Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
PROFESSOR SIR
MARTIN HARRIS
2 JUNE 2008
Q40 Mr Boswell: What I am hearing
from you on the way this has gone is that it has been a consensual
process in which you have—I am glossing—trained some
institutions into doing better than they originally intended to
do and that you have not actually needed to get the big stick
out, although it is still there if you needed it.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: I
think that is fair. What I would say though is that universities
are very genuinely committed to widening. My own view is that
they talk themselves up during the process and I did my very best
to encourage that talking up process, but obviously, and without
breaking the cartel laws, which would be shocking, universities
did talk to each other during this process and the net result
was a more generous outcome for students.
Q41 Mr Boswell: Can I round up my
thoughts by asking you a little about the specific spend on bursaries.
There are three points: the first one is in 2006-07 the under-spend
across the sector on bursaries funded from variable fees, not
others, was I understand £21 million. First of all, do you
recognise that figure and, if so, what happens to it? There is
a second one which I appreciate is not the same point which is
touching back on students not taking up the bursaries to which
they are entitled, to which you have already referred, and I am
not quite clear if that relates to the under-spend or whether
it is a partial of it, as I suspect. There is also the question
at the institutional level of some quite big disparities between
budgeting amounts and the amount which was actually spent. I think
it would not be invidious to pick up two examples: one is the
University of Lincoln estimated £660,000 and actually spent
£1,937,000 and on the other hand up the road from your former
institution Manchester Met estimated £4,794,000 and actually
spent £2,137,000, so it is about half in that case, and in
the case of Lincoln a treble spend. Do these things alarm you?
Have you actually looked into them? Is this something where institutions
can at least learn to get a better handle on what they are likely
to need to budget and how they spend it?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: The
answer is yes to all of your questions, but let me try and unpick
them. So far as we can work it out, the under-spend was about
50-50 two things: 50% was an overestimate by some universities
as to how many students they would get who required the bursary
support that they had offered.
Q42 Mr Boswell: That could itself
reflect the fact that there was a relative lack of success in
the access policy, could it not, because obviously the constitution
of the student body could affect the number of people who would
be eligible?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: Yes,
it could do that, although what we think, and remember we are
talking about plans that were made as legislation was being passed
and before universities had clear ideas, because you remember
there was a huge rush at the end—the legislation was delayed
and universities are not always brilliant at administration—but
one factor in some universities to my certain knowledge was that
some universities simply forgot that gap year students would be
under the previous regime when they were counting up how many
students they were going to admit they counted student who were
under the old regime and things like that. That only happened
once. You only had one annual report from us. It had better jolly
well resolve itself because universities should get better and
better.
Q43 Mr Boswell: It is a learning
curve.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: Yes,
it is a learning curve. The other half of the under-spend we have
already talked about and you are right, Tim, it is the fact that
12,000 students did not allow their data to be shared. We know
that will go down to 6,000 and may well fall further and in fact
looks like it is doing so through the telephone persuasion. You
are left to puzzle why anybody would positively refuse to share
data that they had given to the SLC because they were poor, why
they would positively refuse to let the university know that is
a mystery, but what we must do is keep that number going down
and down. I bet it will never come to zero but we must get it
in that direction. The third thing is that at institutional level,
David has just passed me a note saying that at Manchester there
is a particular issue in respect of the number of students who
have taken up the bursaries to which they are entitled and we
are in dialogue with the university about that. We are in dialogue
with all the universities.
Q44 Mr Boswell: It is of no surprise
to you—it is in your figures—when something like that
appears you think you need to look into it.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: We
have to. If we have a role it is surely at this technical level
to look into those things. In the case of Lincoln they clearly
grossly underestimated the number of students they would recruit
who needed the bursary support that they themselves had promised.
I do think that sort of problem will go away.
Q45 Mr Marsden: Can we come back
to this issue of what you can do in the context of widening access.
We have had the exchanges that we have had which have been encouraging
and indeed in your own report you have said about the largest
barrier to university education remains deep-rooted social issues
such as whether the family has previous experience or aspiration
levels within the school. If OFFA is to be more effective in this
area, should it actually be able to direct its attention directly
to its institutions' admissions policies? I am thinking particularly
here of the assessments that are made of applicants' family background
and schooling.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: I
think we are moving into very interesting territory and here I
am going to be more cautious than you, Gordon. You know that I
totally support the view that resources, including perhaps some
of the resources currently used for bursaries, although that is
a difficult issue and, as Ian said, should be focused on outreach
into schools at an earlier age. I think that the legislation is
really quite specific that admissions remain the prerogative of
the universities. That was one of the fundamental understandings
built into the legislation when OFFA was set up. The present Secretary
of State is of the view that universities could be more explicit
about their admissions processes and procedures and I do not myself
think that that is a job for OFFA but I do think, and I am encouraging
the sector to find a modus vivendi with the Secretary of
State such that there is an explicit publication of the processes.
