Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
SIR HOWARD
NEWBY
19 OCTOBER 2005
Q1 Chairman: Sir Howard, good morning.
Sir Howard Newby: Good morning.
Q2 Chairman: It is a pleasure to
see you back in front of the Committee.
Sir Howard Newby: It is very good
to be here. Thank you.
Q3 Chairman: I hope it is not setting
a precedent. We interviewed Sir David Normington last week and
immediately he was moved to become the Permanent Secretary of
the Home Office!
Sir Howard Newby: I got my retaliation
in first.
Q4 Chairman: We understand you are
going to be leaving HEFCE at some stage and moving to the Vice
Chancellorship at the University of the West of England, so we
may catch you before you go again.
Sir Howard Newby: It will be a
little while yet.
Q5 Chairman: Because we are looking
at Bologna in depth and so we may bring you back in. It is a while
yet. Good. Can I just say before we get started that those of
us who were here last week when we were interrogating the permanent
secretary, and it was his last performance in under a five-year
stint, we covered a range of very interesting areas, and it was
interesting to see the great British education press covered the
same story, an aside by Sir David Normington, but even the headline
was the same. I wonder why we have so many education journalists
if they can only write one story after three hours. We live in
hope for a better performance today, Sir Howard, but we are on
television, so we have a live feed. Let us get started. Sir Howard,
you have been in the job for how long now?
Sir Howard Newby: Nearly five
years.
Q6 Chairman: Would you like to say
anything to get us started? You can start off cold if you like,
or you can have a leading question from me which would be this.
You have been there five years. When you leave will you leave
British higher education in a better state, a worse state or much
the same state?
Sir Howard Newby: I am confident
we will leave it in a better state. It has been an eventful five
years. Little did I imagine when I came into this post that there
would be a White Paper, let alone a Bill and now an Act, which
would thrust higher education so much into the spotlight on the
front pages of the newspapers, not buried in the middle as we
often are. Why do I say we leave it in a better state? Partly
because, I think, looking forward, the case for the centrality
of higher education in a modern knowledge-based society and economy
is widely accepted now in government and elsewhere. I think all
the external indicators are that British higher education—but,
of course, I only have responsibility for English higher education—is
up there with the best in the world, possibly second to the United
States on most indicators, but on many we are actually ahead of
all the other OECD countries, and, of course, the competition
is getting increasingly fierce. Nevertheless—we can perhaps
go into this if you wish—I feel that the quality and the
standards, both in teaching and in research in higher education,
have improved over that period. But we need to improve more, of
course, because the competition is getting fiercer. We can look
forward, thanks to the introduction of the Act, to additional
resources coming into higher education which can be used to invest
in excellence going forward, because I think you and your colleagues
will be aware that, in order to sustain our position in an increasingly
competitive global world of higher education, there is still a
need for further investment.
Q7 Chairman: Let us get started then.
There is one particular area which most people feel has dominated.
As you say, when we started, and I think you and I first started
our jobs at the same time, certainly in terms of the chairmanship
of this Committee, we used to hear that higher education was neglected,
in terms of the media spotlight it was the Cinderella, and, of
course, it immediately changed with the very big debate on variable
fees, and next year we will be into the variable fee time. Reflecting
on that, could it have been handled better by the Government?
Do you think that quite the fight that we had. . . . Could it
have been done better?
Sir Howard Newby: Hindsight is
a wonderful thing, is it not, and, of course, I am not party to
the ins and outs of the micro-politics of all of this within the
Government and within the House. I would put it this way. I think
governments all over the world, and this is not unique to the
UK, are faced really with three issues which this Government was
one of the first to face up to. First of all, governments all
over the world want to increase the number of students going into
higher education because governments all over the world recognise
that to be competitive in today's economy there is a need to improve
skills levels and have, therefore, more people with graduate levels
skills entering into the economy to maintain that degree and,
indeed, enhance that degree of competitiveness, but governments
all over the would want to do that whilst sustaining and, indeed,
improving levels of quality. You put those two things together
and then the third leg of this dilemma is that governments all
over the world want to do both of those things without placing
an increasing burden on the tax-payer, because, of course, there
are other major spending priorities all over the world, often
relating to the same priorities we have here, in health, in schools
as well as in universities, in defence and so on, and it is squaring
that circle which I think has been the policy dilemma. More people
are obtaining a greater of level skills because that is what the
economy demands. How can we do that by improving levels of quality
(because that is what everyone demands) and how can we find the
resources to achieve both of those two things? Countries all over
the world have at least examined the issue of whether students
should pay a higher proportion of the cost of higher education.
