UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 370-iiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREInnovation, Universities, Science & Skills committee
(INNOVATION, UNIVERSITIES, SCIENCE & skills SUb-Committee on Students
Students and Universities
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935 |
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Innovation, Universities, Science & Skills Committee
on
Members present
Mr Phil Willis, in the Chair
Mr Tim Boswell
Dr Evan Harris
Ian Stewart
Graham Stringer
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor
Janet Beer, Vice-Chancellor,
Chairman: Could I welcome our first panel of distinguished witnesses to our
inquiry this afternoon: Professor Janet Beer, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford
Brookes University and Dr John Hood, the Vice-Chancellor of the
Mr Boswell: It would be proper for me to declare publicly my interest as a graduate
of
Ian Stewart: Seeing as we are into declarations I have got to record that I am a
PhD student registered at
Dr Harris: I am a member of
Q169 Chairman: I am on the Court at
Professor Beer: There is a balance of benefit between the individual and society in terms of what universities are for. They are obviously to enable individuals to develop their full potential and to develop potential intellectually, but also to equip them for work, to equip them to make a contribution to society and also to achieve personal fulfilment, so there is the individual. In terms of wider society universities exist to increase knowledge, both for its own sake and for applied purposes. Obviously universities serve the needs of a knowledge-based economy and, probably finally, they play a vital role in fostering and shaping a democratic society.
Q170 Chairman: Have we got the balance right between those different factors?
Professor Beer: I believe that we have.
Q171 Chairman: Dr Hood, what is the purpose of higher education as you see it from
an
Dr Hood: I thought Professor Beer gave a very good answer actually. I could elaborate in places but I do not think it probably serves the time of the Committee well.
Q172 Chairman: Do you think we have got the balance right?
Dr Hood: The question about balance is not for one institution to answer or
another institution to answer, it is a question of looking at the institutional
profile across the nation and it is a question that perhaps more properly
should be asked of those who are thoughtful about the policy for the system
because you are talking about a higher education system in this country and in
many countries that is extraordinarily diverse.
The institution that I represent is at one particular point in what is
an extraordinary array of different types of institution each with, I would
think, valid purposes as defined by their local communities, their national
communities, their international communities.
Do I think that we have got the purpose of the
Q173 Chairman: Given the fact that the
Dr Hood: The
Q174 Chairman: You have total autonomy I am told.
Dr Hood: I wish we did.
Q175 Chairman: Enlighten us, why have you not got autonomy?
Dr Hood: We have autonomy and we protect our autonomy in the sense of academic freedom but we do not have autonomy in the sense that we are unregulated, that we are in a non-compliant regime, for example, where we set our own regulatory framework, our own compliance norms, quite the contrary. The Government's funding, be it teaching funding or research funding or funding for various outreach purposes or for tech transfer purposes comes with very prescriptive conditions attaching to it and very strong audit and other related requirements.
Q176 Chairman: Is that right, Professor Beer, and is it right that we should have that level of interference from the Government?
Professor Beer: I would prefer not to talk about - and I do not think John was talking about - interference; we can all talk about partnership, we work in partnership with Government to deliver desirable social and economic benefits as I already talked about when we discussed the purpose of higher education. Like John, in order to maintain the integrity of our institutions we do need to keep a distance and we do need to maintain institutional autonomy, but that is not to say that there are all kinds of partnership and it is not just with the Higher Education Funding Council or with DIAS, it is obviously with the Department of Health, with Children, Schools and Families and all branches of Government.
Q177 Mr Boswell: If I might first take the point that Dr Hood has raised it occurs to me that at the formal and institutional level there is a high degree of autonomy. In terms of planning the system there is almost no academic autonomy; there may be influence but having had some participation in the other side of it anyone who runs the system as a whole is probably in or around Government and the funding bodies. Do you think that is a happy balance or would you like to see less interference in your day-to-day activities ideally and possibly, at the same time, wishing for the ideal, more influence on the overall shape of the system delivered by academics rather than by officials?
Dr Hood: It is very important that institutions have autonomy in terms of the election of members of staff, in terms of the design and delivery of their academic programmes and so forth. We would all accept that where other parties are funding our activities then we have a responsibility to ensure that those who fund us are satisfied with what we are receiving the funding for, so the question of is there too much compliance, is there too little compliance, is not a question I fear that can be discussed in the general, it would have to be discussed in the particular. In the case of the particular, whether we are talking here about the nature of research contracts and the reports that are required of researchers on one side or the funding that we receive from HEFCE and the various levels of compliance that are required for that, ranging from academic audit at one end to financial audit at the other, these are all things in their own case that are subject to an ongoing dialogue between the various bodies that are involved, and one hopes that we are able through time to establish a reasonable balance that keeps the funder satisfied that the funds they are providing are being responsibly used for the purpose for which they are provided, and on the other hand that the university has its autonomy preserved in terms of its academic activity and purpose and that the freedom of its scholars to pursue that which they are pursuing is preserved at all costs.
