Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MS JESSICA
OLLEY, PROFESSOR
DRUMMOND BONE
AND PROFESSOR
LORD MAY
OF OXFORD
10 JANUARY 2007
Q20 Fiona Mactaggart: By "panic"
I meant a number of organisations said that a particular kind
of degree is at risk from the year counting.
Professor Bone: There are a lot
of issues, and that is one of the absolutely key issues, there
is no question about that. I think the key thing is to keep chipping
away at it. Again, I think the decisive thing (and I would like
this to be something which is fore-grounded in the May ministerial
meeting) is that it is the sector which actually keeps control
of the process. The danger is that the EC, as it were, takes over—Brussels,
to use the term more loosely, actually takes over the process—because
then we could be on the slippery slope to a sort of bureaucratised
process, which I think would be a cause for panic and a nightmare.
At the moment the sector is still in control, and I do not just
mean the UK sector but our colleagues across Europe as well, and
I think it is just a question of chipping away at all these issues.
There is a remarkable amount of agreement across Europe in the
sector about the way to go; that is not necessarily the case at
governmental level across Europe.
Q21 Fiona Mactaggart: Are you saying
that the anxiety that I have detected in some of the evidence
that I have received on the Bologna Process about a kind of standardised
system is not well-founded, that actually it is about a shared
understanding and equivalents rather than standardisation?
Professor Bone: I think that the
anxiety that it could become a process about standardisation is
well founded. I do not think it is at the moment, but there is
always that danger.
Q22 Fiona Mactaggart: In the memorandum
from the DfES they said that it is not intended to lead to standardisation
or greater uniformity of European higher education provision,
it is more a framework designed to ensure the highest level of
quality consistency, and so on, and yet in all sorts of areas—length
of degrees, quality assurance mechanisms, and so on—there
seems to be a very widespread anxiety that it is not a framework
but a standard system. What I want to know is are you confident
that around Europe there is a shared view that this should be
a framework rather than a standardisation and that there is a
common ambition to create that across Europe?
Q23 Chairman: Ms Olley, would you
like to start?
Ms Olley: Absolutely. Certainly
among the European stakeholders involved in the process there
is a consensus that it remains about broad principles at European
level rather than detailed, top-down, rigid recommendations. Absolutely.
That is certainly the case. If I may take the opportunity just
to underline Professor Bone's point about UK engagement, there
has been a real increase in the sector's engagement in the Bologna
Process. As you know, we are hosting the next summit, we currently
hold the secretariat for the process, but experts from across
the UK—from Scotland and Wales as well as England—have
been members of key working groups that have developed this Bologna
qualifications framework, the European standards and guidelines
for quality assurance that we have adopted, and were co-authored
by Peter Williams who you are speaking to later, and so there
is real, solid evidence of how engaged and how influential the
UK sector is in the process.
Q24 Fiona Mactaggart: Are all of
you confident that in research as well as in other areas you can
get a greater level of consistency and coherence across Europe
without standardisation—that it is achievable?
Professor Lord May of Oxford:
I do not think it is easy, and I certainly want to say again I
think we have got to be engaged in the process, but one of the
problems, amongst others (and I think it is one of our faults)
is that we take very seriously any regulations that are put in
place. If you would not minute this story, please! One morning
of the Permanent Secretary's meetings when they used to get together
and complain about their ministers, Terry Burns, who was then
head of the Treasury, was saying there are advantages in having
a uniform taxation system within Europe, and I said, "Absolutely.
I would be very happy to pay the higher Italian taxes, provided
it was consistently uniform and, like the Italians, I did not
pay it." We tend to forget that many of the places we are
talking about, the education system we are talking about, are
unrecognisably different from our own, not in the year structure
so much as in the way the students are treated and the way the
courses are taught, and, talking of the research qualifications,
Italy is still a nepotistic mess in appointments of people at
the faculty level, despite the fact that it is full of brilliant
people. We have got to be engaged trying to push it in the right
direction, but I would hope that we would also have at the back
of our minds that maybe, just for once, if there are things that
end up through our wishing to participate, being things we think
are silly, we leave the universities alone and DfES is a more
bit more relaxed about not requiring them all to tick all the
boxes. We should remember, if you look at any of these surveys
of what are the world's best universities, of the top 10 European
universities in any such survey, we own five of the top six, and
the sixth is the ETH, Zurich, in Switzerland, which would agree
with everything we are saying because it is like a British university.
