Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 28 JANUARY 2009
PROFESSOR RICK
TRAINOR, PROFESSOR
MALCOLM GRANT,
PROFESSOR LES
EBDON CBE AND
PROFESSOR GEOFFREY
CROSSICK
Chairman: Can I welcome our first panel
of witnesses to this, our first formal evidence session on the
Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee's inquiry
into Students and Universities. This session is particularly about
issues affecting undergraduate students from institutions and
universities in higher education specifically in England, but
it may be that you need to draw on experience from elsewhere in
the United Kingdom and we are perfectly happy with that. Could
I first of all ask my colleagues if they have any interest to
declare before we introduce the witnesses?
Dr Iddon: I am a parliamentary adviser
to the Royal Society of Chemistry. I am a member of the University
and College Union. I am a member of the External Advisory Board
in the School of Chemistry at Manchester University, and I think
that I am still a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool
in the chemistry department.
Dr Gibson: I am still a professor at
the UEA—just!
Chairman: You might not be at the end
of this inquiry!
Ian Stewart: I am a member of Unite,
the union, and I am a member of the Council at Salford University.
Q1 Chairman: I am on the Court of
Birmingham University. Our first panel of witnesses are Professor
Rick Trainor, the President of Universities UK; Professor Malcolm
Grant, Chairman of the Russell Group; Professor Les Ebdon, the
Chair of Million+; and Professor Geoffrey Crossick, representing
the 1994 Group. Welcome to you all. Can I say that on this panel
you all have equal status but, Malcolm, I am going to ask you,
if there is someone you feel would be better answering a particular
question, to ask, as the quasi-chair of your panel—but I
do that purely because I am looking at you, rather than because
you are more important than anybody else on the panel!
Professor Grant: I understand
that, Chairman, and I am very happy to assist.
Q2 Chairman: I wonder therefore if
I could start with you, Professor Grant. This is really trying
to look at higher education from the students' point of view and
it is mainly about undergraduates. Two weeks ago, Times Higher
Education published its annual Student Experience Survey and,
for the third year running, it was Loughborough University that
came top. I wondered if you could briefly say what do you think
matters most to students, and which universities in your view
do you think are giving the best all-round student experience?
What matters to them and who, in your opinion, is the best?
Professor Grant: Forgive me if
I pass on the second part of your question but, on the first part
of your question, I think that a number of things appeal to students
and you can measure them by a number of indicators. My congratulations
go to Loughborough, but I think that the choice of Loughborough
as one of the most popular universities is down to being a relatively
small institution that can create a sense of intimacy and personal
relationships between students and the faculty who teach them.
You will find a similar sort of intimacy in the Oxford and Cambridge
colleges, where the loyalty and the allegiance of the students
is more commonly to the colleges than it is to the university,
which has less of an intimate personality. However, look at the
other indicators as well. Look at the strength of response, both
in the NSS survey and in the NUS survey, which demonstrates one
of the highest levels of satisfaction with higher education compared
with other quasi-public services in the country. Look at the very
powerful figures which indicate overseas students' interest in
coming to study in the UK. I think that it is rather important
for the Committee to see the student experience in the round and
to understand the causes that induce students from within the
UK and outside the UK still to see this as one of the leading
countries for higher education.
Q3 Chairman: Professor Trainor, you
are President of Universities UK and so you see all the universities.
What do you think is the key thing that students are looking for
in terms of university?
Professor Trainor: I agree with
Professor Grant that a sense of intimacy is certainly a help.
Fundamentally, students are looking for an assurance that their
interests are being looked after, and I think that can happen
in a variety of ways. Students differ tremendously, as you know,
in the type of courses that they pursue and the format in which
the courses are organised. I think that it is up to each university
to marshal the resources it has at its command—and it is
of course important that those resources be adequate to the task—in
order to give students a sense that they are being properly looked
after. I would emphasise, as Professor Grant did, that, although
some universities come higher than others in the National Student
Survey, the overall level of satisfaction is very high. Although
we are not complacent about that, I think that there are good
grounds for satisfaction there. We have to build on the stronger
aspects, as perceived by the students.
Professor Ebdon: Perhaps I could
add to that, first of all to endorse what Professor Grant has
said in terms of the very high levels of satisfaction. In fact
we are talking about very small differences in satisfaction in
a wide variety of universities and, overall, an excellent level
of satisfaction. That is against a context of great diversity
amongst the student body. I think that your question disguises
the fact that there is not a typical student. Forty-seven per
cent of my students at the University of Bedfordshire are over
the age of 24 before they join us, yet people always assume that
students are 18-year-olds. The thing that students at my own university,
and I think many similar universities, are most interested in
is improving their prospects of employability. That may not be
true of all students but it is certainly true of students who
tend to return to education at a mature age. They are looking
to improve their job prospects. Of course, that is a very significant
thing at a time when we are going into a recession.