But if you mean should an external body—OFFA or anybody
else—be involved in the particular admissions decision about
a particular students, then I think that is very, very dangerous
territory.
Q46 Mr Marsden: I was not talking
about any specific particular incidence of an individual. Those
with long memories remember a certain lady called Laura Spence,
so we are not going down that route. There is a broader issue
though and I would hope that this is something you might be able
to comment on and that is the extent to which universities are
alive to what statistics are telling us about potential applicants.
I just want to throw one thing in here and that is the issue of
educational maintenance allowances. The Institute of Fiscal Studies
published a very interesting but actually relatively little commented
upon report on the impact of EMA's. There has been a whole range
of statistics which have actually been very encouraging. In my
own borough of Blackpool, for example, the number of students
taking up EMA's has virtually trebled over the past three years.
Surely there is a role, given where educational maintenance allowances
are targeted, for that to be an area where OFFA might look at
how many of those young people who take up EMA's get through to
university; how many universities look at EMA's as a potential
marker in terms of their admissions processes.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: I
totally agree with that. One of the things that we are encouraging
universities to look at—I choose my words carefully—is
the extent to which they might look at their own bursary policy
and explicitly say, perhaps to 16-year-olds, that if you get an
EMA and if you then decide to go on into higher education we can
tell you now that you will be entitled to these amounts of financial
support. My intuition is that offering people slightly different
sums of money at 18 is less effective than trying to build up
a set of expectations significantly earlier. I think there is
an obvious potential synergy between EMA's—those students
have identified themselves as going on in education, but also
as needing financial support. I think there is a lot of mileage
in saying that, whatever else a university's bursary policy does,
it will guarantee whatever their maximum is for students who go
through into higher education. The problem is that you do not
want to tie a 16-year-old down back to something we were talking
about half-an-hour ago to one particular university. One of the
things about aspiration-raising is you may move not just from
thinking I will go into HE, but I will go into this university
rather than that university. Clearly you could not have a hundred
universities offering unless it was a national scheme. One of
the things I think the Government might look at is the extent
to which students on EMA might be guaranteed the minimum bursary
that a university offers for students on that income level.
Q47 Chairman: It is actually a drop
though, is it not? If you follow Gordon's line, the EMA is equivalent
roughly to £1,200 a year on a 40-week term of £30 a
week if you do that rough calculation, and yet many of the universities
are offering significantly less than that as a bursary. The point
you make and that Gordon is making is well made. If you can guarantee
at least that level then it becomes an attractive proposition.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: It
also encourages that continuity of upward aspiration.
Q48 Dr Blackman-Woods: I want to
bottom out this issue about admissions policies because clearly
the universities have picked up rumours around some sort of interference
in their admissions policies and it is something that they absolutely
feel is central to their own autonomy. I just wanted absolute
clarification that there is not going to be a vetting scheme of
admissions policies and then whether you think there should be
a vetting scheme, or whether in fact we should do something similar
to what is happening in schools at the moment and just build absolute
transparency into the system so it is really clear how universities
are and what criteria they are using to admit students? Can you
see the distinction I am making between vetting and transparency?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: Yes,
and I think it is a crucial distinction. What OFFA can do and
what should be done are not necessarily the same thing. Let me
give you the answer as I see it. The Secretary of State said recently
that he believes each university should have a published admissions
policy and I have actually no problem with that. He goes on to
say that he has asked David Eastwood and myself to look at how
that might be brought about and to report to him in September.
My own view, and time will tell whether this is what emerges,
is that there is no threat to the sector in any way if they decide
that they will each one by one publish a transparent admissions
policy. If you go then to require it to be part of some statutory
document, that immediately becomes very much more problematical
and not something that I would wish to be associated with. If
you are saying should there be a transparent admissions policy
from each university that they put in the public domain could
anybody dissent from that? If you say it should be part of an
annual agreement with the director of OFFA, then I think that
would be difficult and perhaps even illegal.
