Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
RT HON
RUTH KELLY
MP
2 MARCH 2005
Q100 Helen Jones: They have not so far,
have they? HEFCE say themselves that because there is no mechanism
for deferring payment of fees for part-time students as there
now would be for full-time students, there is a risk that higher
part-time fees may deter the most financially disadvantaged students.
Are we not in a position again where there are two contradictory
processes going on? Government says it wants to get more people
from financially disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education.
We are at the same time operating a system where a university
which caters for a great many of those students is being financially
disadvantaged. What is the way out of that? Is there going to
be more funding on offer for the OU? I may say that I think Birkbeck
is also similarly affected.
Ruth Kelly: I do not have the
website press release with me unfortunately but I did read it
yesterday. If you read it carefully you will see that HEFCE has
said that it is aware of the widening participation agenda in
relation to part-time students. I am hopeful that HEFCE will come
up with a way shortly to help the Open University and other institutions
with part-time students that do contribute to the widening participation
agenda. I cannot tell you what that is likely to be: that is for
HEFCE. I certainly read it in a different way.
Q101 Helen Jones: So far HEFCE has been
very slow to deal with this matter. Are you prepared to request
them to deal with it as a matter of urgency?
Ruth Kelly: Yes.
Q102 Helen Jones: From the evidence this
Committee has heard, time is very short.
Ruth Kelly: Yes.
Q103 Chairman: The thing we must emphasise
is that this is not just a question of special pleading for a
particular sector. The evidence we had last week on part-time
students was very compelling. What it is, is the integrity of
ministers' commitments which were made and if they are reneged
on, that is a rather different matter.
Ruth Kelly: I understand. This
is an issue for HEFCE, but I understand the importance of it and
I am hopeful that we will come up with a solution.
Q104 Paul Holmes: Continuing on the same
theme, it is not just the Open University, it is also particularly
a lot of the new universities who are doing the most to fulfil
the government's agenda of inclusion. They run lots of part-time
courses to get mature students in, but they are going to be very
badly hit by this fact that part-time students do not get their
fees deferred. That is really going to hit places like Derby,
not far from my constituency, or Bolton, indeed inside your constituency.
It is a much wider issue than just for the Open University, which
is facing a very serious problem. On the same theme, in the autumn
of 2006, students are going to arrive at university expecting
their bursaries, but HEFCE and the government are saying that
they are not going to provide the funding flow to universities
until February 2007. So there is going to be something like a
four- or five-month gap between lots of students turning up wanting
their bursaries and the universities having the money to pay those
out. That particularly again affects some of the new universities,
especially Gloucestershire, for example, which estimated that
they had a bill of £3 million for bursaries compared with
only £2.3 million for staff. It will affect all universities,
but the new universities, which have very high numbers of students
who qualify for bursaries, will be hit especially hard. Are you
going to do anything about that funding gap between autumn 2006
and February 2007?
Ruth Kelly: The announcement on
bursaries will be made on 17 March, on how bursaries will contribute
to the widening participation agenda by OFFA. You will have to
wait until then but clearly if there are particular issues about
the timing of the introduction of the money then that is something
I shall be happy to look at.
Q105 Valerie Davey: A different aspect
of fees. Can you guarantee this Committee that the deferred fees
of EU students will be repaid once they return to their country?
Has a mechanism been set up to ensure that money returns to the
universities?
Ruth Kelly: I must say that I
am not familiar with the issue but I can certainly write to the
Committee setting out how that might operate in practice.[2]
Valerie Davey: We would appreciate that;
thank you.
Q106 Chairman: The possibility of getting
the money back looked very flaky. This Committee is getting very
seriously concerned about the way that we are a net contributor
to European education, disproportionately so. We understand that
there are some advantages to that, but the fact of the matter
is that many EU students are applying to come here, in increasing
numbers and that makes the competition for places in a whole range
of universities more difficult for UK students. If we are not
going to get the money back for fees, if we are not going to get
that as an income, perhaps you should be pounding a desk somewhere
in Brussels to get a new deal. Because of the English language,
because we maintain high quality higher education in this country,
we are at a disproportionate risk of losing a great deal of resource.