Professor Crossick: We are all
agreeing with the principal lines of what has been said and I
agree with that. I want to add something else, which is that most
students at university want to be stimulated. I find that very
strongly with students in my own institution. Last week we had
an awards ceremony for students from disadvantaged backgrounds
who had been given large scholarships, and I talked to one of
them. She had come from a difficult educational background and
I said, "How are you finding the course?" She had been
in for one term. She said, "It's an awful lot more than I
thought and it is making me think an awful lot more than I expected".
I said, "Is that a problem?" and she said, "No,
it's great!". I think that is something we must not lose
sight of. One of the things that universities provide is a stimulus
to young people, and to older people coming into higher education,
to think in imaginative and different ways. I think that is what
they want.
Q4 Chairman: Do you think, Professor
Crossick, that if the student body as a whole were actually listening
to this first piece of evidence from four very distinguished leaders
of university groups, they would say that that bears a real relationship
to what they are feeling on the campuses? You paint a picture
between you of a perfect world, where every university is wonderful
and all the students are happy. For instance, in terms of involving
students in the life of the university rather than in the life
of the bar, what is actually happening as far as your group are
concerned? Are there any real examples of that? It is not a real
world you are talking about.
Professor Crossick: Your question
was about what we believed students wanted, not what they were
necessarily being given. Of course, the world is not perfect.
If you had asked us where there were tensions, we could talk about
some of the problems—and doubtless we will get the opportunity
to in the course of this meeting—and to talk about some
of the ways in which universities find it a challenge to deliver
exactly what they want in current circumstances. I think that
we are broadly succeeding and I think that the National Student
Survey shows that. This is students on their own, with a huge
response rate. Well over 80 per cent are satisfied with their
education by the time they are third-years.
Q5 Chairman: They do not know anything
else. They have nothing to compare it with, most of them, have
they?
Professor Crossick: Most of them
have been at school or college beforehand. One of the challenges
that universities have risen to in the last few years is students
coming on to university from an education environment which often
was better resourced and more imaginatively resourced in IT terms
and so on. We have risen to that challenge. Yes, of course they
do not know other universities; but, as I think Professor Grant
said, we get a much higher satisfaction rating than most other
public services. People do not know other medical services either.
Q6 Chairman: Professor Trainor, why
do not all universities publish how much time they will have in
lectures; who will be the academic staff who are teaching them;
the resources that are available to them, to give them the sorts
of criteria by which they can judge between different universities,
if you like, and also to evaluate the experience they have? None
of that is made clear at all and I would have thought that would
have been a key element of offering students a good experience—or
am I being unfair?
Professor Trainor: Slightly, I
think, in that there is a lot of information in the public domain.
Universities, through their prospectuses and supplementary material,
increasingly available on the web, tell students quite a lot about
the kind of experience they will have on a particular course in
the university. The students do not have to take the word of the
institution for it, because they can now cross-refer to the publicly
available information from the neutral source that is the National
Student Survey. You may be correct, if I have your assumption
correct, that even more information might be a good thing; but
students are accumulating impressions of universities, which often
matter more, by open days and visits of other kinds. In fact,
students are very active consumers, with quite a lot of information.
That, of course, is how they choose among the offers they get,
in the many situations where they have multiple offers to choose
from.
Q7 Chairman: With the greatest of
respect, there are very few universities that advertise how little
contact time students will actually have when they go to a particular
university with academic staff. Very few seem to advertise the
fact that, despite there may be great research departments, they
will never actively meet some of those research-excellent professors.
Why are they not doing that?
Professor Trainor: Evidence from
the National Union of Students suggests that something like three-quarters
of students are satisfied with the contact hours they receive.
I think that this whole subject of contact hours is slightly misunderstood.
The number of contact hours in the formal sense that are appropriate
for different courses varies quite a lot. Even within a particular
subject the teaching may be organised in different ways. Universities
in recent years have put increasing emphasis on making their staff
available at advertised times, above and beyond the contact hours,
and many departments have an open-door policy. As for the access
of research stars, certainly in my institution—King's College,
London—the overwhelming majority of our academic staff do
some significant undergraduate teaching; and I think that, roughly
speaking, is the pattern across the country.
Q8 Mr Marsden: Professor Trainor,
one of the aspects of student satisfaction is the balance of the
time that they spend, as you have just touched on, between teaching
and research and the ability of the one to feed into the other.
Do you think the Government should accept the broad conclusions
and the implications of grant distribution in the recent Research
Assessment Exercise?
Professor Trainor: That is a slightly
different issue, is it not?
Q9 Mr Marsden: It is not that different
an issue, because the implications of the RAE proposals are to
even out research money between a larger number of universities,
and therefore that may have an impact on the student experience.
Professor Trainor: Indeed, but
even under the current distribution of research money an effort
is made in all universities to get research brought to bear on
research and scholarship, of course is a related resource for
the academics or the teachers.[1]
Q10 Mr Marsden: How would you define
the difference between research and scholarship?
Professor Trainor: Research is
original inquiry; scholarship is information about a discipline
at the highest level of available knowledge, I suppose.