Q49 Mr Boswell: We can hardly fail
to understand the claims for university autonomy which you have
set out perfectly well and equally a perfectly reasonable requirement
for transparency and publication. However, from what you said
earlier, for example, about EMA, there may be a perfectly reasonable
case to my mind for some elements of common practice—the
ability to provide a deal which enables EMA's to lead to progression,
for example, and there may be others. Do you think those could
be incorporated within that system? If that were to happen, would
that be a proper thing for Universities UK to get involved in
discussing what might be elements of commonality in approach as
well as the distinctive bits that are obviously appropriate to
the individual institution and its access needs?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: It
is perfectly proper for Universities UK to have those dialogues
with government or with anybody else. The point I am trying to
make is that OFFA has certain statutory obligations and I would
not want it to be inside those. It is worth making the point that
it is often said that in Wales there is a national bursary policy
but when you look at what their website says—let us assume
for the moment that it is accurate—what it says is the national
policy is that each university shall offer at least £300
to each student of a certain income level and that there may be
supplementary bursaries available from individual institutions
and they should make contact with those institutions. Put like
that, it sounds exactly the same. We have a policy that says every
student must have a minimum of £300. Luckily it is normally
£1,000 in practice and a jolly good thing too. Sometimes
the differences are more apparent.
Q50 Dr Blackman-Woods: I want to
carry on from that discussion about admissions policies to say
it is unlikely that it is going to be possible to use admissions
policies to tackle the four socio-economic groups 4 to 7 where
there is an under-representation of young people. If you cannot
direct admissions policies to do something about those groups,
would using targets be a mechanism? I know there are the HESA
targets, but I mean specific targets for the 4 to 7 socio-economic
groups. Could that work or have we passed the time when targets
are effective or would be possible to implement?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: Let
me say again in different words what I have said before, starting
from the specific and going into the general. I think there is
no argument against publishing universities' own admissions policies
but I do not think either that that will make a dramatic difference
to the issue that all of you are teasing away at in different
ways. If we are really going to get students from the groups that
we are all interested in, then the phraseology I have always used
is you have got to get them into the pool of applicants. I do
not believe for a moment that any university discriminates against
applicants on the grounds of social class in any direction. I
fundamentally do not believe that. What I do believe is that the
applicants' pool for different universities is uneven and that
the crucial thing that we can all be focused on is getting more
people into the pool and, more controversially, into some specific
sub-pools. You will all have different views about that but that
is very much the Peter Lampl line. It is not just enough to go
to university, you have to go to certain universities, but I do
think the crucial thing is to get students to apply.
Q51 Dr Blackman-Woods: Nevertheless,
my question would be are they going to do that? Are universities
going to do enough to widen the pool unless there is a specific
target for each of them that says you have got to get this number
of students in socio-economic groups 4 to 7 into this institution
or you start to lose HEFCE grant or whatever?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: I
think that universities always respond better to carrots than
to sticks. I have never known a stick persuade a university to
do anything. I do think there are ways in which if any government
so chose it could increase the resources available to those universities
that made the particular efforts that you have in mind, but I
do think it has to be that way round and it has to be on the basis
that if you do increase the pool of applicants from these socio-economic
groups there are incentives for you to do so.
Q52 Dr Blackman-Woods: Is not the
likely outcome of that, and indeed I think we have seen it already,
that what happens is that universities who need to raise additional
income will then target those groups and those that are wealthy
will not bother?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: I
wish I thought it was just about money. I genuinely think it is
much more complicated than that. There is a real question we are
all asking in different ways which is how you get those young
people who come from family and social circumstances where HE
is no part of their experience how we get them to be willing to
consider higher education. Once you can get them to a summer school
and once you can get them to all the things that universities
do you are halfway there, but how do you get them to cross that
first barrier? It is not clear to me, Roberta, that it is exclusively
or even principally the university's job to be talking to five-year-olds,
eight-year-olds, 11-year-olds and their parents and their teachers
and their mentors and so on. I guess in this room there are different
views about gifted and talented, but one of the positive aspects
of gifted and talented is meant to be to pick out at an earlier
age than 18, an earlier age than 16, perhaps as early as 11, young
people in schools where academic aspiration is not top of the
list and to try and encourage those individuals to move forward.
We are always up against a dilemma, are we not, about how do you
raise an entire school and how do you raise individuals within
that school whose aspirations are there? I wish I knew the answers.
Broadly speaking, I think we do have to find ways of identifying
in schools where most young people do not go on to higher education
those who can be motivated to do so because you may think this
is defeatist but I would rather help some than none.
