Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560
- 570)
MONDAY 11 MAY 2009
RT HON
JOHN DENHAM
MP AND SIR
ALAN LANGLANDS
Q560 Graham Stringer: So you are
guessing.
Mr Denham: Yes, I am guessing.
I am guessing that if you wanted to send somebody in every year
to assess every individual degree course in our universities objectively
against a nationally agreed set of requirements that would cost
a great deal of money. It may be cheap, but I very much doubt
it. The second thing is, as Dr Gibson has said, if you want to
go to a university with high quality researchers you do not need
a national Ofsted for higher education to find out where the best
research groups are. If you are the sort of student who wants
to be guided in a subject then it is not too difficult to find
out where the researchers are. We have an RAE, for example, which
tells you where you have the best concentrations of researchers
in particular subjects. It would also point out where you might
have world class people doing research in the university round
the corner that you had not thought about. The RAE also shows
where excellence is. There are ways of finding out.
Q561 Dr Gibson: I remember Malcolm
Bradbury and creative writing; nobody saw much of Malcolm because
he was too busy writing books.
Mr Denham: Allegedly a lot of
poets went to Hull because Phillip Larkin was there in the library.
There are improvements we can make to what we have at the moment
but I think they would be enormously expensive. It might well
be the case that if you had a more centralised system the worst
bits in the system would be better but I would be pretty certain
the best bits would get a lot worse.
Q562 Mr Marsden: I want to move onto
teaching and research and to the relationship and relative weighting
we give to them. I am going to say that you have just argued for
what I would regard as a variegated university system; I cannot
remember the words you used, but that was the thrust of it. One
of the things that has concerned us from a lot of the evidence
we have had is that a variegated system where you have some universities
which are research intensive and some which are teaching intensive
has, nevertheless, led to a gap in funding over a significant
period of time. In 2006-07 the HEFCE current grant for teaching
rose by 5.3 per cent and was required to fund 23,000 additional
students; research funding and capital investment went up by eight
per cent. In 2007-08 the current grant for teaching went up by
4.4 per cent; 25,000 additional students required; research funding
up by 6.9 per cent. Is the issue here that if you are going to
have some degree of variation that you actually need to create
new incentives for those universities that are teaching with the
greatest impact and give them proper financial recognition because
they do not appear to be getting much of it in the system as it
stands at the moment.
Mr Denham: The real terms funding
on the teaching side went up by about 24 per cent since 1997.
We have doubled the research budget since 1997 because we were
spending far too little on research. There used to be a campaign
called Save British Science it was that bad, and I think the government
has invested significantly in higher education but for all sorts
of reasons it was necessary to substantially increase the science
and research budget and we have done that. I understand how you
present the figures and there are some institutional implications
of that big emphasis on research but I think that nationally we
had to make that investment.
Q563 Mr Marsden: Let us take that
as read; let us not argue about the case then but let us talk
about the situation now. The situation now is that there appears
to be a drift apart. Perhaps also significantly (again this touches
on the RAE issues but I am not going to go down that route at
the moment) the government is committed to a much broader social
inclusion agenda in terms of HE but there is nothing in the system
instrumentally that would encourage a young academic in their
late 30s or early 40s to use some of his or her gifts and talents
to do that social inclusion work as opposed to getting their heads
down and doing masses of research. We do not have any leaders
in that system, do we?
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not think
that is true.
Q564 Mr Marsden: Can you give us
some examples?
Sir Alan Langlands: People choose
as their career develops.
Q565 Mr Marsden: Sir Alan, give us
some examples. If I am a young academic in my late 30s and I want
to engage in my local schools community, I want to go out and
do social outreach stuff, I want to be in continuing education
and all those laudable things, I could spend masses of time on
that and I would not get a penny of credit out of your council
because your council has put all the emphasis and the funding
on those people who are doing research.
Sir Alan Langlands: Our council
does not deal with personal reward. I think there are people at
institutional level who are rewarded for doing precisely these
things. I can only talk about an institution in which I was involved,
where one of the very best mathematicians (one of the hottest
researchers in mathematics) spent a lot of time supporting these
public engagement type activities—working with local schools,
teaching on our summer programmes for widening access—and
I think there are people like that throughout the sector.