As you know, we are one of the first in the world to introduce
a scheme which is now embracing that principle. After that I think
the issue becomes one of the mechanisms and the marketing. To
be honest, I still worry that there are too many students and
too many parents who do not understand that when students arrive
at universities and colleges next September they are not going
to have to write a cheque for £3,000. I think there is still
a widely held view that they will have to do that, and clearly
all of us need to market the real situation with regard to fees
and loans and remove some of the perceptions which actually might
actually deter some students from entering higher education.
Q8 Chairman: I would agree with that
broadly, Sir Howard, but over that period of your five years so
far people like the Sutton Trust still say: here we have an education
system right through, including higher education, that still manages
the Essex man's, "Yes, there are people going through it,
yes, maintaining reasonable quality, in fact good quality in most
institutions", but at the same time the haves of the educational
world, are still getting the best deal and the have-nots—those
people who have never had a good education, who have never had
a higher education—are still really not getting their chances
based on their talent. The relationship between the opportunities
you get in education and through higher education are still linked
to family background, income and not talent. Is that something
you would share?
Sir Howard Newby: Yes, it is.
I am still convinced, and actually we published a report last
year on young people's participation in higher education which
demonstrated this, that there is out there still a pool of highly
talented young people who would benefit enormously from higher
education but who, for the reasons you allude to and one or two
other reasons, are not attracted into it, they do not aspire to
it and they do not apply for admission into higher education institutions,
and we all have to work hard at attracting them in. We are all
aware, of course, that this is a deeply-rooted social issue—it
is one of social inclusion—it is not just a higher education
issue. We know that many of these problems need to be tackled
at a very early age, some would argue even pre-school, but certainly
in some of the policies I have presided over in the last four
or five years we have been tackling this issue with the schools
at the ages of around 13, 14 and 15. I think that intervention
can help in raising aspirations and raising performance of those
under-represented students in the school system, and although,
in fairness, we have made some progress towards widening access
over this period, I certainly would not claim it has been enough
and we still have a long way to go, and although I do not think
the problem is intractable, it is very difficult.
Q9 Chairman: Why do you think it
is that so many people are complaining about the disappearance
of a reliable benchmarking system so that you can determine how
universities are performing across the piece in attracting young
people from a broader social range? Is that your fault? Whose
fault is it that that benchmark is no longer there? Many university
vice chancellors that I talk to and other people in higher education
complain bitterly that they do not have that consistent ability
to benchmark themselves and their performance?
Sir Howard Newby: I have to say
it is a reliable benchmark. What you are referring to, I think,
is the change in the tariff. We have moved away—and this
was not introduced by us, of course, but by UCAS for admissions
purposes—two years ago they moved away from the straight
A-level tariff, which I think, looking around this room, probably
we were all familiar with—in my day it was in grades and
then it went over to a points system—and UCAS recognised
that there were many other qualifications these days that students
successfully undertook in the schools and college system which
prepared them for entry into university. Many vocational qualifications,
for example, which we have been working hard to try to improve
the progression pathways for vocational students not just those
taking the academic route through A-levels, and UCAS took the
view that it would help matters if there was a single tariff which
embraced all of these qualification and they altered the point
scores, accordingly. The difficulty, of course, is that the universities
to which you refer who complain are largely those which have a
very high proportion of applications per place and are universities
which almost entirely admit their students on the old A-level
basis, whereas, of course, there are large numbers of other universities
which do not; they admit students not just with A-levels but with
a wide range of equivalent qualifications. We are not responsible
for the tariff, and we have to base benchmarks on the statistical
information that is made available to us by UCAS and by HESA (the
Higher Education Statistics Agency). My personal view is that
there might well be a case for clustering some of these qualifications
into families of tariffs so that those universities which would
wish to use the existing system may continue to do so, those universities
which would want to be more specific in terms of their entry requirements
might do so, and that is something that perhaps we should look
at, but we are in the position of needing to urge others to do
this rather than having control over it ourselves.
Q10 Chairman: Is that easily doable?
Is it expensive?