Q178 Dr Harris: Both universities here that you represent are shown to be some distance from achieving your benchmark for the state school participation rate. I was just wondering whether you think the benchmark is wrong or, if it is not, what it is that is preventing you from reaching it or whether it is a combination of the two.
Professor Beer: The first thing I would like to say is that I am really, really pleased to be asked that question because my colleague Vice-Chancellors in the Russell Group constantly ask that question but nobody seems to take much of an interest in Oxford Brookes being away from its benchmark in terms of the mix of state and private school students, so I am very happy to answer that question. I do not think we have got any sense at Brookes that there are two tribes in the university, far from it, it is a very harmonious institution. In the mix we have got 20 per cent international students as well and on my latest figures we have got 74 per cent state school entries and 26 per cent private school.
Q179 Dr Harris: And the benchmark is 88 per cent.
Professor Beer: We are 12 per cent adrift from the benchmark. Having said that, the benchmark needs to be more sensitive because we out-perform another benchmark exponentially and that is the one that describes participation of social classes three manual, four and five, and we have a completely off-the-scale number of students from those social classes. We work very hard in terms of bringing students in from those social groups.
Q180 Chairman: That is not the question that Dr Harris has asked; I would like you to keep to the question he has asked.
Professor Beer: Missing from Brookes are the state-educated middle classes. If I am answering a question about whether I think the benchmark is appropriate ---
Q181 Chairman: We can always move the benchmarks if we do not agree with them but the question Dr Harris has quite rightly asked is why are we not meeting the benchmark that has been set.
Professor Beer: There is not a simple answer to that because we work hard in state schools to bring in more students; we do no recruitment activity at all in private schools, nothing at all. All our money is spent on recruitment from the state school sector.
Q182 Dr Harris: I would just like Dr Hood to answer the same question and then I will come on to drill down a little further about what might be going wrong.
Dr Hood: Clearly we do not meet the benchmark that is set, but the question that is on the table is, is the benchmark relevant to the University of Oxford given the disciplinary mix and the numbers that we have apply for each disciplinary area from the respective schools of the national system. My answer to that would be comprehensively, no, it is not the right benchmark for that, and you were present in an earlier session where we pointed out, for example, that we would have of the order of 1,300 applicants for undergraduate medicine for 150 places. We have fewer than 300 applicants for 150 places in classics, for example. The spectrum of schools in this country does not prepare students for classics degrees - that is just one illustration - and you need to do this discipline by discipline by discipline. Another of the flaws in the comparisons that are made is to assume that the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge should be the same, but again there are disciplinary differences, for example veterinary science and architecture at Cambridge which we do not have here at Oxford, and different profiles of applicants from the different sub-sectors of the national system. My answer to your question, therefore, is no, I do not think the benchmark is appropriate.
Q183 Chairman: That was not the question.
Dr Hood: I thought that was where Dr Harris was leading, I am sorry.
Q184 Dr Harris: You are saying it is not sensitive enough but if it was sensitive enough you might be able to meet the benchmark, but one of the questions is, is this a worthwhile debate at all?
Dr Hood: There is another facet to sensitivity and that is the assumption that lies behind the benchmark that all students who sit A-levels achieve A-levels with the appropriate subject A-levels to apply for the disciplines in these institutions, so there are all sorts of other variables and they would have to be fine-tuned.
Q185 Dr Harris: Is this a worthwhile argument to have? In your evidence, Professor Beer, you said this had the potential to be a distraction.
Professor Beer: Yes, access to higher education per se ought to be what we are talking about rather than access to a few institutions; we ought to be making sure that every student who in a sense qualifies for higher education gets the opportunity to go into higher education and that more students qualify for higher education, so we need the interventions lower down in the educational system. All higher education is a good thing.
Q186 Dr Harris: Having said that focusing on individual institutions is not that useful we are here today, so at the risk of breaching your injunction I just want to ask some questions about the issues in admissions at both universities. Clearly you can only, through your admissions process, deal with the people who apply to you, okay, and I understand all the work that is being done to promote applications - we dealt with that in our informal session this morning, so I do not want to talk about the number of applications. Once you get the applications is it of concern, Dr Hood, that the success rate for a state school and specifically a comprehensive school student applying, who has applied despite everything - you have dragged them in - is significantly lower every year than that from either a grammar school or an independent school. I hope you accept what I have just said ---
Dr Hood: No, I would accept part of what you just said. The success rate for the students who apply from grammar schools is virtually identical to the success rate from independent schools.
