Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520
- 539)
MONDAY 11 MAY 2009
RT HON
JOHN DENHAM
MP AND SIR
ALAN LANGLANDS
Q520 Dr Gibson: Why do you exist
then?
Sir Alan Langlands: We exist to
administer public funds, to regulate the sector and to disseminate
good practice.
Q521 Dr Gibson: That sounds like
a very positive aim but if you are restricted by the other side
being awkward in determining the rules of the game—
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not think
the other side is awkward. I think the relationships between HEFCE
and further education colleges providing higher education and
HEFCE and universities are very strong. I think their relationships
are highly productive across a whole range of activities.
Q522 Graham Stringer: Both the government
and HEFCE use an excuse for not achieving social policies the
fact that universities are autonomous.
Mr Denham: I do not use it as
an excuse; I use it much more positively. I have to say to you
that I believe that if there were no HEFCE, if I had my civil
servants and my senior ministers giving more direct instructions
to the universities, the universities would not be better than
they are today, they would be worse. It is perfectly true, you
can always pick this or that aspect of what a university does
where you may be frustrated at the pace of change or things of
that sort and if only I had the powers I could make them do it,
but the accumulation of the inevitable processes of more and more
directives effectively coming round, or even if I were to put
that in the annual grant letter to HEFCE—"You must
make them do this, you must make them do that"—you
would actually lose the quality that has made overall our higher
education sector so good, which is that by and large the people
running the institutions feel they have ability within the overall
framework to develop the institutions in the way they want. I
see it is a positive good to the system and therefore if there
are aims that we share we have to find other ways to promote those
aims that we share and of getting the sector to feel that they
own them, that they are the things they want to do and indeed
they genuinely do want to do them.
Q523 Graham Stringer: So you agree
with me, it is self-restraint in the public good which will lead
to a better result. I think that is what you are saying, but it
is effectively self-restraint.
Mr Denham: I have not actually
looked at the legal situation, but I am sure—
Q524 Graham Stringer: I was thinking
of the financial situation.
Mr Denham: I am quite sure that
even within the current law I can write a grant letter to HEFCE
each year that was far more prescriptive—
Q525 Chairman: As you did with the
ELQs; that is an example of where you did use those powers.
Mr Denham: We did and I remember
how keen you were on that. We have done that but actually I think
the general approach is to avoid taking those sorts of measures
unless there is an overriding reason for doing so and I do think
we get a better system as a result.
Q526 Mr Marsden: Sir Alan, the Secretary
of State obviously puts great trust and faith in you because he
has just said what he said. I entirely accept the arguments that
he has put about the arms' length position and all the rest of
it, but that puts a lot of emphasis on you not as an enforcer
but to be creative and pro-active and not just a cheque signer.
Can I ask you about your regional involvement because certainly
in my neck of the woods in the North West the universities work
closely together and there is a good, strong regional policy,
but there are others where that is not the case. You do not actually
have any offices on the ground, do you? You have officers who
go around but you do not have any offices on the ground. Is that
an impediment to you getting into the regions?
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not think
so. We have officers who, as you say, go around and I think one
or two of them do live in the north of England because their main
focus is in the north of England. Of course what we do do is support
the organisations on a regional basis so that they have money
and the opportunity to come together. In fact a week on Friday,
on the 22nd of the month, I am going to be in the North West meeting
the vice chancellors and other senior staff from all the universities
in the North West.
Q527 Mr Marsden: The point I am getting
at is that it is one thing to meet people, it is another thing
to nudge them gently when they are not actually doing some of
the things that we would hope. After all, that is what the Secretary
of State expects you do to. I think we would like to feel a bit
more confident that you were going to be pro-active in that area.
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not see
that you have any reason for lack of confidence. I have just arrived
and I may well be about to nudge them a week on Friday on a range
of issues. Certainly the most recent example of this is the Secretary
of State's letter last week on the budget. It is very clear in
my view and very fair in terms of the current financial position,
and the themes that he set out there I see as my responsibility
to take forward and work with the sector to implement.
Q528 Mr Marsden: That is very useful.
I have just one final question. We have had a lot of discussion
in the inquiry about the rights and wrongs and the unintended
consequences of a variegated bursary system. Both NUS and Million+—and
indeed other people—have given us a very strong steer that
they would like to see a national bursary system. What is your
view about it? What are the problems and the downsides and what
would the benefits be?
Mr Denham: If there were a national
bursary system it would become indistinguishable from add-ons
to student financial support and it would not be clear why you
were bothering to have two mechanisms delivering the one outcome.
The idea of the bursary scheme was to allow institutions to vary
the bursary; that was the whole idea of it when people could experiment
with whether they wanted to attract particular types of students
or support particular types of students, have a heavier weighting
in one area or another. It was the idea of being able to see how
a more varied bursary system would develop that lay behind the
original rejection of a national bursary scheme. My own view is
that this has to be one of the issues that we put into the fees
and funding review later this year because we do need to allow
people to assess what is the evidence. If people have particular
types of structures and they said were going to attract this type
of student, has it actually worked and has it delivered what people
wanted.
