| Higher Education Bill
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The Chairman: Order. I know that the hon. Lady feels passionately about the subject and has a real knowledge of it, but, with respect, she is going wide of the mark. I have been listening with anticipation for the word OFFA, and I have heard it only once recently. Column Number: 502 Mrs. Campbell: I shall come back on track. I hope that OFFA will look for a sign that universities will target those groups of students whose numbers have declined in recent years—such as 31 to 40-year-olds—in the access plans. Mr. Boswell: We have had a long debate on amendment No. 24, which I support. It has been characterised by a good deal of thought and a measure of passion in connection with securing the widest possible range of opportunities for students, be they from disadvantaged backgrounds or not. I am happy to accept the good will displayed in all contributions. As I had time to reflect on what I might say, I cast my mind back and calculated that it is almost exactly 41 years since I first initiated my studies in moral philosophy at Oxford university. I was, to my knowledge, the first member of my family to attend university, and that was not necessarily on merit. I remember a distinguished lawyer saying of my late father that he had the best non-legally trained legal mind that he had ever encountered. Thank goodness we are in the business of providing more opportunities for people to realise their potential and for the nation to realise its potential. That is not a matter of contention. I mentioned moral philosophy because I want to clarify some of the concepts that have emerged. I shall raise two specific issues and end with a few general points that are more political, but not intentionally party political. First, time refines one's memory of one's studies. The one thing I remember from moral philosophy was the first lesson that I learned in the first tutorial: to say that something is good is not by itself an argument for passing a law to promote it; nor is saying that something is ipso facto bad an argument for promoting a law against it. We have an interesting clash between the voluntary principle of securing an agreed objective and the statutory route for so doing. Secondly, there is the matter of regulation. One or two hon. Members, particularly from the Labour Benches—to be honest, I have in mind the hon. Member for Nottingham, North—may have underplayed the panoply of regulation and, if one wishes to call it so, interference, which is already available to the Higher Education Funding Council for England in its interface with institutions. At the most simple level, there are separate bands according to the type of course and the monitoring of a variety of objectives. HEFCE has been charged in the past with monitoring the Government's agenda to widen participation and the payment of the so-called postcode premiums. HEFCE and the Higher Education Statistics Agency keep score and collect a variety of statistics, on which the hon. Gentleman drew. I appreciate that we will debate the matter later, but he says that we should inspect higher education institutions as Ofsted does in schools. There is already a mechanism for inspection through the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, which acts as a control on the spending of public money. There are no absolutes in the debate on complete regulation or no regulation. The questions relate to Column Number: 503 who should regulate, whether regulation needs a separate body, and how regulation should be carried out. In that context, I was fascinated by a letter, which became available to the Committee today, from the Minister to the hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Mudie) in the light of his comments at our last sitting. The context is transfers of private fees between institutions—where a student transfers from one to another—and the possible problem of fees remission, for example. The Minister said that the current system, in which universities largely exercise self-regulation, works well. That was interesting, and I mention it because it is clearly set in a narrow context. The Minister may not want to confirm that and he will have to argue why he needs a statutory regulator in the wider context of access.The Minister continues the letter with the sentence that caught my eye and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins). He said that one of the themes of the higher education White Paper and the Higher Education Bill is deregulation, so the Government will not impose additional regulations in that area. If the director of fair access is not a regulator, I am bound to ask what on earth his purpose is. Of course he is a regulator, and we have to consider how he will operate. When we discussed particular cases, it was genuinely illuminating to discover that the regulator is likely to operate better if he does so at a level of generality—I presume that that means working on plans and their implementation—rather than at a specific level, which, in shorthand, I shall call the Laura Spence level. That case, which caused shock and horror, reminds me of a conversation with a former admissions tutor at Oxford university some years ago which stuck in my mind. He told me that there were three places for applicants to read medicine at his college, but that there were 24 applicants, all of whom would have three As at A-level. He asked, ''Where do I start?'' That is