| Higher Education Bill
|
|
Mr. David Chaytor (Bury, North) (Lab): On that very point, does the hon. Gentleman accept that since the Chancellor's statement about the Laura Spence case, the proportion of students from under-represented backgrounds attending Oxford and Cambridge has increased almost year on year? The deterrent effect of the Chancellor's statement that he is criticising has not taken place. Mr. Rendel: The hon. Gentleman is completely wrong. My memory of the statistics is that the number of students at Oxford and Cambridge from under-represented groups had been increasing year on year for some time and that the year after that case, the number at Oxford fell, although it increased the following year. I think that there was one year immediately after the Chancellor made those remarks when the percentage went the wrong way at Oxford, which perhaps proves my point. Column Number: 497 However, the problem does not lie just with the students. It is impossible for the Minister, through the use of OFFA or by any other means, to force either the parents or the schools to do anything to encourage young people. That point has been made. It is important that, as far as possible, parents and schools encourage those from the under-represented groups to see their future as one in which they go to university. It is impossible to use OFFA to achieve that. The problem is a fundamental one in our society as a whole and it cannot be solved simply by introducing a higher education Bill. We have a real problem in our society in trying to ensure that everyone of talent and ability sees university as part of their future. That is damaging and it will difficult to overcome while we have a society that is still class-based to some extent—we still speak of the working class, the middle class and the upper class and people still think of themselves in that way. Sadly, until we overcome that problem—a problem I would dearly love to see our society get rid of—it is not going to be possible to overcome the problem as a whole. We have to work at the problem from a huge number of different angles, and doing that purely from the point of view of access to university is never going to be enough. Access to university has a part to play, and my party accepts the need for universities to plan better access—that is a part of the process and is therefore worth while in itself. It is, however, only a part, and I suspect quite a small one, in the total process of widening participation among youngsters from less privileged backgrounds. I hope that the Minister will accept that it is only a small start in what has to be a long process of improving the situation. Chris Grayling: On a point of order, Mr. Gale. Given the nature of the discussions that have taken place in the Committee in recent days, I think it will be helpful to draw its attention to the comments made in the Chamber this morning by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. When I asked him to give an undertaking not to claw back money raised by the universities through fees in the allocation of university grant, he declined to do so. That will be a matter of great concern to the Committee. Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North) (Lab) rose— The Chairman: Order. That may or may not be of interest to the Committee, but it is certainly not a point of order for the Chair. Unless the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) is ingenious enough to turn it into a proper point of order, we will have to proceed with our consideration of the amendments. Mr. Allen: Further to that point of order, Mr. Gale. What I have to say has absolutely nothing to do with the intervention by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell at Treasury questions this morning; it relates to the point that I made to the Chancellor. I think that we need a lifelong learning account, similar to the children's trust fund that is being set up by the Chancellor, which will help to ensure that people, such as mature students, have a nest egg that they can use to Column Number: 498 go on to further education. No doubt that, too, will be of great interest to the Committee, Mr. Gale.The Chairman: That may well be so, but I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman has signally failed the ingenuity test. It is not a point of order for the Chair.
2.45 pmMrs. Campbell: This has been an interesting debate. I had not intended to contribute, but I heard the contributions from hon. Members on both sides this morning, and I think that I have a contribution to make. I look forward to hearing how my remarks go down. I agree with some of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell this morning, when he said that there was already a good deal of good practice in universities. I believe that that is the case. Last summer, Cambridge university admissions tutors invited me to look at some of the schemes that they were putting in place to improve access to the university. I clearly remember that there was a taster course taking place in the week that I visited. I went to meet some of the students who were taking part in that course. It had been paid for by the Sutton Trust, which is an excellent organisation, chaired by Peter Lampl. I spoke to one of the students, a young—I think that she was about 16—black girl from an inner-city comprehensive school in Hackney. I asked her how she was enjoying the course, and she said that she was having an absolutely wonderful time and that it had opened doors for her that she had not imagined. I asked her how she had come to know about the course, because most of the students were there through their schools. She said that her school had not brought it to her attention. She had seen an advertisement in her local paper. She took the advertisement into school and asked, ''Do you know anything about this?'' The school did not. She said, ''Do you think I should apply?'' She was told that she might as well, but there was no great enthusiasm from the school. The staff did not think that she would get on to it, and they did not think that she was the sort of student who should apply to Oxford or Cambridge anyway. That example illustrates that there are young people out there with initiative who are prepared to grasp the opportunities that are offered to them, and that schools could do a much better job of encouraging young people to apply to Oxford and Cambridge. It also illustrates that the universities are beginning to reach out to try to raise those young people's aspirations. I do not know what happened to that young woman. I hope that she applies and becomes a student, because she could make a terrific contribution. I also want to draw attention to campaigns that have taken place in the past. Both Oxford and Cambridge run the ''Target Schools'' campaign. It is highly organised and well run. Under the scheme, students from the university go into schools and encourage people to apply. They talk about their experiences, their qualifications and the advantages that they are getting from university life. They Column Number: 499 encourage younger children—usually around the ages of 14 or 15—from the schools to apply.In Cambridge, that scheme is run entirely by Cambridge university students union. As far as I know, the university has contributed financially, but not in other ways. The scheme is run by the students. I recall that, about seven years ago, I got to know one of the students who was organising the scheme. I suggested that we collaborated on it, so that he would make available to me the list of schools to which they were writing to ask them to participate in this scheme. I would then write to the Member of Parliament for the school's local area, and encourage them to encourage the school to participate. As a result of that, I discovered that many of the schools involved in the scheme were grant-maintained or public schools. Although students thought that they had a fairly comprehensive list of state schools, most were not. That campaign has been successful over the years, however. I would also like to mention briefly the Group for Encouraging Ethnic Minority