Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
PROFESSOR BRENDA
GOURLEY, PROFESSOR
DAVID LATCHMAN,
MS GEMMA
TUMELTY AND
MS SALLY
HUNT
17 JANUARY 2008
Q20 Mr Boswell: I suppose there is
a distinction here between students who come to you with claims
of qualification, where you can ask to see their certificates,
and students who are burying those claims of qualification and
nobody would know?
Professor Latchman: That is precisely
the point, because to do the ELQ you will not have to prove you
have the previous degree because it is, by definition, at the
same level in a different subject. So it is not about progression.
Q21 Chairman: Just before we finish
on this, can I have roughly a one or two word answer, starting
again with you, Professor Latchman, to this question? In terms
of the principle, any student with a current level 4 qualification
who wishes to study for another qualification should be funded,
as far as you are concerned, end of story?
Professor Latchman: Yes. I believe
in open access, but I also believe we should debate this issue
properly before we change the funding system.
Q22 Chairman: But that is the position.
Is that your position too?
Professor Gourley: Yes.
Ms Tumelty: Yes.
Ms Hunt: Yes.
Q23 Mr Boswell: Terribly briefly,
because I am conscious of time, sometimes there are unspoken assumptions
in these sorts of decisions. The words "academic tourism"
have not featured in anybody's literature on this and I am drawing
an analogy sometimes used in benefits tourism. Is there any view
in the minds of our witnesses that this decision is driven by
some fear of perpetual students hanging on without being able
to make a career decision or not?
Ms Tumelty: I would say maybe
once, when we got free education or grants or whatever, that would
be an absolute issue but now, where students are having to pay
top-up fees and having to pay back their loans and having rising
living costs, I would really like to see the evidence that there
are perpetual students out there.
Q24 Chairman: Professor Gourley?
Perpetual students?
Professor Gourley: Well, ELQ students
do not get funded in the same way anyway as first time students,
but we have done a survey of our ELQ students and 75% of them
are studying for vocational reasons, and only 8% of them are studying
for personal enrichment.
Q25 Dr Gibson: I am studying the
Secretary of State's every word and every speech he is making
in the first three months and one he made at the Open University
was interesting in which he said, "We have asked HEFCE to
redistribute—not cut—£100m of core teaching grant
over three years. This is under a third of the money we currently
spend on ELQs". So he is not going for the whole pot, is
that true?
Professor Gourley: I think so.
Q26 Dr Gibson: Why not?
Professor Gourley: I think there
is the question of being able to fund the exemptions and the question
of putting some of the savings back into the system to fund particular
priorities with respect to employer engagement.
Q27 Dr Gibson: So it sounds like
there is a cunning plan somewhere being worked out by numbers,
or is it guesswork, do you think?
Professor Gourley: I do not know
what it is at the moment.
Q28 Dr Gibson: Why is the Minister
isolated on this?
Ms Hunt: Because he is wrong!
Q29 Dr Gibson: That is a Newsnight
answer, not a Select Committee answer!
Ms Hunt: You can ask it three
times; I will still say he is wrong.
Q30 Dr Gibson: Is there any reason
why you think the Minister comes over as getting very little support
in this, because usually the smart government gets the support
of the professionals before they institute some new policy change.
Why do you think has that not happened?
Ms Tumelty: I think it is interesting
that there is such a broad coalition against these proposals from
students to lecturers to Vice-Chancellors to the CBI—not
someone we often share values with—and actually I cannot
find anybody that agrees with this decision. I think the issue
is consultation, there was not enough of it, and I also think
that there has been no clear rationale published around exactly
what that money is going to be used for. Certainly HEFCE have
said that it is going to be found for priorities not yet set.
Q31 Dr Gibson: I thought there were
going to be 20,000 new students?
Ms Tumelty: How they do that,
who they are going to be, whether full-time, part time, how they
are going to get through the door—we have not seen any of
that.
Q32 Mr Cawsey: Who speaks for them?
You give a list of all the people in the system now. What about
the ones who are not getting into the system?
Ms Tumelty: NUS obviously speaks
for students who are pre application as well, and actually we
have concerns about the whole education sector from further through
to higher, and want to see the most students we possibly can in
the sector gaining from education and skills. Yes, we would want
more students in the system, so of course we want those 20,000
extra students in place but, as Sally said, why should we pick
those students against students who are re-skilling and up-skilling
and actually serving the economy well.
Professor Gourley: Could I add
something to that? The Open University does an enormous amount
of marketing, as you know; it has all sorts of outreach programmes
to get students in, it is one of our core missions getting people
into higher education that would not have seen themselves as higher
education candidates. At the moment we have no unmet demand at
all; we are taking all the students who apply to us.
Q33 Dr Gibson: But the Government
has said quite clearly to you that you only need 3,000 to make
up the shortfall? That was in the speech, I seem to remember.
What did you do when you heard that?
Professor Gourley: I have to say
I am rather mystified by that figure. I am not sure how you lose
29,000 students and gain 3,000 and come out square. I suspect
the 3,000 students are probably full-time equivalents, which in
part-time terms would be at least two to three times the number,
and it is not easy to simply add seven, eight, nine thousand students
overnight. We already do very heavy marketing and outreach programmes
to achieve the student numbers we have.
Q34 Dr Gibson: But the insinuation
was that the money lost would be regained by having these students.
Do you accept that or do you think it is pie in the sky and just
putting a finger up in the air and guessing?
Professor Gourley: The Government
has a hope that a lot of the students that we try and encourage
back into the system will be co-funded by employers. We do not
share that hope and we certainly have not got evidence of it.
In the same survey of ELQ students, 12% of our ELQ students got
some support from their employers and 9% got full support. That
does not change a pattern we have seen over many years.
Q35 Dr Gibson: But it is a fair argument
an employer should play a greater role in higher education. What
are you doing to try and achieve that?
Professor Gourley: We do a lot
with respect to employer engagement and we have some very substantial
programmes with employers—Microsoft, Cisco, all sorts of
employers—but we have to accept the fact that a lot of students
are actually studying to escape present employers not necessarily
stay with present employers, and we also have to accept that most
people nowadays do not have one employer and one career, they
have four, five, six different careers over a lifetime, and the
economy is offering them all sorts of different kinds of careers
and they have to up-skill and re-skill to take advantage of that.
Employers have no particular interest in supporting that.
Q36 Ian Stewart: Do you think, Professor
Gourley, that this debate is a surrogate for a wider debate about
employer involvement in higher education?
Professor Gourley: Yes.
Q37 Ian Stewart: Why?
Professor Gourley: Why should
there be a surrogate?
Q38 Ian Stewart: Yes.
Professor Gourley: Well, I suppose
people think that incentives are a way of getting people out of
the woodwork, and if you put incentives in place all will be right.
Q39 Ian Stewart: Is there a necessity
for higher involvement of employers in higher education?
Professor Gourley: I would think
it could be improved.
Professor Latchman: I think certainly
one would support the idea that employers should provide more
support, and that is a laudable government aim. The problem is
this is being rushed in with relatively little consultation with
employers. It is exactly the same at Birkbeck—many students
will not tell us who their employer is because they are studying
to move on, and in London, where I have obviously a particular
interest, many employers say: "We can hire people with the
appropriate skills. They may not be Londoners or British citizens,
we can hire them from abroad, so why should we pay to fulfil the
government priority that Londoners should be employed or UK citizens?"
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