Q529 Ian Stewart: The first point
I would like to put to you is a carry over from the previous questions
to the area that I want to press you on which is around social
engineering. Notwithstanding financial limitations, should we
be moving to a 24/7 FE and HE sector and would that be desirable?
Mr Denham: If you look at the
broad FE sector and particularly the development of Train to Gain
you increasingly have a 24/7 training system. In Train to Gain
in particular people will go and train a night shift at night.
If you want to take work based learning to a higher level I think
it is likely that the demand for that type of flexibility will
grow. That is an entirely different thing from saying the entire
sector delivers everything it does on a 24/7 basis. If you look
internationally there is no doubt that one of the growth areas
of higher education has been with institutions which are targeted
weekend markets and others and some of our most successful institutions
here—Birkbeck for example—have built their reputation
around offering flexible higher education. I think the answer
would be that it would be very unlikely that the entire university
sector will shift from what it does at the moment to an entirely
different model of providing education. If you ask me, as part
of the greater diversity in the future, whether there will be
more flexibility about when and where you can study I would have
thought the answer would be yes. Of course there is a continuing
growth in on-line learning in particular through the Open University
but many institutions as well which are almost, by definition,
available to students 24/7. That is bound to grow in the future
both here and around the world.
Q530 Ian Stewart: The reason I asked
that question is that when we had Lord Leitch before us his recommendations
were an increase of about 40 per cent of the skills base in this
country. That is a big ask. If it is going to develop in the way
you have just described, does that not put bigger pressures on
the resources available? Is there a potential that it will increase
access and not increase the levels in funds?
Mr Denham: It obviously depends
on how you do it. Interestingly enough, the UCAS Report last week
tended to show that we were on track for the Leitch target on
higher level skills. It put the focus and the pressure on us perhaps
in other areas but suggested we were on track for the 2020 target.
If you took as one example the HEFCE co-funded degree places (usually
foundation degrees funded with employers which I understand are
often delivered in quite flexible ways) they are probably providing
degrees at a lower cost to the public purse than some of our traditional
undergraduate degrees but in ways that are more flexible for learners.
I just give that as one example. It is not obvious that doing
something in a new way is necessarily going to cost you more than
doing what you do at the moment.
Q531 Ian Stewart: Moving onto the
issue of access and social engineering as a concept, if you have
a situation where there are two students and one place, and one
has come from a background that is more needy but they have equal
qualifications, is there an argument for giving the place to the
person from the background that is more needy?
Mr Denham: We have been guided
by the report from the National Council for Educational Excellence
that looked at this very carefully last year. It is a significant
report because it was endorsed by the universities taking part
in the National Council for Educational Excellence. They said
that it was important that universities have the full knowledge
about the student and everything that indicates their ability
(I have paraphrased it there but I should let you have the exact
wording). The point that I would make is that the aim of the exercise
must always be to get the student whose potential is greatest
and to have ways of looking at students that enable you to identify
the greatest potential. I do not think we should ever be in the
business of saying that somebody whose potential is lower should
be given an artificial advantage over somebody whose potential
is higher for some extraneous reasons. The issue is how do universities
identify those people? Admissions policies are for the institutions
themselves to follow. A lot will look at the NCEE recommendations
and apply those locally and others already make greater efforts
to more proactively seek out the students with ability and talent
who might not otherwise apply.
Q532 Ian Stewart: Do you see that
being done through a compact and different arrangements?
Mr Denham: We worked with a group
of eleven universities who agreed to work together on two things—I
think nine of them are Russell Group universities and two of them
are the 1994 Group—and they are looking at doing two things.
Each of them at the moment offers a compact arrangement with a
number of students in their own area. They are looking essentially
at a mutual recognition approach so that, for example, to name
two of the universities involved, a student that might take part
in the Exeter compact but who actually wanted to go to Newcastle
would be recognised by Newcastle University as though they had
come through one of the Newcastle University compacts. These are
all institutions that say they have enough experience of running
compacts to know that they can identify students with the greatest
potential. The second thing that the universities look at on a
slightly longer timetable is how can they reach out slightly earlier
in students' lives to those students who might well go to university
but would not necessarily have applied to a research intensive
university and to offer them, through summer schools or weekend
assessments or whatever it might be, the chance to look at what
those universities have to offer to see if they can stimulate
their interest in applying.
Q533 Ian Stewart: It is quite difficult
to assess potential, I accept that. In terms of access, will the
cap on students make it impossible to widen participation further?
Using techniques like A* to determine whether a student should
get a place based on a potential for getting a qualification rather
than already having that qualification, are these not questionable
approaches?