Q187 Dr Harris: That is right, comprehensive versus grammar and comprehensive versus independent.
Dr Hood: Yes.
Q188 Dr Harris: That must be disappointing in a sense because you have done a huge amount, or a huge amount is being done to get them to apply, but then they have less of a chance of getting in. Are they getting lower results - are you getting worse candidates in other words from the state sector?
Dr Hood: I would not want to make any judgments about better or worse per se; what I do think is correct is that we are getting different results and, given the history of this country and the social history of this country, what we have been at pains to try and do is to present the University of Oxford and its extremely high entry requirements and academic standards to as many people in the wider communities of the country and the schools of the country and those who run and control and teach in the schools in a way that would encourage the most talented of students to apply to our institution.
Q189 Dr Harris: I understand that but I do not want to deal with that; post application I am talking about.
Dr Hood: I do not want to make any judgments, I just want to say that what we have done at Oxford in the past three or four years is to try and ensure that our admission processes - and you heard about them this morning - are as fair as possibly they can be in terms of assessing the quality of those applicants and most particularly their potential to succeed at Oxford. We have been transparent about that and we have been rigorous about it, and if those systems are fair and transparent then the outcome will unfortunately be what the outcome is. It is for those who have the ability to analyse in depth the sociology, the social history, the performance of the school sector to draw conclusions about the whys and wherefores of it.
Q190 Dr Harris: But there is evidence - which I hope you will accept - that students from comprehensive schools, with the same qualifications as those from privileged educational backgrounds, and they still achieve the same, do better in their final degrees, so there is an argument that the success rates if everything was working - and no one doubts your motives - if everything was being done to do this right, the success rates for those students who had overcome the hurdle of a poor educational background of getting three As or an A* and applying to Oxford despite the prejudice that exists against it, would have higher success rates because that is what you need to do to balance the fact that they do better at the end.
Dr Hood: You could promote that argument and you could promote around those statistics a number of arguments which I will not do at the moment, but our intent is to ensure that our admissions system is as fair and equitable and transparent as possibly it can be in assessing that which we take to be important in admitting students to our university, as I described a moment ago, and then the outcome will be the outcome. You are right that if we get significantly different outcomes in terms of degrees from different school backgrounds then that is something we have to think about very carefully in terms of any refinement of our admissions process, and that is a constant feedback loop at the institution, discipline by discipline.
Q191 Dr Harris: Can I ask Professor Beer about social engineering. What do you think is social engineering, doing nothing to prevent the current high proportion of students from the top end of the socio-economic classes getting into universities, or when it comes to a marginal decision between two preferring the one that has overcome educational background even though on a one-to-one basis you have got no other basis to do it, giving extra points as it were to someone from a poor educational background? Some people describe the latter as social engineering and others describe the do-nothing approach and allowing this imbalance to continue as condoning social engineering. What is your take on that debate?
Professor Beer: Social engineering is obviously a loaded term but we have a compact locally which means that students from the local area, particularly schools in difficult or more challenging environments, if they get the grades they have a place, i.e. they are not in competition for a place even in our hotly contested disciplines.
Q192 Dr Harris: Guaranteed places are reserved.
Professor Beer: For students if they make the entry grades. We also have community scholarships in every single school and college in Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire where head teachers or principals nominate a student who is coming to Brookes for a bursary which is in recognition, not necessarily of academic achievement but of something exceptional that they have overcome in order to gain entry to higher education; so we are targeting particular kinds of students. We also do a lot of work in FE colleges, both with mature and with conventional age students in order to encourage applications.
Q193 Ian Stewart: Good afternoon, both of you, now for the easy two questions. Tuition fees: as we know the maximum currently is £3,145 and most universities are taking that. You know the Government is making a review in 2009/10; what would happen if the Government, say, put the maximum up to £7,000 for example? Would your university charge that amount?
Professor Beer: We would probably get there by gradations but we would also want to have a look at the complete student support package. That is the short answer.
Q194 Ian Stewart: Before I move on I will be asking you questions later about the existing stats between the two universities but that is for later. John?
Dr Hood: May I talk around the question?
The cost of provision of the sort of education that we provide at the
Q195 Ian Stewart: Let me ask you both the direct question: if you by gradation or any other method move to, say, £7,000 will this not act as a deterrent for the lower socio-economic groups?
Dr Hood: I do not want to hypothesise around the figure because I have tried to provide a context wherein this is an extremely complex and challenging problem for society, and the extent to which it provides a difficulty for lower socio-economic groups depends entirely on the quality of needs-blind support and the composition of the package that we can provide. In my view - and this is a personal view and not an institutional view - that is why you need a regulator.