Applications. Among the lots of good work that GEEMA does, it has one day on which it invites students from ethnic minority backgrounds into Cambridge university to take part in taster courses, to participate and to talk to students and members of staff from ethnic minority backgrounds. I have attended this day on a number of occasions. There is always an excellent atmosphere, and it is a very good way of encouraging young people to apply. I have been critical of the low number of students from lower-income backgrounds at Cambridge and Oxford. However, this is not uniform throughout the universities. We tend to talk about standard or average applications, but we can look at the success of King's college, Cambridge, for example. I do not know the current figures but, in the past few years, the proportion of students at that college from state school backgrounds has hovered around 90 per cent. That fact is not very well known and, of course, it is balanced by other colleges that do less well. I recall inquiring into this to find out how it was that King's was more successful than other colleges in attracting students from state school backgrounds. I learned that King's had identified some state schools with which it wished to have an ongoing relationship, whereby the admissions tutor got to know the staff at the school and the good students were invited to the college to make sure that they knew what they were applying to. That ongoing relationship meant that the college received a number of high-quality applications from those state schools. That seems to me to be very good and worth replicating. I went to another admissions tutor, who shall be nameless, and asked why he did not also do this. He replied that the problem is that King's has now bagged all the good state schools, and there are none left for anyone else. We must try to overcome such an attitude. I do not think that that person is an admissions tutor any more, because things have moved on since then. However, the case that I have Column Number: 500 described indicates the importance of good access plans, and it may be that those access plans involve establishing relationships with a number of state schools so that those students know the college to which they are applying, and have a good idea of the staff and the university lecturers.In the past, quite a lot of the collaboration between Cambridge colleges—and Oxford colleges, I am sure—and schools has involved collaboration with independent schools. I suppose that that is perfectly understandable. When somebody has done a degree at Oxford or Cambridge and then goes on to teach in the independent sector, they will try to keep their relationship with the admissions staff at their college, so that when they have good students, there is someone for them to contact and provide with a recommendation. That is how bias creeps into the process. It is very important that we have good admissions policies, as well as good access plans. I have not tabled any amendments and I am not suggesting that the Government should change their proposals for OFFA. I want to tell another series of anecdotes, though, to illustrate why it is important that we have proper admissions policies. In the 1980s, I was the admissions tutor for the joint honours degree in combined science at Anglia polytechnic university, then called Cambridgeshire college of arts and technology. I admitted about 150 students each year and I decided that, if I was going to do that properly, I should find out what makes a good student and how it was possible to identify their characteristics from a selection interview, a reference or an application form. In about 1981, I attended an extremely good course at the London university teaching methods unit. I learned interview techniques—what not to do as well as what to do—and about what made a good student. In my intervention on the speech of the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel), I said that there was a great deal of academic research that showed that the correlation between A-level results and degree classification is not at all strong. In fact, it is almost negative in many subject areas. Only in maths, physics and chemistry is there a good correlation between A-level grade and final degree classification. A-level grades might be some indication for those subjects, but they give little indication for other subjects. One of the best ways of identifying which students will make good students is to note those that have good study skills. The school that crams its students, by making sure that they are intensively taught and have little free time, is not likely to produce students who do as well at university as that which gives students projects to do, expects them to go to the library, find out information for themselves and learn how to organise their time successfully. Knowing that changed my interviewing procedure markedly. I used to ask people in detail how they studied and what interests they had. If a student was interested in the subject area, I would find that they had spent a great deal of time pursuing that interest outside their formal academic studies. In my experience, that often led to students who got much better degrees than those who did not do that. Column Number: 501 The point that I am making is that it is excellent that OFFA can require universities to produce access plans that encourage applications. However, having encouraged those applications, it is important that the university is sensitive to how to interview those students to ensure that the good ones get selected. As the hon. Member for Newbury was saying, it should not be a matter of luck. The great danger is that when university lecturers—often academics and not staff specially trained in interviewing—interview a student, they tend to go for those who are articulate. Articulacy is better among those students who are middle class and public school educated. That is where much of the bias creeps in. If people can be trained to ignore articulacy and look instead for real potential, they are more likely to pick the students who will do well in their degrees. I accept that admissions is not part of OFFA's remit, but I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will encourage universities to train their interviewers and make sure that people understand what makes a good student and how to identify that student's potential when they come for interview. Nothing would be more damaging than encouraging many more applications from students from lower-income backgrounds and then finding that they did not get accepted because of university interviewers' prejudice about their lack on articulacy. Such students might not be good at expressing themselves.
3 pmOn the subject of students who are under-represented and have tended to do badly in previous years, on Wednesday 25 February 2004 at column 452W, my right hon. Friend the Minister answered a parliamentary question tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Helen Jackson) on Monday 8 December 2003. She asked about the age profile of first degree entrants to UK universities in 2003–04, five years ago and 10 years ago, broken down by age groups. The number of people under 20 applying to university has continued to increase. In 1994–95 it was approximately 180,000, and by 2002–03 it had risen to 235,000. The number of people aged between 21 and 30 has remained about static, although it has fallen by a few hundred. The age groups that we should worry about are 31 to 40-year-olds and 41 to 50-year-olds. There has been a marked drop in those categories. In the former group, the figure fell from 16,000 in 1994–95 to 14,500 in 2002–03. There could be many innocent explanations for that. It may be that that age group had more opportunities to study at the age of 18 and therefore took up their education at an earlier age. It is worth looking behind the statistics as well as at the raw figures. Those students could have been put off by the up-front fee and they might benefit from some of the Government's proposals in the new student support package.
|
| |
| ©Parliamentary copyright 2004 | Prepared 4 March 2004 |