Ruth Kelly: I am very happy to
send a note to the Committee on how I think that might work.[3]
Q107 Chairman: Will you also be firm
on the Bologna accord? You are a new broom and some of us have
been a little bit tired of the way in which the Bologna accord
seems to have been moving steadily ahead. Some of us actually
quite celebrate the fact that degrees and the post-graduate experience
are different in different EU countries. Forcing us to give up
our one-year MAs which we are very good at to go to a two-year
MA, to lose our four-year degrees in Scottish universities, all
seems a bit worrying to us.
Ruth Kelly: The Bologna process
has an important role to play in the knowledge economy and the
idea that we can recognise qualifications in other countries is
a good one. I do not think the answer is necessarily standardisation;
I completely agree with you on that. What matters is the outcome
and I shall remain firmly focused on that.
Q108 Mr Chaytor: We are just suggesting
here that you might usefully hop on the Eurostar and go to Brussels
and tell them that we want our money back. It would secure your
place in history if nothing else did. When the government decided
to delegate responsibility for the bursary system for full-time
undergraduates to individual institutions, was that deliberately
designed to channel a bigger share of the tuition fee income to
leading research universities?
Ruth Kelly: No, I think the argument
behind autonomy—
Q109 Mr Chaytor: So it was an accidental
outcome.
Ruth Kelly: No, no. Let me explain.
The argument behind autonomy in relation to bursaries, which is
a good thing, is that universities can really start to think about
where their disadvantaged communities are and that they can target
those areas. For example, I understand only 1% of Cambridge students
come from the North East. That is not something you would perhaps
recognise if you were to approach this from the national perspective,
but when an individual university thinks about its intake of students
and where they come from they can act in a more targeted way.
I think that is a strength in the system and that is why it has
been done as far as I am concerned.
Q110 Mr Chaytor: Would you accept that
once the decision had been taken it was absolutely inevitable
that the leading research universities would get a larger share
of the income to spend on teaching facilities and staff salaries,
precisely because they would be distributing less in bursaries?
Ruth Kelly: I do not think it
is necessarily the case.
Q111 Mr Chaytor: Modern universities,
by definition, having a larger proportion of their students from
local families are going to spend more.
Ruth Kelly: I do not think that
is necessarily the case at all. One of the things which is pretty
clear to me is that our leading research universities ought to
be paying much larger bursaries to their students to attract people
from communities which have never sent them to those universities
before. I expect to see that reflected on 17 March.
Q112 Mr Chaytor: Which they probably
are, but they are giving far fewer of those bursaries, therefore
the total income allocated to bursaries will be less than in other
universities.
Ruth Kelly: Let us wait and see
what the actual results of this process are.
Q113 Chairman: Why did the government
not publicise it? Those of us who fought hard to support the government's
line—David and I were certainly amongst those—on variable
fees, now find that there is a very great deal of ignorance out
there in terms of the knowledge of the great advantages of deferred
fees and bursaries, of the re-introduction of grants? Why is the
government not doing more to publicise the advantages?
Ruth Kelly: We are publicising
the advantages and they are quite straightforward: the removal
of the upfront fee, the re-introduction of grants and no payment
while you are studying; very, very clear advantages. I was discussing
just this point with the Director of OFFA yesterday and it is
my firm view that there has never been a better time to be a poor
bright student in this country. It is a pretty simple message,
but one we have to get across. There is wide awareness of the
changes among 16-19 year olds. We have written to them, we have
explained this; we are using radio and newspaper adverts and so
forth to get our message across. I understand that has had a wide
penetration and the potential students are aware of the changes.
Chairman: We are going to revert now
to schools.
Q114 Mr Gibb: Can I refer to the Clackmannanshire
study, the 16 week programme of pure synthetic phonics. At the
end of that programme, after 16 weeks, the children in the pure
synthetic phonics group had a reading age seven months ahead of
the groups using the NLS and by age 11 these children had a reading
age of 14½ when they were expected to have a reading age
of 11. The NLS has very detailed objectives which makes it very
difficult for a school to adopt a pure synthetic phonics programme
because those objectives, for example, require long vowels to
be taught in year one, term three, whereas synthetic phonics will
teach that in the first few weeks. What is your assessment of
the Clackmannanshire study?