Q196 Ian Stewart: Let us then move on to something more specific about a bursary system, which you say would be all-important amongst other aids. Currently there appears to be a discrepancy between the amount of bursary a student at Oxford can get - £3,000 odd - and what a student at Oxford Brookes can get, around £1,000 plus. Is that a good thing; why should there be a distinction between the two and is there not an argument for a national bursary scheme?
Professor Beer: Our average is £1,500 so it is lower but then our income from fees is probably lower. As you know, we have only had the full income this year, the third year of operation, and it was not zero to £3,000, it was about £1,200 to £3,000 that was the jump. The sector average is a 21 per cent spend from the additional fee income on bursaries and at Brookes it is 30 per cent because we are way above, and 90 per cent of our eligible students claim their bursaries, so we do very well in terms of encouraging students to have that take-up. The imbalance in terms of amount of money available is under a variety of different reasons and I am sure that one is income from fees, how much of it we can spend.
Q197 Ian Stewart: I will ask you the direct question, Professor Beer, does that put your students at a disadvantage?
Professor Beer: I am hoping not. We have put an additional half a million into hardship funds, we have also employed extra advisers in terms of finance and we do our utmost to make sure that those arrangements are put fairly to the students, within our means. Roughly 30 per cent goes on bursaries, 30 per cent has gone on necessary catching up.
Q198 Chairman: In answer to the national bursary scheme, do you support it or not, just a simple yes or no.
Professor Beer: It would have to be considered as a much wider review of student support arrangements.
Q199 Ian Stewart: Dr Hood.
Dr Hood: On the question of different institutions offering different profiles of bursary schemes this has been a good thing because it was new as a concept when top-up fees were introduced. We all have a lot of learning to do about the impact of bursary schemes on affordability on the one hand and choice on the other hand. What the intervening period has allowed institutions to do is to understand far better what the impact of different schemes has been, and that is helpful in terms of any further development going forward, either of individual institution schemes or, indeed, of schemes once fees move, should they ever move, so I do not myself have a problem with this. The thing that we spend too little time talking about is the question of what is an appropriate level of total indebtedness for a student who comes through our degree programmes to graduate with? That is a discussion that very much should be to the fore when the question of any increase in fees is discussed, and it has to be to the fore in combination with what type of bursary programmes are going to complement the indebtedness, and in a way it then becomes a self-defining equation. Taking then your question about a national bursary scheme, a national bursary scheme is a possibility but it has to be addressed in that wider context of how we design it in terms of total indebtedness of students when they graduate, will it be something that fully complements that or will they have to be institutional and, in the case of Oxford, institutional and college-based schemes further to support it. You asked the question earlier that if a fee goes to a certain level are we likely to see a differentiated market or will all institutions go for the same fee? At some level of fee you will start to get a differentiated market and then you are going to need more than a national bursary system, you are definitely going to need national and institutional and other bursary systems in support. These are all interlocking points that need to be addressed together.
Chairman: I would like to leave that there. I have been very bad at managing time, Graham, so you need to get through a lot in the next five minutes.
Q200 Graham
Stringer: Is a 2:1 from Oxford Brookes the
equivalent to a 2:1 from
Professor Beer: In the general run of things there is very little equivalence
between Brookes and
Q201 Graham
Stringer: You are setting the exams
autonomously and determining the curriculum; is your 2:1 in history equivalent
to
Professor Beer: It depends what you mean by equivalent. I am sorry to quibble around the word but is it worth the same is a question that is weighted with too many social complexities. In terms of the way in which quality and standards are managed in the university I have every confidence that a 2:1 in history from Oxford Brookes is of a nationally recognised standard.
Q202 Graham Stringer: That is rather avoiding answering the question, is it not?
Professor Beer: Yes indeed.
Ian Stewart: That is honest.
Graham Stringer: Are you going to answer it directly, Dr Hood?
Q203 Chairman: Sorry, I do not think we can let you away with that.
Dr Hood: Maybe Professor Beer could come back when I have had a crack at this, if she is happy.
Professor Beer: Sure.
Dr Hood: We teach in very different ways between the two institutions and I
think our curricula are different between the two institutions, so the question
really is are we applying a consistent standard in assessing our students as to
firsts, 2:1s, 2:2s et cetera? What I want
to say in that respect is simply this, that we use external examiners to
moderate our examination processes in all of our disciplinary areas at
Q204 Graham Stringer: The external examiners are satisfying the curriculum you have set, and you said previously - I think I an quoting you accurately - that the taxpayer should be satisfied that what money is received by the universities is well-spent, or words to that effect, but if the taxpayer is spending however many thousand pounds it takes to get a 2:1 student graduated in history should not both of you be able to answer the question directly that you have spent the taxpayers' money to an equivalent value and what has come out is of the same value both to the student and to the taxpayer?