Mr Denham: On the A* specifically
the National Council for Educational Excellence did say that institutions
should be cautious about using A* as a predictive tool until there
was much more knowledge about how A* operates. When you have a
totally new system of assessment it is obviously difficult to
begin with to say who is going to get an A*. There are, rightly,
cautions about predictions before anyone knows quite how to predict
who will get it. In terms of student numbers, going to university
has always been a competitive process; it has always been the
case that about 80 per cent of those who initially put in an application
actually get through. The issue here is continuing what we are
doing to stimulate able young people to apply. As I say, there
will be 40,000 more students this September than even two years
ago[4]
and I do think we can continue to make progress even though we
cannot afford to fully fund every single person who might like
to go to university and we never have been able to.
Q534 Dr Gibson: In terms of contact
hours and access to teachers, are students getting a good deal
now? In our day you did not have notices outside saying, "I'll
be back at four o'clock and then I've got one hour". I see
more of that when I go round universities now. With research,
teaching, administration and marking hundreds of scripts the pressure
on teachers is amazing so you can see why they diversify their
activities to different groups of teachers and so on. There is
a sort of classification of teaching now in terms of what their
skills are so the contact hours are changing now.
Mr Denham: It is quite hard to
tell exactly what the trends are. The evidence from the student
surveys—the ones supported by HEFCE and the ones done by
the NUS—show very high levels of satisfaction amongst students
with the courses and specifically about the quality of teaching
and support that they get. It does not seem to me that they have
a generalised problem. I think the issue is raised from time to
time. It is clearly one where students need to have good information
before they apply. It would be useful if there were a similar
approach across universities presenting that information so you
can compare like with like and that would enable students to understand
exactly what sort of contact time they were going to get. The
second thing is that I do not think that contact time necessarily
as a crude measure tells you how good the quality of teaching
is or the rest of the learning environment or the support that
is available. It is an obvious thing to look at but it is not
necessarily going to tell you how good the teaching is.
Q535 Dr Gibson: Put yourself in the
position of an 18 year old looking for somewhere to go, how would
you know where to go? Is it a haphazard process? Does it depend
on the grades? Can you go to Nottingham for the same kind of course
with fewer A levels? How does a student really make that decision?
Mr Denham: There is an awful lot
of information out there for students. One of the first pieces
of work the National Student Forum looked at was the quality of
information open to students. Their conclusion was that there
was an awful lot of information available although it was not
necessarily easily accessible and we are working on that at the
moment. I think part of it is to look at improving the quality
of advice and guidance. The choice for an individual student will
vary according to the student. The student already confident in
working on their own initiative will have not difficulty in—
Q536 Dr Gibson: Have you seen the
books in the States where they line up courses by the amount you
have to pay and you choose the course which you can afford? Are
we moving to that kind of society? I know we have not decided
how we are going to do it yet, but that would be a simplistic
way.
Sir Alan Langlands: There is no
sign of us moving there but there are plenty of signs that students
choose their course and the location and the location is often
dictated by the cost of living and distance from home and other
factors. Primarily they choose the course and if you talk to young
people making that decision they will say, "I want to do
law at Warwick" or "I want to do history at Newcastle".
They can be very precise about what they want to do.
Q537 Dr Gibson: How do they make
that choice?
Sir Alan Langlands: I think they
are basing that choice on a whole lot of information. A lot of
it is based on the prospectuses of universities, perhaps advice
from their career guidance teachers, perhaps peer information
which I think is one of the most significant parts of that decision.
Or it could even be experience of their siblings.
Q538 Dr Gibson: They go to visit
a university and it is a really bad day, the buildings are grey,
the rain is coming down, there are no directions from the car
park to get to the department they want to go to and so on, does
that put young students off making that final decision?
Sir Alan Langlands: These may
be factors but I think the crucial thing is the choice of the
course and often the way in which they are treated when they come
to the university and the way in which they are welcomed. They
are often inspired by the people they meet, sometimes other students
and sometimes the staff who will be teaching them and supporting
them through their degree programme.
Q539 Dr Gibson: There was a student
listening programme set up in 2007; what difference has that made
to anything?
Mr Denham: One of the pieces they
did in the beginning was the complaints about poor quality of
information, advice and guidance. We were quite surprised, if
I am perfectly honest, at the number of students who are now on
university courses who were saying they did not have enough advice
before they went about what course they were going to do. That
is leading to a major piece of work with ourselves and DCSF looking
at the whole issue of information, advice and guidance. That work
has been enormously helpful. The second thing the Forum is doing
is that when they came to look at the information available they
came to the conclusion that there was more information available
than they, as students, had realised but it was just quite hard
to find and that work is also being followed through by the Forum.
So I think it has had a real impact and has changed some of our
thinking about it. The other issue it threw up, incidentally,
was a particular complaint about the quality of information about
masters courses. Quite a lot of students were saying that it was
not too difficult to find out about undergraduate courses but
there are no equivalent sources of comparable information for
people doing masters. I think you must not forget that one as
well.
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