Sir Howard Newby: There are lot
of technical statistical issues about this. I do not think it
would be expensive. It comes down in the end, I think, to a policy
decision about whether we think the benefits from having a rather
more flexible tariff system on which the benchmarks will be based
would outweigh the inclusiveness that the current tariff system
embraces. You are, under the current tariff system, not disqualified
or discriminated against because you have chosen not to do A-levels
but have chosen instead to do other qualifications which are deemed
to be equivalent to A-levels, and that is opening up entrance
to universities again to a wider section of the population who
might not have thought that a vocational qualification could or,
indeed, should lead to university entrance.
Chairman: Thank you for that. Let us
drill down a little more in terms of the higher education fees.
Paul Marsden.
Q11 Mr Marsden: Thank you, Chairman.
Sir Howard, you will know, and I assume welcome warmly, that the
Secretary of State announced yesterday that he was increasing
the fee for part-time students and, indeed, increasing fourfold
the Access to the Learning Fund?
Sir Howard Newby: I believe so,
yes.
Q12 Mr Marsden: Do you think this
has gone far enough?
Sir Howard Newby: I think we will
only be able to see when we see what happens to the changes in
the numbers of students coming through the part-time route. My
board is considering at its meeting in November some proposals
that we will put to it as to whether there are issues on the institutional
funding side, which we are responsible for, which might assist
part-time students or might assist universities admitting part-time
students, which can be put alongside the student support arrangements
that were announced yesterday. I know that there are a number
of universities with high proportions of part-time students who
are concerned about this, and in my board we signalled, for example,
that we would look at whether there is more that could be done
to ensure that students from non-traditional families, what we
would call widening participation students, will continue to be
encouraged to go down the part-time route, and that is what my
board will consider in November.
Q13 Mr Marsden: The Higher Education
Minister, Bill Rammell, yesterday indicated that he thought the
Government had not recognised enough the needs of the part-time
sector and had not thought enough about links between the importance
of part-time students and the employability agenda, and that raises
in my mind whether in fact you at HEFCE have done enough to alert
him and his colleagues to this?
Sir Howard Newby: I would, of
course, say that we have. I think the Chairman invited me a moment
ago to reflect back upon the events of the last two years. I have
to say that the White Paper was written rather too much from the
point of view that the average student, if I can put it that way,
is a full time 18-21-year-old campus-based student, whereas that
group of students is, of course, a diminishing proportion of those
as a whole. All I can say is that it was not for want of trying
that at the time we were impressing upon the Department the need
to think ahead more about flexibility of delivery of higher education,
about lifelong learning and that agenda and also about the part-time
route.
Q14 Mr Marsden: Those are fine as
general principles, but you have it in your power to do some quite
specific leverage things, and you have had institutions like the
Open University and Birkbeck banging on to you for the best part
of 18 months about this issue. Some people might say that you
spent a little too long in the Russell Group cloisters and not
enough time on some of the community learning centres and elsewhere
where increasingly a lot of HE is being delivered by further education.
That is in the past, but you do have an opportunity, as you say,
to remedy it with your board meeting coming up. Is that board
meeting going to just produce another widening participation initiative,
or is it going to look fully at the costs of institutions like
the Open University and Birkbeck and try and address some of the
real problems that they have been having?
Sir Howard Newby: My understanding
is that the Open University has been recording record admissions
this year, and the reason why my board took the view it did last
year is that it wanted to wait and see whether or not the introduction
of the new fees regime was going to prove deleterious to the institutions
you mentioned which, of course, are wholly dependent on part-time
students—there are a number of other universities which
still have high proportions of them—because the argument
could be made that there may be a higher proportion of students
who would wish to continue in employment and undertake part-time
study at institutions like Birkbeck and the Open University rather
than come out of employment and go into higher education as full
time students with all that means in taking on a loan to cover
a debt. My board said we are going to keep this matter under close
supervision, which we are doing, and we will see, if there was
evidence that not only Birkbeck and the Open University but other
institutions with a high proportion of part-time students were
suffering, we would intervene. The board at the same time expressed
the view (and you will know the arguments) that because part-time
students were not eligible at the time for loans to cover their
fees, and because there was a prospect at least that part-time
fees might increase, that there was a case for looking at whether
we should increase the premium, a widening participation premium
for part-time students so that resources could flow to institutions
to support those students in particular in greatest need, and
my board will be considering specific proposals on that at its
meeting on 3 November.
Q15 Mr Marsden: Given that, as I
said earlier, an increasing amount of higher education is being
delivered by further education institutions and a large number
of those people are part-timers, and given also that many of the
students doing that course are particular women in their thirties
and forties returning who are doing them to acquire additional
skills—they are not doing them, I think the craze is, basket
weaving or more esoteric subjects—are you, again, as in
institution in HEFCE looking closely enough at how HE is being
delivered via further education colleges and what more you could
do to support and incentivise it?