Dr Hood: On the point of have we spent it to the equivalent value, I think it is a slightly different point from the question you are asking. I have already illustrated to you by answering a question earlier about the cost of our provision that we are putting an awful lot more cost into the education of each student than Oxford Brookes is. I do not say that to make judgment about that, I am just talking about value per se. I have answered your question quite correctly by saying that as a result of the quality assurance processes we have the taxpayer should be very satisfied that we are achieving the national norm in terms of the classing of our degrees.
Q205 Graham
Stringer: I did not want to interrupt you
but I do have a supplementary which is the external examiners will tell you
that you are doing what you have set out to do to a standard you have set but
my question is really slightly different.
It is that that is fine for
Dr Hood: Can I help you with that? That is the reason that the Government established the Academic Audit Unit, so that you would have an independent process of assuring the institutional processes, and that is exactly what the Academic Audit Unit does. It exists to assure that our processes operate to a certain quality and standard so that the outcome is an outcome that the taxpayer can be satisfied with.
Professor Beer: All the processes described by Dr Hood in terms of the way in which the students receive their marks and those marks are validated are identical in this institution and are monitored, as you know, by the Quality Assurance Agency.
Q206 Graham Stringer: On the quality assurance, when we have had the QAA before us they have told us that all they deal with is process and they reeled back in horror when we said "Are you looking at standards at all and comparability?" and they said, "No, each university is independent and they set their own standards."
Dr Hood: But we do it by reference to external examiners in the case of the gradation of degrees.
Q207 Chairman: May I just come in here? I am treating this conversation with incredulity if I am perfectly honest. If you are telling me that it costs roughly twice as much to educate a student at Oxford as it does at Oxford Brookes, in terms of the hours invested you invest significantly more time in your students than they do at Oxford Brookes, you are telling us that your admissions process is so rigorous that you are creaming the world's best students in order to get in and yet you are saying the outcome at the end of the day is exactly the same. Why do we bother?
Dr Hood: I did not say any of those things with respect. I did not say we were creaming the world's
best students; on the contrary we set out overwhelmingly to find students in
this country and, because of European legislation, the balance from Europe, who
can come to
Q208 Chairman: I will concede that to you. Can you come back to my central point?
Dr Hood: I did not say that we are teaching them to the same standard, the same content or by the same processes as Oxford Brookes University; what I said was that we are using independent assessors from other institutions by and large in this country to act as checks and balances on the quality of our examining and the quality of our certification of a student's degree.
Q209 Graham Stringer: We are tending to go round in a circle, are we not?
Dr Hood: Yes.
Q210 Graham Stringer: I do not want to repeat the Chairman's question but he is saying you are putting, in round terms, twice as much time and twice as many resources into a student who comes from the best academic background, some of the most able students in this country, and your external examiners are saying you are doing very well at that and they are validating what you are doing, but you then are saying that there is a read- across to 2:1s in other universities, that students are reaching the same academic standard; that seems highly unlikely does it not? If you take the brightest students and you put more effort into them, more tutorial effort, more teaching hours, more resources generally in a higher academic environment, do you not think that the world would look askance at you saying that at the end of that you are coming out with the same kind of qualifications as somebody from ---
Dr Hood: I am not saying they are coming out with the same kind of qualifications.
Q211 Graham Stringer: It is a higher standard.
Dr Hood: I am not saying it is a higher standard, it is a different
standard, it is a different education.
One of the important things about the sector in this country is that you
do have choice about the sort of institution.
I also want to make another comment to you and that is that the
Q212 Ian Stewart: Is it a qualitative difference in the number of ones and 2:1s or is it a quantitative difference?
Dr Hood: I do not know what Professor Beer's statistics are to be honest.
Q213 Ian Stewart: They are roughly half what yours are.
Professor Beer: Exactly; I would say that most other institutions would have a
longer tail so the
Q214 Ian Stewart: Is that because of resources?
Professor Beer: I would say no, although of course more resources are always
welcome. We teach in a different way and
the methods of teaching at
Q215 Ian Stewart: I am perplexed at Dr Hood's explanation that it is a different experience without qualifying what is different about it.
Professor Beer: It is different between subjects within this institution. The six students you will see ---
Q216 Ian Stewart: No, within the same subject.
Professor Beer: What I am saying is they are different experiences according to different academic disciplines and they are different according to the stage of people's lives at which they take up higher education, so I would not expect or indeed think it is desirable that a mature student in nursing would have the same experience as an 18 year old in history of art.
Q217 Ian Stewart: Let me just stop you there because I do not think we are asking about a comparison between different disciplines, we are really pressing you within the same disciplines. Implicit in Dr Hood's answer to Graham Stringer was that there was a different experience and what we are keen to find out is what is it that is different and what do potential employers recognise is different between the experience of Oxford and a different experience with the same degree in the same subject at the same level, one or 2:1, in Oxford Brookes.
