is something
that we welcome. I think we have got experience of what you might
describe as beneficial relationships between the university, the
funding council and regulation and I would cite human resource
strategies for the universities over the last two or three years
where HEFCE's insistence that universities have strategies and
that was a condition of the release of some funding has undoubtedly
meant that universities have moved forward on a range of issues,
including equal opportunities. If that is the model, the encouragement
of good practice, a relatively light touch and dealing firmly
with institutions which do not have appropriate policies or approaches,
that seems to me to be something which is acceptable and may indeed
add a certain amount. I think there is an interesting issue, and
I was interested in the answer that Howard gave to you about performance
prior to 2006 or policies subsequent to 2006, and he said it was
about policies subsequent to 2006. Now, that has a very particular
meaning for a number of institutions which have been in the background
of the discussion over the last few minutes.
571. Again we have touched on this partly, but
as to the apparent confusion and contradiction in government policy
where, on the one hand, you have got the postcode premium going
up from 5 to 20% to encourage more students from lower socio-economic
groups, you have got the access regulator, you have got Margaret
Hodge saying the other night that she wants to set targets and
so forth and, on the other hand, you have got Margaret Hodge being
slammed down straightaway, saying, "Oh no, we can't do that",
and you have got all the fuss over Bristol and you have got the
Prime Minister at Prime Minister's Questions saying that universities
must only admit by ability, are they not two totally opposite
policies there?
(Dr Knight) The policies appear not to be completely
consistent. Let's separate it out. The postcode premium is not
an incentive to the universities to recruit from particular social
groups. It is a recognition that students, as Howard said, may
be coming to university with a particular background and they
need additional support and I believe the premium has gone up
and I welcome that and that is good news and should be celebrated
even if the money has been sneaked off somewhere else in the grant.
I have no idea exactly how the grant is worked out yet, but we
will find out shortly. The postcode premium, that is good news.
That is about providing additional support, it is helping students
progress and universities will spend it accordingly. On admissions,
it is an extraordinarily slippery slope if you start saying that
a particular student with lower A level qualifications is admitted
in preference to another student with higher A-level qualifications
and it is not a slope that I would personally want to go down.
A-levels measure two things. One, they seek to measure general
ability, and how good they are and how bad they are is a matter
for other researchers. Two, they also, and this is why the SATS
argument does not solve the problem completely, are a measure
of the pre-requisite knowledge students need in order to benefit
from certain types of degrees. You are not going to get on an
honours degree course in physics unless you have physics A-level—well,
you might but you are not going to progress particularly well.
If there was a better system—and I have looked at SATS as
I suspect everybody has and it has great attractions in it—I
do not think the universities would resist the introduction of
something like SATS, provided we can maintain the other element
which underpins the under-graduate degree, which is the prior
knowledge which is measured by certain A-levels in certain subjects.
The fact everybody is wobbling around this particular issue, trying
to get a coherent policy out of it, I think indicates the complexity
of the problems we face with admissions and the fact that this
matter has not been publicly debated much before, and I actually
welcome the debate even if some of it is a little worn at the
moment.
572. As we take, hopefully, more and more students
from non-traditional groups, should we not expect to see a higher
level of dropout? We heard earlier we have the second best rate
of retention in the western world but we also have one of the
most elitist recruiting systems in the western world, so as we
have a wider base should we not expect more people to drop out?
(Dr Knight) Not necessarily so. There are certain
qualifications which theoretically prepare people for higher education
which did not work well. The Advanced GNVQs I think had a very
unhappy start. Higher education has to adapt to the nature of
the knowledge and experience that the student is bringing in,
particularly in the first year, and see if we can adjust and modify
the curriculum to get them to the same standard at the end of
the third year. That is much more of an active process in universities
now than it was 10 years ago. A couple of my faculties have "wobbly
students" processes, where they look to see if the particular
cohort of students who have a particular qualification having
difficulty passing certain modules, and, if so, why. Is the knowledge
in that module something you can move properly to the second year
or is it a matter of giving those students additional support
to get through. We are much better at that now than we were 10
years ago. So your question, does widening access mean greater
failure, the answer is it should not do if we do our job correctly.