Q566 Mr Marsden: I understand that,
Sir Alan, but with respect you are talking about the Scottish
system with a far smaller number of universities and a far smaller
number of people in the system where it is easier to do that.
Let me leave that and let me come onto another question which
I would like to put to you. When we had the Russell Group before
us, the vice-chancellor for Leeds argued the case for strong research
intensive universities on the basis that research fuelled good
teaching and good teaching relied on good research. However, time
and time again when we pressed him in the session on that issue
he could not give any objective evidence for that and was reduced
in the end to flattering some members of the Committee by saying
that the majority of us had been to Russell Group universities
so they must be doing something right, which did not seem to be
a very good argument. Is it not the case that there is not any
research out there which demonstrates, other than by the sort
of assertion that we had from the vice-chancellor of Leeds, that
good teaching relies on good research and would it not be a good
idea to start commissioning some?
Sir Alan Langlands: The vice-chancellor
of Leeds also talked about the good work they are doing there
on widening participation and I do not think the point I made
applies only to Scotland; I think it would apply equally to many
of the big provincial cities.
Q567 Mr Marsden: That is not the
point if was making. If I was being ungenerous I would say he
did not really give us a great number of examples, but in fact
I am not going to make that point because I trust what you said.
The point that I am making is that this is a crucial issue. It
informs the position of the government but we do not actually
have any research on this, do we?
Sir Alan Langlands: I do not know
of any research but I know that there has been a long-range discussion
about what some people have referred to as "research-led
teaching" and I know that there is a strong belief in many
institutions that it is an advantage to have people who are working
researchers teaching the students and encouraging them not just
to fill their heads with knowledge or the specialist skills they
might need for the future, but helping them to understand important
issues in relation to problem solving, the research method, the
way in which you would tackle problems not just in an academic
laboratory for example but also in an industrial laboratory or
in a company setting.
Q568 Mr Marsden: Would you at least
go away to your colleagues at HEFCE and ask them and say to them
that the Committee thinks it is about time there was some?
Sir Alan Langlands: We will ask
the question and if there is evidence that we could provide to
you we will do so.
Q569 Mr Marsden: John, the 2008 RAE
allocated more funding to the post-92 universities and in your
comments you rather echoed what the Times Higher Educational
Supplement said about it being a good thing that there were
islands or pockets of excellence in non-research intensive universities.
How do we encourage that process while meeting the targets which
I fully understand and which the government very much stresses
of keeping our international base and status?
Mr Denham: It is very important
that we recognise excellence where ever it is and that is what
the RAE did. However, we do recognise as a government the dilemma
and we have been fairly clear, I think, that it would be wrong
to interpret this year's RAE as part of a 20 year trajectory in
which the research money is moved out across the entire system.
I think there is a case for having fairly high levels of research
concentration. We need to ensure that those people who are working
in pockets of excellence in some universities are not isolated,
are able to work with research teams in others and be properly
recognised for doing so. We need to get the balance there right.
One thing I would pick up on is that the government view about
research concentration is broadly driven by the strength of research
and the need to have institutions with concentrations of a wide
range of research. We actually think that teaching is important
everywhere and we do not actually think that only good teaching
takes place in research intensive universities. One thing I would
observe, though, is that I have never met a vice-chancellor in
a university that is not research intensive who does not believe
that it is important to give their teaching staff the space to
do scholarships of some sort of another. They may not be leading,
world-beating research teams, but they do not believe that their
staff can teach effectively all the time unless they have some
space for scholarships and for developing their knowledge in whatever
way it might be. The consensus about the importance of people
having time for that is right across the sector.
Mr Marsden: I am sure that is the case
but I would just finish with a quote from a student which says,
"Sometimes I feel I am a bit like a sausage factory rather
than surrounded by some of the foremost minds in my field. I appreciate
students can sometimes get in the way of research but the whole
point of university is for lecturers to pass on their knowledge".
Q570 Chairman: Secretary of State,
you have passed on you knowledge, thank you very much.
Mr Denham: I am not offering myself
as one of the finest minds around!
Chairman: I did not go that far but we
were very pleased to have you! Thank you both very much for your
presence this afternoon.
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