Higher Education Bill

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Mr. Boswell: The Minister may want to clarify this point later, but will he confirm that OFFA will not exercise any interest over wider issues such as postgraduate students or others paying full fees, who are different from the first-time, full-time undergraduate students who are part of the regulated sector?

Alan Johnson: The regulator will deal only with those who are liable to pay fees. The link is with the payment of fees.

Mr. James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): On a point of accuracy, it will not surprise the Minister to discover that I am a reader of The Daily Telegraph, but I was trying to quote verbatim from a report in that paper. If he has a better report of what Sir Howard said, I will bow to that, but it was intended to be a verbatim quotation.

Alan Johnson: I accept the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. I just happen to have the verbatim transcript.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East made an impassioned speech. He is absolutely right: we had 40 years of free higher education with generous maintenance grants post-Robbins report, but the social class gap has not narrowed, but widened. It is still the case that one is five times more likely to go to university if one's parents are professionals than if they are unskilled. The whole Bill can move us on from that. To insist that the regulator had power over admissions would not be the right way forward. The Schwartz committee, which is examining admissions, is the right way forward.

The issue is about applications. If we can solve the issue of low aspirations and the aspiration to apply to the university that best meets an individual's needs, we will have cracked the problem that has bedevilled the country for many years.

Mr. Francois: There has been much discussion, in what has been a good debate, about what we can do to widen access to higher education for people from non-

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traditional backgrounds—or shall I be blunt and say working-class backgrounds? Several of us have argued that although the universities may have a role in that, schools have an important role too. There has been some debate about where the balance of responsibility lies. In the brief time available to me that is the main issue that I should like to touch on—I want to juxtapose the responsibility of schools and universities and, if the Committee will indulge me, to speak at least partly from personal experience. I hope that the hon. Member for Nottingham, North will be able to hang on for a moment, as I am about to refer to him in my remarks: he is leaving, so I clearly have him worried.

As far as I know, I was the first of my family to go to university. I very much agree with something that the hon. Member for Nottingham, North said about the importance of the love of family, and families' encouragement to children in developing their educational potential. That was true for me and I am sure it was true for many members of the Committee. I submit that that applies across all social classes and that no social class has a monopoly on parents' love for their children and their wish to encourage them to go on to higher education.

I went to the sort of school, in the sort of area, that the hon. Member for Nottingham, North often likes to talk about. When I entered secondary school in what we now call year 7 but was known in those days—in old money, as it were—as first year seniors, there were approximately 220 children in the year. Of them, two subsequently went to university—fractionally under 1 per cent. One was the son of the director of studies at the school, and I was the other.

I do not want to denigrate my old school at all. I am not here to criticise my alma mater. It was broadly a good school and it provided a good general education. A number of the people who left at 16 went on to get good jobs locally. Quite a few ended up working in the City, and as a result they probably earn much more than any of us. Some, no doubt, are even earning more money than the Minister. [Interruption.] At least one or two of them, perhaps.

I have no general criticism but I have one particular criticism, which brings me back to some of the points made by the hon. Member for Leeds, East. One weakness of my old school and of many schools in working-class communities is that there was a certain lack of aspiration on behalf of the school, let alone the pupils. The school itself did not do enough to encourage children from the relevant backgrounds to go on to university. Not enough was done to explain what was available to those children, and to make it clear to them how they could progress and take advantage of the opportunities if they were so minded.

We had a sixth form, but it was not particularly academically oriented, whereas we all know that there are many other types of school with sixth forms that are extremely academically oriented, with very good success rates at getting people into higher education, including Russell group universities. The school's one weakness was that it did not necessarily allow children from the relatively modest backgrounds in question to understand what was available. Because of that, a tremendous amount of talent, including intellectual

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talent, walked out of the front gates of the school at 16. In some cases, as the hon. Member for Leeds, East intimated, they walked out younger than 16. Some just cut to the chase and bunked over the fence at the age of 14.

If the school had been better prepared to make plain to some of those children what was available through a university education, quite a few more might have had a crack at it and benefited from it. Perhaps they would not have done, but at least they would have had the option of trying. That weakness existed some years ago, and I humbly submit to the Committee that it is still a serious weakness in the education system in the United Kingdom even today. I do not necessarily blame the universities for that; the responsibility lies mainly with the schools. They are not doing enough to make what is available plain to children from such backgrounds. There are issues around ethos, the way a school is run and what the head teacher, some of the senior staff and the other staff believe their roles to be.

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There can be a poverty of aspiration not only among the pupils, but sometimes in the schools. The difference in principle is that while the Government say that the universities are in many ways at fault and that they need to reach down to the schools to improve the situation—in other words to look at the problem from the top down—in many cases there is also a number of problems in schools. They need to do better on behalf of their young people. In other words, the problem needs to be addressed fundamentally from the bottom up. [Interruption.] I am not saying that the two are entirely mutually exclusive. That is not my argument. I am saying that I strongly believe that, in many cases when it comes to this particular matter, the real problem lies with the schools rather than the universities.