Q11 Mr Marsden: So from that point
of view those universities who do more of the second than the
first should still be given a decent share of the pot under that
definition, should they?
Professor Trainor: The position
of Universities UK is that excellence should be funded where it
is found. We also think it is necessary to look at the stability
of funding from one year to another; but your original question,
as I took it, was about the balance of time between teaching and
research.
Q12 Mr Marsden: It was a dual question,
to which I would like a dual answer.
Professor Trainor: I have given
one half of it, I think. Would you like me to go on to the other?
Q13 Mr Marsden: I would like you
to tell me what your view or what the view of UUK is on the proposals
in the RAE.
Professor Trainor: I think I have
given that in broad outline.
Q14 Chairman: What we are anxious
to get at here is that you from Universities UK say—and
indeed, Professor Crossick, your organisation has made the same
point—that teaching and research are essential, and good-quality
research is essential for good teaching in terms of the student
experience. What we are anxious to find out—and certainly
what I think Gordon Marsden is anxious to find out—is do
you stick by that? Is that absolutely clear? Because there is
then another question coming behind it.
Professor Grant: May I make two
points on that? First of all, the interrelationship between teaching
and research goes right back to the Humboldtian idea of a university
as one of the fundamental pillars upon which a modern university
should be constructed. Secondly, in the research-intensive end
of the university sector we very strongly take the view that the
finest teaching is informed by research. I think we also need
to build onto that an understanding that a large proportion of
what happens in those universities is at postgraduate level. I
know that this is not part of this inquiry, Chairman, but in the
Russell Group 30 per cent of our students are postgraduates; in
a number of our institutions it is rising to parity with undergraduates.
There is, if you like, a cross-institutional array of research
and integration to teaching, to training and to PhD study. Thirdly,
so far as the RAE is concerned, there are two phases to the exercise.
First, an assessment by panels of the quality of research across
67 units of assessment in the country. The second phase is not
yet complete. It is the allocation of funding against the findings
of quality. That came last week to the board of HEFCE. There was
a letter from the secretary of state outlining the nation's strategic
needs for the allocation of QR. HEFCE have now adopted and approved
a paper, which will accord with the secretary of state's strategic
views. That paper, I understand, will be published today. The
next phase of it will be—
Q15 Chairman: I am really not anxious
to get into this.
Professor Grant: No, but I wanted
to explain to you where we were currently with the RAE.
Q16 Chairman: We just do not have
the time during this session. I am really interested in this core
issue and then I have to move on, I am afraid.
Professor Ebdon: Perhaps I could
help with a response on this. Clearly, the Research Assessment
Exercise has been declared a robust exercise by the Chief Executive
of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. I think that
it is absolutely right that it has looked very carefully, in a
very robust way, and has found excellence much more widely spread
than in previous years. We should be celebrating that and we should
be funding that.
Chairman: Professor Ebdon, that is not
the point that we are trying to get at.
Q17 Mr Marsden: Can I come back to
you on that, Professor Grant, because you have rightly reminded
us of the role not just of the Russell Group but of other universities
in terms of postgraduate—but we are not looking at that
in this inquiry. There is an essential question here, is there
not? If I am a student at whatever sort of university grouping,
one of the things that I want to know is that part of my teaching
experience will encompass some of the top experts in the field,
and you have acknowledged that point. The point about the Research
Assessment Exercise, as it has certainly up until now been carried
through, is that there have been widespread allegations—"allegations"
is perhaps too strong a word—widespread suggestions that,
because of the emphasis on where people rank in it, in some universities—and
I will not name individual ones—there has been a transfer
fee culture whereby people have been poached for their research
abilities, and most of the students there never see hide nor hair
of the academic in question, certainly not on a regular basis.
That is an issue, is it not?
Professor Grant: There are two
questions. One is the poaching one, which I will not go into because
I do not think that it relates to this inquiry. The second one
is quite a serious issue. We are trying in British universities
to spread resources thinly across a variety of measures of excellence.
We need of course to ensure that we return strong performances
on the RAE; so it is necessary that we provide sufficient time,
resources and facilities for our leading researchers to perform
strongly in the research. We punch way above our weight internationally
in research output. The consequence, however, is not as bleak
as you paint it. The consequence is not an inevitability that
that is time taken away from teaching. I think that all of my
colleague vice-chancellors would be able to point you to instances
where we insist upon world-class research stars undertaking teaching
across the institution. However, world-class research stars will
not be spending hours in one-to-one supervisions with individual
students.
Q18 Mr Marsden: Nobody does except
at Oxbridge, on the whole.
Professor Grant: And not there
either. You have to understand that we are struggling with limited
resources to do our very best on all fronts. The students are
not the victims of this; the students are the beneficiaries of
it.
Q19 Chairman: We really have to move
on, but one final point, Professor Crossick.
Professor Crossick: My final point
is this. We have already made the point about the benefits of
students learning in a strong research environment. The point
I would want to add to that is that if you look at—
1 Note from the witness: What I meant was that
all universities attempt to use research and scholarship to enrich
teaching. Back
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