Dr Hood: We are setting out to train our students how to think, we are setting out to develop their critical faculties, we are setting out to develop in a very sophisticated way their powers of analysis and synthesis.
Q218 Ian Stewart: Are we not doing that at Oxford Brookes?
Dr Hood: May I finish, please?
Q219 Chairman: Excuse me, Dr Hood, we are trying to have our questions answered.
Dr Hood: I am trying to answer it, sir.
Q220 Chairman: I do not believe you are because we understand exactly the point you are making about the quality.
Dr Hood: He just asked me how was the teaching different and I was trying to explain that.
Q221 Chairman: We are not asking you about the teaching, we have heard significantly about that.
Dr Hood: What are you asking me then?
Q222 Ian Stewart: The experience that you talked about.
Dr Hood: The experience is a teaching experience, it is the way they are taught, that is what I am talking about. It is the way they are taught to develop their critical faculties, the way they are taught to develop their powers of synthesis and analysis; we are trying to teach them how to think. We are not trying to teach them - and I am not suggesting Oxford Brookes is - something else or in some other way and therefore we teach them socratically in small groups in tutorials.
Q223 Chairman: Universities UK have made a statement which you have emphasised again today that a 2:1 degree in the same subject is broadly equivalent - they are the exact words which Universities UK have used to this inquiry - and you are stating today that that is the same, that a 2:1 in history at an Oxford college is the same as a 2:1 from Poppletown University in Poppletown.
Dr Hood: I am not competent to judge a 2:1 at
Q224 Chairman: We understand that, it is the comparators between your university and somebody else's, that is the point.
Dr Hood: To the employer question I think employers by and large find
Q225 Mr
Boswell: Can I come to Professor Beer? It seems to me that out of this set of
exchanges the one datum we can probably accept is that there is a higher level of
resources per student at the
Professor Beer: You are asking me if I had more money to spend what would I spend it on?
Q226 Mr Boswell: It is clear that there is a difference in the money if nothing else, even if the standards are equivalent, so what is the difference, looking at it the other way round?
Professor Beer: We would probably reduce the SSR; we would not reduce it all the
way down, we would not introduce the tutorial system that is in existence in
Q227 Mr Boswell: Can I just see if I can distil one thing from that list? You think that the teaching of critical skills, critical thinking, is something that you both impart here and it is important that you impart it to all undergraduates.
Professor Beer: Absolutely, and we work very hard to make sure of that. To a large extent curricula is not important, it is the skills that Dr Hood has very eloquently described that are important. These students have got to be marketable for 50 years, so the knowledge may go out of date, you do not want somebody working on your computer who is applying the knowledge that they got as a computer science graduate in 1970, so knowledge goes out of date. Skills, capability, flexibility does not go out of date.
Q228 Mr Boswell: It is a platform rather than a level.
Professor Beer: The level is important but the platform is primary.
Q229 Dr Harris: Dr Hood, how do you deal with a brilliant researcher who is not a very good teacher - hypothetically?
Dr Hood: This assumes they have been appointed to a position which requires that they teach because I should actually say that only about 1,600 of our 4,700 academic staff are in teaching fellowships or statutory professorships and the rest are in research-only positions. If we assume your question applies to one of those in a teaching type of fellowship we do have a centre which exists to help our colleagues with their teaching skills and so we would expect that they would take advantage of the various programmes that are on offer there. The colleges, through which undergraduate teaching is delivered, have a very sophisticated administrative system with senior tutors who monitor these things and in association with heads of house and the like would be looking to advise colleagues where they can seek assistance for the challenges that they have.
Q230 Dr Harris: What would you do with someone who was a really good teacher but was not attracting research grants?
Dr Hood: We have quite a number of those in the university at the present time. You mean not so much research grants, you mean who are not particularly research-active.
Q231 Dr Harris: Yes.
Dr Hood: They would tend to take up other duties within their college or within the university or within their faculty or department of an administrative or like nature in greater proportion than some of their other colleagues.
Q232 Dr Harris: Do you think it is possible to have - and I am going to ask the same question of you, Professor Beer - a department that is just full of good teachers but does not have any research where they are doing undergraduate teaching?
Dr Hood: No, not in our university, no.
Q233 Dr Harris: It is not possible to have that in your university - should it be possible is my question.
Dr Hood: My answer to that was no because it is not the nature of institution we are. We are a research-intensive institution where those who are involved in scholarship and research at the cutting edge of new knowledge are teaching the next generation, and they are imparting their understanding, their new discovery, their existing understanding to the next generation.
Q234 Dr Harris: If a university had a catastrophe in terms of research funding - not your university, I am asking you as a representative of universities - but the teaching as far as you knew was still good and the people were still keen to teach, that would suggest that a university that took that approach would need to close the course or prop it up from outside with subsidised grants.
