Examination of Witnesses (Questions 388
- 399)
WEDNESDAY 6 MAY 2009
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
ARTHUR, PROFESSOR
MICHAEL DRISCOLL
AND PROFESSOR
ROGER BROWN
Chairman: Could we welcome our first
panel of witnesses this morning and may I apologise for starting
the session slightly late this morning. We welcome you very much
indeed to this, the Students and Universities inquiry, Professor
Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds;
you are very, very welcome and congratulations on achieving notoriety
as the new boss of the Russell Group. We wish you well in that
post. Professor Michael Driscoll, the Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex
University; thank you very much indeed for being with us this
morning. And Professor Roger Brown, the retired Vice-Chancellor
of Southampton Solent, currently Professor of Higher Education
Policy at Liverpool Hope University; a very warm welcome to you,
Professor Brown. There is an interest to be declared.
Dr Iddon: Can I declare,
Chairman—and this is for both panels this morning—that
I am a member of the University and College Union, Visiting Professor
at the University of Liverpool School of Chemistry, a member of
the External Advisory Board, School of Chemistry, University of
Manchester; and I am unpaid Parliamentary Adviser to the Royal
Society of Chemistry.
Q388 Chairman: Can we start with
you, Professor Arthur? We recently visited the US and we visited
Georgetown University outside Washington, a leading private Jesuit
University. We were told in great depth how the university prepares
students from all backgrounds for entry into the university and
the steps that they actually take to make sure that when the students
arrive at quite prestigious universities they are able to actually
fit in and take advantage of it, particularly students from less
privileged backgrounds. What do you think is the balance of responsibility
between the universities' role to make sure that all students,
wherever they come from, can actually fit into the university
effectively? And what is the balance between your role as a university
and that of schools?
Professor Arthur: I think each
university would take a significant responsibility for doing exactly
that. At Leeds we would have a detailed induction programme which
goes on for two weeks, which has academic and social aspects.
But for students from particularly disadvantaged backgrounds,
particularly students that come in on our Access to Leeds Programme,
which I am more than happy to explain to you, then we have a very
detailed programme that starts as they apply to the university
and then increased support when they first arrive and throughout
their course.
Q389 Chairman: How are they flagged
up to you?
Professor Arthur: Those particular
students?
Q390 Chairman: Yes.
Professor Arthur: We are in the
process of changing it but hitherto it has been an arrangement
with specific schools and the entry criteria for that course are
on the basis of social or educational disadvantage; so things
like receipt of Educational Maintenance Allowance, first timers
into higher education coming from a school with less than 45 per
cent A to C; students from a care background and those sorts of
issues. Any other form of individualised personal, social or educational
disadvantage they wish to declare is brought to our attention
by the teaching staff and we offer a specific programme for entry,
which includes a discount on A Level scores.
Q391 Chairman: What about the social
aspects? Going back to Georgetown again, they made sure, for instance,
that the rooming arrangements, with students coming from obviously
challenging backgrounds, were carefully taken into consideration.
Writing courses were prepared to make sure that they were able
to start the courses running rather than having to catch up once
they got there. Is all that in place?
Professor Arthur: Similar sorts
of arrangements. It is run by a team called the Access and Community
Engagement Team and there is a social programme for those students.
I think there is a real balance to be struck between doing special
things for those students and fully integrating them into the
rest of the activities and programmes at the university, and there
are certainly special skills courses to bring students up to speed
rapidly if they lack writing or other skills.
Q392 Chairman: Professor Driscoll,
all is well in the university world then and students, wherever
they come from, have an easy transition into higher education.
Professor Driscoll: I would not
say that at all, but the students that you describe are exceptional
at my university and in fact we know nationally that 48 per cent
of students come from colleges rather than schools. In my own
university over half the students who come to initial higher education
to undergraduate degrees are mature students. We work very closely
with the schools because a lot of our recruitment is local and
we have 80 or 90 partner schools that we work with, both helping
to prepare students to come on and raising their aspirations and
so on. The more difficult group to prepare in advance, of course,
are the mature students who may be entering from work or from
unemployment and we have to try to work with them when they arrive
at the university to make sure that they are properly inducted
and properly integrated. Although we cannot easily access them
before they apply and they come to the university, nevertheless
those students, of course, by the very nature are more mature;
they are usually more sorted out; they have been in the labour
force and they are coming into higher education to raise their
future employment and career opportunities. So they are not difficult
people to induct and to get integrated into the student body.
But our students are very, very diverse, so it is difficult to
have a programme that is one size fits all. We try to tailor our
induction programmes for students, both domestic and internationally.
I would say that our biggest challenge is a cultural one with
international students rather than students from disadvantaged
backgrounds. They are not untypical in my university, so we are
experienced, if you like, in handling those issues and trying
to make sure that we maximise their chances of success.
Q393 Chairman: Professor Brown, the
question I am really trying to get at is you can understand—take
Liverpool Hope, which we visited, which clearly has a lot of local
students and the Liverpool students see that very much as their
local university—there being a real link between schools
and colleges and the university, but do you feel that that applies
throughout, particularly to the more "prestigious universities"?
Professor Brown: It is very dangerous
to generalise, Chairman. I think there is a wider issue, which
is that the universities now have to cope with a much wider range
of students from a much more diverse set of backgrounds and there
are more students than there were, who are not well prepared for
degree level entry, and this is true even for students with good
A Level results. I think if one were redesigning the higher education
curriculum now one might well think in terms of a foundation year,
not just for international students or students with acknowledged
learning difficulties but more generally really. I am sure other
bodies would have given evidence in this, but I think there is
a real issue about the extent to which the school and university
curriculums are drifting apart rather than coming together. In
the old days A levels were a good proxy for first year university
entry; A Levels do not fulfil that need now and therefore on the
one hand you have a proliferation of rival qualifications like
the pre-U, the A star, etcetera; but on the other hand of course
those qualifications are being taken from pupils from a more differential
range of schools. I think there is a serious issue about the mismatch
between the school and the university curriculum, which individual
universities—and most universities—that have similar
arrangements as those that have been described, in themselves
cannot necessarily cope with.