We run a serious risk, if we take this too seriously, and I do
not mean this disrespectfully, but the Civil Service culture is
rather different from the higher education culture in many ways.
I do not 100% trust DfES, even though I have absolute confidence
in the good intentions and the conscientious diligence of the
people in that excellent Department. It is a delicate trick to
be heavily engaged while at the same time recognising that that
engagement is likely to lead to commitments that are not going
to be great, and I draw in saying that on my eight years of experience
in this European research area, the European Research Council,
and seeing the terrain and the battlefield being fought out of
trying to take the European Research Council idea, which was essentially
initially proposed as a welfare agency, having a fair chance of
being turned into a premier league that helps everyone. There
is no guarantee it will yet, but it is in the right direction,
and that is what I hope we can do with Bologna, but it is not
going to be easy.
Q25 Mr Marsden: I wonder if we could
turn to the scale of Bologna and what the implications of it might
be. We have already heard is it going to be a purely EU thing
and clearly the numbers are post the numbers of people in the
EU. Perhaps I could ask you, Professor Bone, do you see Bologna
getting bigger and bigger and eventually turning into an international
set of principles and standards and, if so, would that be a bad
thing?
Professor Bone: It depends what
that would look like. I think increased transparency in terms
of the way in which universities function, which is one of the
outputs from Bologna, would be good thing for international trade
in higher education, and I include research in that. One of the
things that we are facing at the moment, for example, is a very
uneven playing field in the way in which the state actually subsidises
research activities in universities across Europe; so anything
which leads to greater transparency, whether it is transparency
in terms of qualifications requirements, whether it is transparency
in the way in which universities are funded, I think would be
a good thing internationally; but if what you are envisaging,
Gordon, is a kind of huge pan-national WHO in international education,
then that would not be a good thing. Clearly that would be a nightmare.
Q26 Mr Marsden: Presumably, apart
from anything else, our North American colleagues would be very
reluctant to go along with it?
Professor Bone: Indeed. One of
the nightmares as well, and it is something we have heard quite
a bit about (and we might come back to that again in our discussion
specifically about Europe) is international quality assurance
agencies.
Q27 Mr Marsden: Let me explore with
you a bit more the push-pull factors here. Some of the countries
that are wanting to join up to Bologna, frankly, in my view, are
doing it in some respects as a proxy for EU membership, and that
is perfectly understandable and laudable from that point of view.
Is it our job to help them along that road?
Professor Bone: I do not think
it is necessarily our job. As I have said, I think there is an
argument that there is a longer-term gain in actually improving
the standard of higher education globally.
Q28 Mr Marsden: So that is what it
is there for, or part of what it is there for?
Professor Bone: It is a small
part of it, but it is certainly a part of what it is there for,
yes.
Q29 Mr Marsden: There was reference
earlier to the issue of how easy is at the moment or not, as the
case may be, and one of the crucial backgrounds to this, of course,
is programmes like Erasmus and Socrates and Da Vinci. If we are
going to move down a route which says these things are a good
thing and we want more of them—and I do not know whether
this is something you would be able to comment on, Lord May—has
there been any assessment as to how valuable in terms of impact
the structures of what is already there (Erasmus, Socrates and
Da Vinci) has been?
Ms Olley: In the context of preparing
the European Union's new mobility programme, which is beginning
this year—their new integrated life-long learning programme
which will replace Erasmus, Socrates, Leonardo—there has
absolutely been a review and a close look at how they were working.
Q30 Mr Marsden: I am particularly
interested in the whole issue of student impacts. Not the bureaucracy
of it, not whether all the boxes have been ticked and everything
has flowed properly, but have the students who have gone through
those programmes benefited themselves, particularly UK students,
from what they have done. Is there any hard evidence on that?