Mr Chaytor
573. Can I pursue the point about the distinction
between courses for which the body of knowledge included in an
A-level programme is a pre-requisite. Your advice therefore to
students who do not have the optimum A-level growth for a given
course is to apply for a course where it is not directly related
to the combination of A-level subjects that they have. There is
a tactical point here, is there not, in terms of advice to certain
students?
(Dr Knight) Students are tactical and have often got
in a mind their university course when they are looking at their
A-levels and AS-levels. They are highly tactical and they are
much better informed than they were 10 to 20 years ago.
574. But in terms of the courses for degrees
for which clearly the A-level body of knowledge is a pre-requisite,
are you both saying that in all circumstances the A-level score,
whether it is a particular combination of grades or total points
scored, is the most accurate criterion to use in determining eligibility
for degrees?
(Professor Eastwood) If you are saying, are there
areas where universities have been over-rigid, that is to say
they deployed that argument but they deployed it rather glibly,
I would have to say there would be some justice in that. I think
we have been quite late in adjusting to changing patterns in secondary
education; modern languages might be an example of this. I think
there have been occasions where universities and certain departments
within universities wish that the world had not changed in the
pre-18 environment, but it has and they have not made that kind
of adjustment that is necessary. I do think there are areas—modern
languages would be one, some sciences might be another area—where
we do need to look at what has happened for a variety of reasons
in the secondary school age range, and then we need to do as universities
to address the consequences. But we do still need to think about
where we want to get students at the end of that programme so
foundations years, foundation degrees, might be a part of the
response. I should however say in a number of areas where you
might think that is an issue—engineering would be one—we
are not free agents because in order to secure accreditation there
are minimum requirements on precisely such issues as A-level entry
points. So quite often what we find is that when universities
are wishing to be flexible, when they are wishing to respond to
changes in the pattern of education, certain other key players,
notably accreditation bodies, are actually more rigid than we
are.
Chairman
575. I want to move on to the last section,
research and teaching, but before we do that, one thing which
did disturb me is something you said, Peter, about the hallowed
nature of A-levels and not interfering with them as the criteria
for entry. There has always been flexibility in terms of balancing
A-level performance with other evidence of the potential of students—interviews,
teaching reports and so on. We have never had a climate where
the A-level score was the only criterion. I am amazed that now
some people are saying that someone with a slightly higher A-level
score could be discriminated against in favour of somebody with
a lower score, that seems to me to be something that has gone
on in all higher education institutions for as long as I can remember.
Is that not the case?
(Dr Knight) It may not have gone on in quite the explicit
way it has been debated at the moment. I think my position is
that you have to have a very good reason indeed to admit a student
with a lower A-level score than one you have excluded. I would
like to think an interview is a clear and objective analysis of
a student's capabilities, I actually think it is one of the weaker
ways in which we make judgments about our fellow men.
576. So do I, I certainly agree with that, but
you know as well as I do that institutions and many Oxbridge colleges
have used interviews to balance A-level scores for as long as
there have been A-levels.
(Dr Knight) The fact it has happened in the past does
not necessarily mean that it is the way we should progress in
the future. I do feel uncomfortable about the nature of the current
debate but I have a guilty conscience on this, Chairman, because
when I was admitted to university I was offered 2 Es but then
it was an offer made by the vice-chancellor who had not got anything
to do on the day so he decided to interview me.
Chairman: I can see you have a guilty
conscience about that.
Jonathan Shaw
577. Briefly on research, you have heard what
HEFCE's Chief Executive said and the announcements regarding the
reduction in funding. Have you anything in particular you want
to say about research funding and the future of it?
(Dr Knight) UCE's involvement in research is quite
modest. We have less than £1 million of RAE money although
a lot of research money from other sources. We strategically sought
to build up our performance in the RAE and we were one of the
10 most improved universities in the 2001 RAE. We built up that
performance using public funds allocated by HEFCE to develop our
research. To get almost nothing seems to me to have been a waste
of those funds and an unfortunate outcome in terms of policy.