Q53 Chairman: I started my questioning
by saying that you were the appointment that the Russell Group
wanted and OFFA has been framed in the image of the Russell Group.
Your response to Roberta seems to emphasise that because the Bolton
Universities, the Salford Universities, the Leeds Mets, all are
meeting a very, very healthy target for socio-economic groups
4 to 7. The universities that are not are the Russell Group. Unless
you have a target which says to them, and I agree with Peter Lampl
here, we do need to get the very poorest students into what are
perceived to be the very best universities and I always say that
all universities are our best, they are just different—but
whatever you would say in terms of the Russell Group universities,
unless you have a clear target for that, they are just not going
to do it, are they?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: I
am certainly not here as an apologist for the Russell Group but
I do believe that you have to then ask yourself is it fair to
young people to admit them to a university if their academic attainment
at that time is not on a par with those others who are admitted.
Q54 Chairman: Why does the one follow?
Why should that be the case?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: Because
unless we can show that there are people in the pool of applicants
to a particular university who have reached the normal entrance
qualifications of that university in that subject, unless we can
show that there is then discrimination on social class grounds,
then the issue is how to get people to apply, not how to admit
them, is it not? Am I making myself clear?
Q55 Chairman: I think you are making
it clear. I was the head of two very large, but relatively poor,
comprehensive schools in the North East and Leeds for 20 years.
Never once did I receive a letter from Oxford or Cambridge actually
targeting my students. I did from Leeds Met and I did from Sunderland
Poly. That is the point. I think it is a stick as well that you
get well rewarded if in fact you actually target these young people
who have real ability at an early age and you pull them through
into every institution rather than just some institutions and
you seem to be against that.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: No,
I am not. If I appear to be against it then let me rephrase it.
What I am saying is that we should encourage every university
to make every effort to ensure that its pool of applicants is
as socially inclusive as possible. I do not think anybody is going
to dissent from that.
Q56 Dr Blackman-Woods: It is willing
the means as well as the ends. I totally accept what you are saying
about the pool. We do not have evidence of direct discrimination
against students from poorer schools who have four A's at A-level
and not getting into these universities. I would accept that it
is not only a role for universities—they have to work with
schools and others—but nevertheless there has to be something
that pushes us surely towards a bigger pool from those backgrounds
because we have not got a large enough pool at the moment.
Professor Sir Martin Harris: If
you look at the amount of outreach done by, let us take the Russell
Group since the Chairman has mentioned them, compared with a decade
ago it is chalk and cheese. That is the programmes of working
with FE colleges, sixth form colleges and summer schools and summer
programmes. If you are asking me is it enough, no, it is not enough,
it will never be enough, but you have to ask yourself how far
universities should go down the road of effectively supplementing
both the teaching and the pastoral care provided in schools. That
is my view that, in the end, you have to change what 11-year-olds,
what 13-year-olds think they are capable of academically and think
they are capable of socially. They have to go against their immediate
peer group very often. "Why do you want to go to university?
We do not want to go." You have to get people out of those
and I think society can decide to do that and universities are
part of that.
Q57 Ian Stewart: I am perplexed by
what you said earlier. When you described that situation I have
to say that it did sound as though you were actually arguing that
universities should not bother getting right down to school level.
Did you mean that?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: No,
I did not.
Q58 Ian Stewart: Or did you mean
that they cannot be expected to do that?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: I
said they can only be part of a societal decision that says we
are going to redouble our efforts to raise aspirations in secondary
schools or even earlier.
Q59 Ian Stewart: How can that be
done by universities?
Professor Sir Martin Harris: Funnily
enough, I went to the HEFCE annual conference in Warwick at Easter
and argued very strongly that universities should have staff attached
to themselves so they are university employees but not university
teachers in the usual sense who spent their time—I was arguing
about 11 to 16-year-old schools, not FE and sixth form colleges—to
improve mathematics teaching, to improve those underpinning disciplines
that get you into the pool, so that is the academic line, but
also the pastoral line because I do believe that if people at
12 or 13, or 14, have somebody they meet from time to time who
says "You can go to university, you can go to a good university",
those are the sorts of things I would like to see done. It would
not be right, Ian, to assume that people who are currently employed
to be university teachers and researchers would be ideal at helping
12/13-year-olds to change their aspirations, academic and pastoral,
but of course it should be done. I made that speech at Warwick
in April.
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