Ms Olley: I can certainly look
to provide you with hard evidence after this session, but my impression
is that Erasmus is absolutely beneficial to those students who
participate.
Q31 Mr Marsden: With respect, Jessica,
that is an impression. What I am asking about (and I do not know
if our other colleagues have anything to say on this) is have
there been any surveys of the students? Those programmes have
been going for several years now. What has the feedback been in
British universities? Have they all come back and said, "Yes,
we want more of this", or what?
Ms Olley: There have been surveys
and my understanding is that the feedback was positive, but I
would like to confirm that.
Professor Bone: To the best of
my knowledge, there has been no overarching cost-benefit analysis,
if I can put it that way, under Erasmus, as far as I know, but,
again, I think there have been individual surveys and I am sure
we could supply you with the outcomes of these.
Q32 Mr Marsden: My last point, and
this is perhaps one that Lord May may want to comment on, should
we not be trying to proceed on the basis of empirical evidence
from the benefits of existing EU cooperation before we actually
propose structures and systems that expand?
Professor Lord May of Oxford:
My answer is simply, "Yes". We should be driven not
by some idealised, tidy scheme that unifies things, we should
be governed by the aspiration of making it easy to move around
and evaluate people, recognising that at the moment we have huge
diversity. Some of it is good, as within this country of different
emphases in different areas, and so on, and some of it is a diversity
of the actual standards, and we should be trying, as we look at
trying to make it easier to move around, at the same time to do
it in a way that raises standards by acquainting people with the
models that by various objective measures work better, producing
better educated people.
Q33 Mr Carswell: I wanted to talk
a bit about the Lisbon Agenda and mobility across Europe. Do you
agree that the Bologna Process is fundamentally about responding
to the Lisbon Agenda on competitiveness and making European higher
education world class?
Professor Bone: I do not know
that it is linked necessarily to the Lisbon Agenda in its entirety.
I think it has relevance to the Lisbon Agenda clearly, and I certainly
think that fundamentally it is about competitiveness, yes, and
competitiveness in the widest possible sense, not just economic
competitiveness narrowly defined but social benefit which would
lead to a better environment overall.
Ms Olley: I would agree with Professor
Bone. I would just add that the sector is concerned that the whole
Bologna Process can compliment many of the reform processes within
the Lisbon strategy. There is a sense that we want the two processes
to remain very separate, not least because the bottom-up decision-making
process within Bologna has actually been very successful when
you compare it with the European Commission's top-down approach
to reforming higher education. If I may give you an example, the
recent proposal from the Commission on the European Qualifications
Framework for Life-long Learning is a qualifications framework
which would encompass all education in Europe from the cradle
to the grave. It is described as being voluntary. The UK sector
has got grave concerns about this proposal mainly because of the
choice of treaty article that the European Commission is basing
the proposal on, which is that for vocational education which
gives the Commission considerable powers to legislate. So there
is a concern about the level of detail, the division of responsibility
between the European Union and Member States in that respect.
Q34 Mr Carswell: Building on that,
is the Bologna Process needed to achieve the agenda goals in the
UK, do you think? Do you think it is central to it?
Professor Bone: I certainly think
the facilities are. There is no question about that. If I catch
the drift of your question, it would be, I think, disastrous for
the UK if we were not involved in the Bologna Process because
I think then we are, as I say, in a position where we would lose
control of what is effectively a modernisation process in Europe.
I think there is some evidence that at the moment we are still
in control of that process.
Q35 Mr Carswell: Some might say that
the Lisbon Agenda has not been wholly successful. Could it be
that the Bologna Process is perhaps a solution in search of a
problem? Could it not be that the intention is to Europeanise
higher education and that Lisbon and all that baloney is simply
the justification?
Professor Bone: One can speculate
that that is the case. I do not think from the sector's point
of view that is the case. I will repeat what I said earlier on:
I think the sector is still in control of the Bologna Process.