Q394 Mr Marsden: Professor Brown,
I thought those remarks were very interesting. If I could just
probe you on a couple of aspects of the changing student profile.
We know from all the demographic statistics that the cohort of
younger people coming in, in all areas, is going to decline significantly
over the next 10 to 15 years. At the same time statistics show,
as Professor Driscoll illustrated in his own university, the steady
rise in the number of adult learners, and who knows what additional
numbers to that there will be given the economic downturn. How
do you think that this change in demographic profile is changing
universities' relationships with students and how do you think
it should change them?
Professor Brown: Again, I think
you must differentiate a bit because not all universities have
the same entry profile. The short answer to your question is that
there will be more demands on universities for more flexible learning
programmes—that is already apparent in many of the big cities
here. We may also see the American phenomenon where students study
in more than one university at the same time; up to half American
undergraduates are studying at more than one university—it
is often known as "swirling". This in itself raises
big questions about who is responsible for the standards of the
programmes, but we will put that on one side. So basically the
demands of those kinds on universities will increase, and flexibility
always costs more money. If you go down the credit based route,
for example, if you have more teaching in the evenings and you
have people working at weekends it all adds up to money and it
increases the demands on the universities and it is not at all
clear where that resource will come from.
Q395 Mr Marsden: You have mentioned
flexibility but is it not the case, from evidence we have heard
and what is generally argued, that despite good intentions we
are very far from the form of the sort of credit accumulation
framework that could actually deliver the sort of flexibility
in the good way that you describe.
Professor Brown: Yes, but I spent
a long time looking at credit frameworks in the 1990s and they
are something of which everybody is in favour but nobody actually
wants, and the test is whether people are prepared to pay for
them. I do not think—except in some of the big cities where
you have the kind of student demand that we have described—that
for many students there is that demand for a credit framework.
Bear in mind that many of our programmes are already quite flexible—a
modular course can give a student a huge amount of choice compared
with what was the case 20 years ago. I think if you do go down
the credit routes there are issues we need to look at; you would
need to revise the whole funding system, you would need to fund
on the basis of credits and you would have to look at the quality
assurance as well all because the great beauty in the present
funding system is basically it funds whole students for whole
years and that provides a relatively cost effective method of
funding. Once you go down the credit route where you are funding
based on credits the risk is that you need a whole bureaucracy
to make sure that the students have acquired the credits and the
funding has to be divided and so on. One would need to be quite
careful about going too far down that route as a general position
across the whole of higher education.
Q396 Mr Marsden: Professor Arthur,
can I come to you again to pick up on something that we saw during
our US visit? I actually went on behalf of the Committee to a
university called Howard University, which is an all black university
in Washington DC. They have a very interesting initiative—it
starts in middle grade school—which takes young, primarily
black boys and girls from the five most deprived areas of Washington
DC districts on a lottery basis. That school is actually attached
to and supported by the university. You have described some of
the things that you are doing at the moment to try and widen access
and participation with local schools and elsewhere; is that route
that I have described at Howard the pioneering, innovate sort
of thing that Russell Group Universities such as you should be
doing?
Professor Arthur: There are programmes
like that which I have been involved in personally actually, through
the University of Southampton when I was there, which was in compact
with inner city FE[1]
colleges in Southampton and with Lewisham College, which was a
special pathways programme to bring students into medicine. They
just simply had to get through the pre-designated hurdles and
then they were automatically offered a place in medicine, and
that did recruit a lot of black and ethnic minority students highly
successfully.
Q397 Mr Marsden: I am sorry to interrupt
you on that. I am talking about something where the actually university
seeds, if you like, or plants—in this case a middle school—outside
its window. There has not been anything like that done in English
universities so far as I am aware.
Professor Arthur: I think that
is right. Our equivalent of that would be working with the schools
in the city in the region and some of them in depth, the 12 partner
schools where we are working in every single year in that school.
Also, our participation jointly with Leeds Met, as it happens,
in the developing of Academies in the city where we are contributing
expertise to the development of those.
Q398 Mr Marsden: So that is how you
work it.
Professor Arthur: That would be
the closest equivalent. We also have a programme of medicine with
Bradford University for coming into special routes of medicine
in Leeds as well.
Professor Driscoll: Our ancient
universities used to have arrangements between their colleges
and established schools but those schools have tended to separate
away from the pairing with a university. It seems to me that there
probably is not the same need in the UK that you identified on
your visit to the United States, for that particular community
that Howard University cater for. I think all of us have articulation
agreements with schools. We have them in the partnerships I described
between our schools and colleges of precisely that nature to encourage
widening participation and to provide guarantees subject to achievement
of required standards for places within my university. I was in
India last week and part of that trip visited a higher education
institution in Chandigarh, which had done exactly this and there
you could see the value of the purpose because they were offering
free places to a school they established on their university campus
for rural children, who otherwise would not even get into a school
if they did not create the school; and they provide free tuition
and a free pathway into their engineering programmes, and I hope
that one day one of those children will come and take a scholarship
with Middlesex University as a way of establishing a connection
and contribution to the development of rural people in India.
Q399 Dr Harris: Professor Driscoll,
do you think that the benchmark system is worth bothering with,
given that a number of universities are well short of their benchmark
and some people say that it is relatively meaningless. Oxford
University, for example, thought a benchmark was unfair.
Professor Driscoll: This is benchmark
on wider participation?
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