Ruth Kelly: I know this is something
you feel passionately about and you put to previous secretaries
of state and have used every opportunity to raise.
Q115 Chairman: I must tell you that Nick
has converted quite a few of us on this Committee to taking more
of an interest in synthetic phonics than we otherwise might.
Ruth Kelly: Including myself.
Q116 Chairman: The Scottish data is very,
very persuasive, is it not?
Ruth Kelly: The schools minister
was talking about this on the Today programme this morning;
I do not know whether you had the chance to hear him. Synthetic
phonics is a large part of what the national literacy strategy
is about and it has evolved a lot since its introduction in 1998.
It is not a pure synthetics approach, because it also teaches
grammar, context and allows indirect inference about words. The
evidence on this is not of which approach works best. It is not
as strong as the proponents of the pure synthetic approach suggest.
The evidence, as I understand it and correct me if I am wrong—I
am sure you will—is based on pure word recognition at the
age of 11 and not literacy, not comprehension and understanding
and context and character and setting and theme. The gap narrows
virtually entirely if you judge literacy rather than word recognition
at the age of 11. What I would say to you is that I think synthetic
phonics work well. We do teach synthetic phonics, it is at the
heart of our approach, but within the national literacy strategy
we also teach other things which are also important to the understanding
of the context and understanding the book, reading it fluently
and well. That greater breadth is also important. We looked at
this in the department in 2003 and had a phonics seminar, I have
been told, which included the authors of that particular study.
The outcome of that seminar was a decision that actually our approach
was the best one.
Q117 Mr Gibb: There was a lot of dissatisfaction
with the way that seminar was handled. It is true; it was basically
unsatisfactory and I hope you do not base your decision upon that
seminar. Can I urge you to be as robust on this issue and independent
on this issue as you have been on Tomlinson? There is no doubt
in my mind, having studied this quite carefully that if you can
enable children within the first year of primary school to decode
every word effortlessly, they can then concentrate all their mind
on comprehension and that is why children have better comprehension
using synthetic phonics than they do under NLS where children
are spending a lot of their mental resources trying to guess and
work out what words are from this searchlight approach which involves
four different ways of decoding words. Decoding is no longer effortless
for children. Can I just urge you to take a careful look at the
NLS because at the moment the way the NLS is configured it does
make it very difficult for schools to adopt a synthetic phonics
approach. I was disappointed by the minister on the radio this
morning because I do not feel he has a real understanding of how
contradictory the NLS is with the synthetics approach. They cannot
work together. You have to abandon the NLS if you are going to
have synthetic phonics in the school. Would the Secretary of State
be happy to meet the people from the synthetic phonics part of
this argument, Ruth Miskin and Sue Lloyd, because it does require
quite a lot of application to understand these issues in detail?
Ruth Kelly: May I tell the Committee
that I have actually read some of Ruth Miskin's books and I know
what she is trying to do. I also think that those are the very
same materials which are used in the national literacy strategy.
We will keep the literacy strategy under review. It has made a
huge impact on reading standards and literacy standards of our
11 year olds, something I now want to see continued through every
school and we must make sure that it is based on the best evidence
possible. I am sure that synthetic phonics will remain central
to that approach.
Q118 Mr Gibb: It is not central to the
NLS at the moment.
Ruth Kelly: I am sure this debate
will continue.
Q119 Chairman: Synthetic phonics was
shown to help those most difficult children to learn to read.
Would the synthetic phonics approach help those who were found
to be struggling at seven or eight?
Ruth Kelly: There are passionate
advocates of synthetic phonics, of reading recovery, of different
approaches to how you really motivate children and teach them
to read. I actually think the national literacy strategy is an
extremely good way through this. People will continue to advocate
different systems.
2 Note: See Ev 20. Back
3
Note: See Ev 20. Back
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