Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


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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