why it is difficult for the Laura Spences of this world to get into such universities or, for that matter, other universities—it is not just courses at the ancient universities for which there is strong demand. I wish, if not to draw a distinction between tests of academic ability and potential, at least to touch on the substance of the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell, which deals with them. I am not sure why we have moved away from using the word ''merit''. I suspect, rather impishly, that as the Prime Minister has been using merit as the metric and saying that that is what he lives and dies by, so I have become less attracted to it. In a way, I am attracted to the idea of potential, which, together with the concept of academic ability, is included in the amendment. I concede that potential does not immediately track existing output and may need to be measured in several different ways. That is entirely proper. The hon. Member for Newbury nods. He made a particularly interesting speech on the subject. It occurs to me that our discussion is not just about the over-prepared, over-privileged, privately educated boy going up with a golden future ahead of him. Sadly, Column Number: 504 it could also be about someone who got tremendous grades and then perhaps was involved in an accident or suffered some injury or illness and was no longer able to perform effectively. That is the downside. The counterpart is the person from an unpromising background who could do far better than his grades indicate.Kali Mountford: I am following the hon. Gentleman's comments closely. He makes a good argument, but I do not understand what, in the range of potential, merit and academic achievement on which an individual student may be assessed, is precluded by an assumption of fair access. Mr. Boswell: I am not saying that anything is precluded. My point is that the matter is complicated and that it is better to make an academic judgment. As to access, there is no question whatever about not wishing to encourage fair access. I tried to explain that at the beginning of my comments. The argument is not about the ends but about the means for securing the ends. I do not want to try your patience, Mr. Gale, but this point is germane to the amendment. I was discussing potential and I hope that university admissions tutors take it into consideration. I have no reason to think that they do not. They want their pupils to succeed and to draw themselves up to their best ability. A set of concepts is embedded in this issue and needs drawing out. I have identified four aspects that make up the progression of someone who achieves their potential by the end of their degree course. The first is aspiration. It is not fashionable on new Labour Benches to quote from socialists, and I shall not inflame the Committee by introducing quotations that I have not used before, but I commend a phrase of the late Aneurin Bevan, who was nothing if not a strong believer in equality of opportunity and access. He used to talk about the ''poverty of aspirations''. I quote that because, throughout my time as a Minister, those words were often on my lips. I did not mind repeating them, because he was right. What is important is the ability of people to say, ''You could do this.'' As with the girl from Hackney, mentioned by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell), it is great if they can do it, but they need to be drawn out and given an opportunity. That is not at issue and my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell spoke about it. It is almost the most important thing. I do not think that the issue is even the grades that people get at a bog-standard comprehensive—to use an offensive phrase—but the mindset that says, ''We can go on and do this.
3.15 pmThe Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education (Alan Johnson): I have always wanted to do this, because the hon. Gentleman is so good on quotations, but the person who said ''poverty of aspiration'' was not Nye Bevan but Ernest Bevin. Mr. Boswell: I stand corrected. My view about Ernest Bevin, for whom I also have considerable regard because I think that he was a real bloke, was that his problem was the poverty of aspirants. There we are—I grovel before the Minister's superior Column Number: 505 knowledge and I am glad that he has put the Committee right. I genuinely did not know that.This is a serious issue and we need to make people think about it more seriously. We need to give them the opportunity and, rather than arguing between us, we should put it into their minds that they can take that opportunity. The second issue is that of access plans: what is put together and what is written down. I do not mind the concept of access planning if it is done by the institution. I may be fond of Oxford university, but I hope not exclusively so. University College Northampton, which is up the road from me and which I know well, has done a tremendous amount in working on its access to the local community. I do not think that it is unique in that, but it does a great deal. I mentioned Staffordshire university earlier in connection with access for people with disabilities and for ethnic minorities, and it does excellent work. Such work is done better by the institutions, rather than regulated from the centre. However, that may be a philosophical difference of view that we have. I concede that the admissions process is not, formally, in OFFA's remit, but that is a