Dr Hood: It is not for me to comment on what other universities should do ---
Q235 Dr Harris: A hypothetical university.
Dr Hood: There are degrees of granularity in how I would answer that. I think in a university it is critically important that those who are teaching stay current with where their discipline is developing, so it is not a question of someone just becoming inert in terms of the development of their understanding of the discipline, they would have to remain very active in that if they were going to continue to be a teacher in a university.
Q236 Dr Harris: I understand that. We have had some written submissions to suggest that as long as people are up to date with their knowledge, even if they are not research-active, then some universities can actually have very good teaching departments even if they are not attracting much in the way of the research grant, which is quite cliff-edge anyway, and it actually allows them to focus on teaching - they are not falling behind, they are reading. Do you think that is a reasonable approach to take for some universities?
Professor Beer: It is not one that we want to take at Brookes; we do not think it
is the business of a university for its academic staff not to be engaged in
both research and teaching. We come from
further back than
Q237 Dr Harris: If the two answers you have given, which are similar, are extended across the whole sector - and I am not saying that you are saying that they are, but I am seeking to ask you if there are any circumstances where this would be done - if there was just a subject where Britain did not have that much in the way of a research base, not none but there was a desperate need to train people in that subject for UK Plc, what would you do in that circumstance? In other words could you consider any circumstances where you could use universities for teaching alone with people who were up to speed but not research-active, either of you, even if it is not your institution, because I want you to look beyond your institution.
Professor Beer: I am sure that that is appropriate but, as you say, a rapid development in the subject would soon be followed by the need to do research in that area.
Dr Hood: What I would say is we should go overseas and find someone who is research-active or a whole team of people who are research-active, and one of the extraordinary trends in certainly our institution in recent years has been the internationalisation of the academic staff where fully 38 per cent of our academic staff today are non-UK by first citizenship.
Q238 Dr
Harris: Brookes has a reputation not for
necessarily being as research-active in every subject as
Professor Beer: No, absolutely not, we are research-informed rather than research-led. Our learning and teaching is something that we are extremely proud of. As you say we have a long and distinguished record in terms of what we think of as delivering a high quality student experience; however, we do not see teaching and research as mutually exclusive but as mutually beneficial, and often the best researchers are the best teachers and vice versa. You can talk to Dr Rust again about some evidence that we may have for that claim.
Q239 Dr Harris: But they are exclusive in terms of timetable; a person can be doing a lecture or doing research but not both.
Professor Beer: I do not agree, it is a virtuous circle between research, knowledge transfer and teaching and the external dimension, whether it is research or knowledge transfer, is of value to the individual student.
Q240 Chairman: We will leave that hanging in the air. We have come to the end of this session; it could have gone on a lot longer, but we are very, very grateful, Dr Hood, because I know that you have reorganised your schedule to be with us. Thank you very much indeed Professor Janet Beer.
Dr Hood: Could I say one final thing, Chairman? One of the things that is worrying us a lot as an institution is postgraduate education and the need to prepare the workforce for tomorrow, and the lack in this country of any coherent structured policy around the provision of postgraduate education and the funding of students for that. I just want to leave that on the table.
Q241 Chairman: I have to say that is another inquiry.
Dr Hood: Fine, but I would encourage you to have it.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor
Margaret Price,
Chairman: We welcome our second even more distinguished panel: Professor
Margaret Price from
Q242 Graham Stringer: Dr Rust, in your evidence you have said that there are worrying differences in assessment of degrees across different universities. Can you detect that this is because of different methods that are used in assessing degrees or what reasons would you give for the different processes that there are in the assessment of degrees?
Dr Rust: There are lots of answers to that question. The work of both of the groups that I am connected with and representing here today suggests that you can see a whole host of reasons why - for example, very simply, the algorithms that the university uses to compute the marks into some final classification. The group SACWG has shown that you can have up to a degree classification difference with the same set of results from one student, simply by feeding them into a different algorithm used by a different institution. Beneath that we know there is other evidence that marks will vary depending on a host of factors. We know that students do better on coursework assessment compared with examination, we know that in certain disciplines - maths for example - you will get higher marks because you can get full marks for certain types of activity. What then happens of course is those numbers all get crunched together in I would suggest quite indefensible ways if you looked at them as a statistician, and a whole host of results can come out from that. Is that enough? Do you want more?
Q243 Graham Stringer: That is a start. Are these different methodologies the main vehicle for fuelling degree inflation or are there other reasons?