We are not here to apportion blame. However, if we are here to say where responsibility rests, I believe that it rests with many of the schools rather than with the universities.

James Purnell rose—

Mr. Francois: I will allow a brief intervention. I know that the hon. Member for Bury, North has been bursting to speak all afternoon and I do not want to cost him the opportunity, but I will give way.

James Purnell: The White Paper agrees with the hon. Gentleman. It says that improving prior attainment is the main driver—not the only driver, but the main one.

Mr. Francois: I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. I think that he can clearly understand the balance of my argument. I do not want to do it to death but I will summarise. We sometimes sit in Parliament and talk about how working class kids do not always manage to get on as well as we would all like them to. I strongly believe that in some cases the reason that they do not get on is not because of some inherent bias, be it class-based or otherwise, within our university

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system. In some cases, the reason that they do not get on is because the schools that they attend fail those children and do not give them the start in life that they properly deserve.

The Chairman: Order. For the benefit of those whom the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Hall) represents, let it be a matter of record that he has sought to catch my eye but, unfortunately, time will not permit me to accommodate everybody on this occasion.

Mr. Chaytor: I apologise for having to leave the debate for a short time half way through, but it is interesting that in its early stages we diverged enormously on the issue. There was a time when the Opposition tried to attack the Government on the grounds that the measure would lead to charabancs full of the sons and daughters of coal miners coming down the M1 and along the M40 to take places at Oxford university previously occupied by pupils from independent schools in Surrey. They then went on to say that, in addition to that, caravans full of Slovakian gypsies would be coming up the M11 and taking up places at Cambridge university previously occupied by pupils from selective schools in Hertfordshire. However, as the afternoon has gone on, there has been considerably more common ground between both sides. The hon. Member for Rayleigh brought the debate towards a conclusion with a speech with which many Labour Members could have agreed.

Had I chosen to table an amendment to the Bill, I would have attempted to extend the responsibilities of OFFA to secondary schools as well as universities. That may still be an option on Report.

Anyone who is tempted to use the term ''sink school'' and attribute blame to sink schools needs to step back. I suggest that they follow the excellent precedent established by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) and spend a week working in an inner-city school, allowing themselves to be televised while doing so. It seems to me that those who are prepared to attribute blame to the performance of inner-city schools have a responsibility to find out what the challenges are.

I think that we agree across the Committee that the issue is a complex one and that its root is apparent in the early years. The root of the issue lies in the accident of birth, in the allocation of opportunities in the early years and in the allocation of places at primary and secondary school. Nevertheless, that does not mean that it is not an issue for the universities.

I want to put on record that although it is in our minds that 90 per cent. of those with two A-levels go to university, and that is important, we need to increase the number of students who have the basic entry requirement if we are to widen access, and we must consider the variable performance of individual universities. Neither of the Opposition spokesmen were able to my answer my question on that matter. Widening participation is no longer an issue for most British universities, because their student base is largely representative. However, it is an issue for some universities. The Minister was asked to name those universities where there was a problem, and

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although it is inappropriate for him to do so, it is not inappropriate for me.

I draw attention to the performance indicators of the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Imperial and King's College, London, the London School of Economics, the universities of Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Oxford Brooke's, the Royal Agricultural College and University college London, which are published by HEFCE. They are no secret; this is a public document and I want it to be on the record. Those universities, not all of which are in the Russell group, have a significant gap to make up in terms of their HEFCE performance indicators on widening participation. There are three indicators: students from low participation neighbourhoods; students from social classes 3, 4 and 5 and the balance between students from state and private schools.

It is not a particularly controversial issue within the universities, as they are aware of their performance against the benchmarks, but the universities' performance is variable. Over several years, the overwhelming majority of universities have implemented excellent policies on widening participation; a smaller number—not all from the Russell group—have found difficulty in doing so. OFFA is important because it will apply a little more pressure and concentrate the minds of some universities to work harder in that respect. I do not say that there is an overwhelming problem, but the universities I have named have the furthest to go in meeting their HEFCE benchmarks.

There are significant differences between universities which, to all intents and purposes, are comparatively similar. For example, why does Manchester do significantly better than Leeds? It is not something that we can sweep under the carpet, and it is not an issue to which we should attribute blame. But something is happening in Manchester that is not happening in Leeds, and the question is how we extend the best practice of the most successful universities.

My argument against the Opposition amendment is that either accidentally or through duplicity they have confused the issues of access and of admissions. It was encouraging that the hon. Member for Hertsmere and, by implication, one or two other Opposition Members, accept that the question of differential admissions was a legitimate subject for debate. It is not relevant to the clause; it is an issue for another occasion, when Professor Schwartz publishes his final report. I hope that then we can have a serious, open, mature and well-informed debate about admissions policy, but this debate is about access.

The Bill takes an enormous step forward and we should support it.

 

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Prepared 4 March 2004