The idea of autonomous universities having their own ends and
their own aims is actually at the moment driving Bologna. There
is always a danger that the whole thing flips upside down and
there may be people who have malign motives, if I can put it that
way, but at the moment that is not the way it is going.
Q36 Mr Carswell: Lord May, is the
Lisbon Agenda a solution in search of a problem?
Professor Lord May of Oxford:
The bit I know the most about of the Lisbon and the subsequent
Barcelona thing is indeed what gave rise to the European Research
Council. The discussion there is a new one, again, both for the
sensible aspiration and the uninformed nature of the dialogue
about it: because the thing that continues to be repeated is if
we look to tomorrow's knowledge economy. If we look at the United
States (and they spend 3% of GDP on research and development,
a similar figure for Japan) the EU—that was then the EU
15 when this figure was quoted—has spent 1.8% of GDP on
R and D and, now that we have got the EU 25, it will be a smaller
proportion. The Lisbon declaration then says, in the most astonishing
non sequitur, "Therefore we need a European Research
Council (ERC) to provide more basic research." The fact of
the matter is that 96% of the difference between the American
3% and the European average of 1.8% comes from private spending
by business and industry on development rather than basic research,
and, in fact, there are many countries in Europe that spend significantly
more. Germany spends more like point 8% of GDP on basic research
compared to the United States. They are tricky figures to get
actually, but there was a neighbourhood of point six, point seven,
and there is also a great difference between what people get for
what they spend. Nonetheless, that was then enshrined as an aspiration
with even a date (2012 I believe) when Europe was going to match
that, and, again, in this article in Nature, just rereading
it—I enjoy my own prose—I said, "I do not believe
there is a snowball's chance in hell of this happening, but whether
or not this improbable ambition is fulfilled lies entirely in
the hands of the industry not Government." Again, we come
back to Lisbon. They have identified a problem. It is a problem
in Europe of under-investment in basic research, in applied research,
in translational research, and it is another reflection of the
more risk-averse culture for much of Europe. It is a fundamental
problem. But, instead of thinking of how you address the problem,
you move off to do something that is beside the point. I digress
for a moment to say, nonetheless, I think a good point with the
ERC and the shape it has been given encourages one to believe
that, if we participate in a more sympathetic way in these processes,
we can help reshape them. In short, Lisbon identified the problem
excellently and it said silly things about what it wanted to do
about it; whereas it ought to be saying: "Finland, Sweden
spend more than 3% of GDP; Switzerland spends more than 3% of
GDP, most of it, of course, from private industry. What are they
doing right? What can we learn from them rather than just making
declarations?" That is what I say about education. They should
be asking what can they learn from the really successful countries
like us, rather than trying to create some tidy scheme.
Q37 Mr Carswell: Did you want to
add something?
Professor Bone: I wanted to add
another example, and that is the European Institute of Technology's
proposal, which is another example (a classic example) of what
Lord May has just said. They identified the problem correctly,
which is the problem of translation between university research,
action and business and then come up with an absolutely insane
solution?
Professor Lord May of Oxford:
Based on a total failure of what MIT was like.
Q38 Chairman: Based on?
Professor Lord May of Oxford:
It was based on a romantic delusion about what the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology was like. Everything you have said is
right.
Professor Bone: But the key difference,
again, goes back to what Jessica was just saying. The difference
there is that that was EC led, whereas the Bologna Process at
the moment is being controlled by the sector.
Q39 Mr Carswell: I have two final
questions on the question of mobility specifically. I am sceptical.
Degrees from good universities around the world gain recognition;
excellence speaks for itself. Why do we need a technocratic process
to do what could happen and has happened organically by itself?
Professor Bone: I think the trouble
is that what tends to happen is that by word of mouth—and
word of mouth may well be right—excellent universities,
their degrees are accepted everywhere globally, but there are
many other good universities who, for one reason or another, do
not have that kind of street credibility, if I can put it that
way, and that is where the trouble starts. What Lord May was saying
about Oxford and Cambridge is absolutely clear.
Chairman: I think Steven wants to come
in on mobility. Can I bring Stephen in here.
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