Sir Howard Newby: I would say
that in the past we probably have not given enough attention to
the particular needs of further education colleges in delivering
higher education. That is now very much now on our agenda. I will
not trouble you perhaps with the minutiae of funding formula and
matters of that kind.
Q16 Mr Marsden: You could give us
a note, if you think it is helpful?
Sir Howard Newby: I am very happy
to do that, because we have considered recently that very specific
issue as to how further education colleges—this, of course
is tied up with another review that is going on elsewhere—could
be incentivised further to deliver higher education courses in
the way you describe.[1]
I want to come back to your broader issue. We see the bulk of
the issues facing the further encouragement of part-time study
lying on the student support side, which is why I very much welcome
the Secretary of State's statement yesterday, rather on the institutional
funding side. But I have indicated, there are some things on the
institutional funding side which we can do and will intend to
do, initially with the premium, but if we find that there is a
major downturn in part-time student numbers across the sector,
then we would intervene to assist in that process.
Q17 Mr Marsden: My last point. I think
it is not just a question of the numbers of students going into
part-time education but their purpose in doing so and the quality
of the study and its contribution to the skills agenda which the
Government and presumably HEFCE are strongly committed to. With
that in mind, you will be aware of the fact that there is considerable
concern in the FE sector at the moment that the cuts by the LSC
in funding for colleges may seriously affect adult learning. Have
you taken a position on this and looked at it at all in HEFCE
and will you do so given, as I say, the strong increasing links
between the health of HE in the part-time sector and, indeed,
the continuing education sector and the health of FE colleges
and learning programmes related to them?
Sir Howard Newby: I think the
straight answer to that is probably "Yes". It is not
my role to interfere in the internal affairs of the Learning and
Skills Council.
Q18 Mr Marsden: No, but you can write
helpful articles and say helpful things to ministers, can you
not?
Sir Howard Newby: And, indeed,
to Andrew Foster, which I hope I have done. I think there is an
issue about post-16 progression from FE to HE, which we have been
actively addressing through this notion of lifelong learning networks
which links colleges and universities together. That is coming
along very nicely, particularly, if I may say so, in the north-west
where a number have now been established. We work very closely
with the Learning and Skills Council to try and ensure that those
progression routes are made as seamless and smoothly as possible,
and we are confident we can do that. I am naturally disappointed
that the Learning and Skills Council has withdrawn from its support
of Aim Higher, which is one of the major policies we have introduced
to both reach out to students from underprivileged backgrounds
and to retain them in the sector once they enter, but I do understand
the funding problems which the Learning and Skills Council faces.
It is just unfortunate that those circumstances have led them
to withdraw in that way.
Q19 Tim Farron: Sir Howard, a further
comment on the part-time student grant. I wonder whether you would
comment on the fact that although the increase in the order has
been announced, that actually still only adds up to an increase
in terms of the actual cost to the individual student instead
of being a quarter of the likely annual fee to a third of the
actual cost of part-time higher education. I suppose the concern
there has to be that all we are doing is giving a leg up to those
potential and current part-time students who can already afford
to access higher education, or, indeed, who are doing vocational
subjects where the employer is prepared to make up some of the
shortfall. Before I move on to the next question, do you see that
as a likely reality?
Sir Howard Newby: Not quite. First
of all, the last figures that I saw were that 83% of part-time
students were in employment and 41% of them were supported by
their employer, and this has been, I think from the Department's
point of view with its responsibilities for student financing,
the difficulty. They are concerned that additional support from
the tax-payer for part-time study would essentially be dead weight
funding; it would simply substitute the funding by the employer.
What I think is very innovative about yesterday's announcement
is that the Government announced a very considerable increase
in the access to learning fund, which is administered by universities,
not by the Department, nor by the Funding Council, which means
that students who are in need will now have considerably more
support available to them, and it will be for individual universities
to make the judgment about which students really need it. So it
is not a blanket entitlement. Those students who are in employment
being supported by their employers can continue to be supported
in that way, but there has now been a very considerable increase,
I think from 12-20 million, in the Access to Learning Fund, which
will give very much needed support to those students who are genuinely
in need. We will wait and see whether that is sufficient, but
I think it is a very major step in the right direction, and, if
I may say so, a very creative way of dealing with this dead weight
problem.
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