point on which I will wish to pause in a minute. Finally, and I do not think that this should be overlooked either, there is the academic process itself. The Minister gave me an answer some time ago, which I have not referenced for this discussion, but it made me concerned that OFFA would strike into the delivery of the academic process. In a sense, OFFA is almost bound to do that, because it has an obligation to monitor the delivery of access plans. I think of difficult circumstances in which a university might be in academic difficulties and needs to merge two courses, including two that, for academic reasons, have different fee structures. If a university ran out of resources and faced a difficult choice, should it sack its lecturers or renege on its bursaries after giving some notice? I can see that the Minister is sensible to those points, but they are difficult ones. Whatever it said in the access plan, if a course was taught in a particular way, it could be inimical to the interests of the individuals involved—for example, people with disabilities or ethnic minorities. Those are, in a sense, a list of the ground rules for discussion. The first specific point relates to the point that was explicit in Government policy and, even more so, in the draft guidance to the director—the question of subsidisation of bursaries. If I am right, above £2,700 of fees, universities will be expected to give to the maximum limit of £3,000 to make the difference, which would mean up to £250 available for bursaries. Leaving aside the question of whether they can afford that—it is a separate issue that I am not contending—there is an important issue of principle, at least in one sense. I am surprised that it has not been touched on. Through this mechanism, the Government are asking student A to make a contribution to the fee remission or bursary of student B. The Minister may be surprised that, at that level, I find that perfectly reasonable. When I have discussed such a concept with independent schools, they have said that typically 5 to 6 per cent. of the fees of an independent school are put Column Number: 506 aside for bursaries for access—to use the same phrase—for students who are less advantaged or run into difficulties at that school. There is an element of cross-subsidisation.I should not be forgotten that, in the structure that the Government would establish, the subsidy would go from the family of current student A to current student B and it would not relate to the means of the student when he graduated and would be repaying his normal loan. It would be a charge on his student loan account however much or little he earned later, so there is an implied inequity in it. The Minister should at least explain to the Committee how the implicit cross-subsidisation is defensible, and that nobody will be able to say that it is a compulsory tax from student A to student B and a denial of human rights. The question of the application of the access regulator's regime concerns me even more. The objective in the introduction of the Secretary of State's draft letter of guidance states:
That is an entirely non-contentious aspiration, but we need to know the coverage of it. The Minister will remember earlier and very constructive debates about part-time students, who account for 40 per cent. of the whole, and about postgraduates. We might have gone on to talk about second-time-around first degree students paying their way and foreign students. It is an interesting paradox that many institutions now rely on foreign students outwith the European Union to bolster their finances—they are a profit centre, not a loss leader. I am not clear, although the Minister may be, whether OFFA has any remit for such students. Is its remit for students resident in the UK or the European Union who are reading a first full-time undergraduate degree? The regulatory mechanism relates to that category—the conventional three-year first degree student. I am not clear whether OFFA is meant to take into account in access plans what is happening to all students—foreign, postgraduate and part-time students and those in the other categories that I mentioned. It is clear that the regulatory mechanism impacts only on the regulated sector. The issue becomes particularly pointed in relation to the European Union, to which my learned hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison)—the good lawyer that he is—referred to briefly. As I understand it, the issue relates to a European concept rather than a ministerial one. The European Union has created a common space for students to move around and, since the Gravier judgment, with which the Minister will be familiar, there is a common regime of support for those students. I must be careful, because my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell has reminded me in private conversation that Gravier bites not on student support, but on tuition fees and the fees regime. I am sure that you, Mr. Gale, would become extremely impatient if we were to widen the debate to include tuition fees to foreign students, so I note and Column Number: 507 accept your warning. What I am saying to the Committee is that, like it or not, the Minister must produce a regime for students in other EU member states, and we may want to return to some of these matters in relation to the repayment of student loans and bankruptcies at a later stage.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 2004 | Prepared 4 March 2004 |