I do not see a shred of evidence which says we need to fund whatever
the Super 5s* are at 6*. It is almost as though we are creating
a new aristocracy of Super Russell Group institutions and I just
do not see the evidential base which says that level of concentration
is going to be better than the existing arrangements. The UUK
discussion on this I think concluded without dissent that 4s should
be fully funded, and there was substantial support for 3As continuing
to be funded as well, because there is good emerging research
in the 3As—which are defined as institutions with more than
average levels of national excellence, and the 4s are levels of
national excellence with international aspects of excellence in
them. To try and concentrate research funding on the basis of
a model which has some legitimacy in the physical sciences I think
is a mistake. So I regret the concentration of research funding.
I regret also the idea that only those universities which have
that concentration are excellent or good universities. I think
the Government will reject that because they are creating a new
aristocracy, as I said, of institutions defined on the basis of
their excellence in academic research and then spreading that
excellence by a process of osmosis to every other aspect of their
work, and I think that is most unfortunate and counter-productive.
(Professor Eastwood) I think I ought to preface what
I say by saying that the RAE has been one of the more successful
things that has been done in terms of driving up the quality of
research and in terms of managing the research base, and it seems
to me all the international comparisons of data which you are
familiar with do suggest this is an area where we punch above
our weight. It is important to recall that what we are talking
about when we are talking with the adjustment in funding is adjusting
the funding around data gathered from the 2001 RAE which was undertaken
by institutions on certain assumptions. One of the key assumptions
was that four-rated units were "the bedrock of the system".
Institutions developed strategies with that assurance. They sought
to maximise the number of staff they entered into the RAE, and
in some cases were prepared to take a hit in terms of the grading
score, so you might come out with 4 rather than 5 but you had
long term strategic reasons for doing this because they were developing
the research culture, and were looking forward to the 2006 exercise.
I think what has happened over the last few months has been very
unfortunate because it has perturbed a part of the structure which
was working. Moreover, and very importantly, the assumption has
been—and it is there in the White Paper—that somehow
we do not collaborate. Universities do collaborate, we sometimes
operate on a stand alone basis when we are trying to secure funding
but basically we do collaborate in fund-raising in all sorts of
ways, and the collaboration is strongest in many ways in research
and particularly scientific research. But that collaboration does
not just operate between institutions, it also operates between
units, and at risk of being parochial but just to illustrate the
point, my computer science department is 4-rated, it has flagged
within it an outstanding group on colour. It is also crucially
important not just to my institution but to the John Innes Centre
and the Institute of Food Research, which are located the other
side of the river from my institution, what is delivered in terms
of bioinformatics out of the computer science school is critical
to the research base in the wider university and in these research
institutes. It is also critical to environmental science and it
is critical to servicing the financial services industry in the
city. So you have there a strategy moving forward, a unit which
has 5* quality in it, the reasonable presumption you will get
that unit to a 5 in the 2006 RAE. Suddenly everything is thrown
up in the air which affects not just computer science but it affects
the other parts of the research base in my institution and in
others which are dependent on their ability to deliver. So whilst
I am dismayed at the prospect there will be a further reduction
in funding for 4s in next year's round—I think that is undesirable
and I would like to see it reversed and I do not think it is necessary
and I do not think the funding is there to sustain 4-rated units.
I think what we desperately need is stability in the funding environment
until we reach the next RAE when new data can be gathered, on
a new basis if the Roberts Review, which I am on, comes up with
a new model, and then we can have an orderly transition to build
on the success of that.
Chairman: Thank you very much. You were
very equivocal on that front. We are sorry we have kept you so
long and we apologise that some members have had to leave to attend
Prime Minister's Questions where they were hoping to be called.
We have enjoyed this session. We invited you because we knew you
had strong, independent views that you were not cautious about
sharing with the Committee. Thank you for that, we were not disappointed.
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