Dr Rust: Like my good friend Mantz Yorke I am going to try and avoid the notion of grade inflation on the grounds that that is a pejorative term. There are a host of potential reasons for why there are now more firsts and 2:1s. We can hypothesise about a range; it could be that teaching has got better - we certainly have more postgraduate certificate courses for new teaching staff and we have made a move towards professionalising academics as teachers - it could be that students are working harder, it could be that we are clearer with courses framed in terms of learning outcomes et cetera, so students are clear as to what it is they have got to do and can then perform to the task, or it could be that we have grade inflation. The fundamental point that I think I would want to make today is that we do not know. We can have those discussions but it is at the level of conjecture. As the QAA said in 2006 we have no system that will actually enable us to show whether it is inflation or not.
Q244 Graham Stringer: Could it be that different universities are choosing methodologies that give them better results because they are concerned about their position in the league table?
Dr Rust: I have never come across that or have no reason to believe that.
Q245 Graham Stringer: But you could not rule it out.
Dr Rust: I just do not know.
Q246 Mr Boswell: Could I just interpose on what Dr Rust has said? The way I read it is first of all, following what he said about the QAA, there is actually nobody sitting above this process as in the schools sector there is for example now with Ofqual who can moderate it or say what is happening - that is the first point. The second point is that whatever merits there may be in the external examiner system they are not actually effective in moderating these conceptual differences. Is that a fair account of what you are saying?
Dr Rust: I am not sure I want to encourage the creation of an Ofqual for higher education.
Q247 Mr Boswell: That is a separate issue and an important one.
Dr Rust: Otherwise, yes, that is what I am saying. About external examiners, there are many merits to the external examiners system, it brings many positive outcomes, but it is certainly not a system that is going to guarantee your standards.
Q248 Mr Boswell: As we have raised the hare about having an Ofqual for HE or whatever is it your view that that would be a less good or a better intervention than in effect saying you judge your own standards and you award accordingly either within a degree classification or without one?
Dr Rust: There is another possibility as recommendation one in the ASKe submission. There is a way that we could develop academic communities to take account of comparability of standards across institutions, and that is the way to go with the grassroots-up method.
Chairman: I want to return to that a little bit later so I do not want to pursue that. We are back to you, Graham.
Q249 Graham Stringer: It is a similar point really. If we are not going to have a higher education Ofsted what is the solution to getting comparabilities between different universities in degree standards, or at least knowing where we are?
Dr Rust: As I said, I would support ASKe's recommendation, but you wanted to leave that until later.
Q250 Chairman: You ought to come in here, Professor Price, because this is your work.
Professor Price: I would very much resist the idea that there can be a body sitting above to actually impose standards because standards very much belong and are created and are maintained within the academic communities. That does give rise to the issue of how you make comparisons between different disciplines and how those disciplines operate within different institutions. I have just come back from Australia so forgive me, I am not quite on the same time zone as you, but I had some very interesting discussions in Australia about the nature of a sort of chicken-wire network where you would group discipline communities, where there are sort of overlaps with them, and effectively create a network whereby you could have comparisons with close disciplines which then cover the whole of the discipline span.
Q251 Mr Boswell: Is that by institution or by sector or either?
Professor Price: It would be either, yes.
Q252 Ian Stewart: How do you do the sector one? I can understand it within the institution but how do you the sector one if you do not have a body that oversees the sector?
Professor Price: You would need to create those networks between institutions and
many disciplines do have external bodies that they feel more affiliated to than
necessarily their institutions, particularly professional bodies, and they take
their standards from those, so you have already got networks. One of the things that we have also proposed
is that within the
Q253 Ian Stewart: Would that show up this very elusive difference of experience that Dr Hood was talking about?
Professor Price: I suppose it depends on whether you are talking about outcomes or whether you are talking about the process, and you need to look at those in slightly different ways. If you are looking at outcomes one of the best ways of determining standards is to actually look at examples, so rather than ask people to talk about standards in the abstract, which is very difficult to do because standards are held both explicitly and tacitly, in order to create understanding between people you have to have concrete examples to look at, so we can look at outcomes. In terms of looking at processes you have to be careful about not just looking at the input measures but looking at the output measures from the students' experience as well, so we would need to gather evidence and data about that in order to do that. One of the things that will probably come out of the discussion today is that there is actually not a great deal of evidence on which we can draw conclusions.
Ian Stewart: That is honest, thank you.
Dr Harris: Before I bring in Professor Ryan I want to go back to something that was not quite picked up from what Graham Stringer was asking. Dr Rust - or anyone - we observe an increase in the number of firsts and 2:1s relatively speaking, we observe a variety of techniques in your work that are used to do marking, some of which, for what look like some quite small or innocent changes, can have significant impacts on their own, let alone in combination, to change marks - and they seem to be changing in an upward direction - yet you tell us that you cannot say there is grade inflation in a pejorative way, in other words you see no evidence that this is unjustified. That is my first question. Secondly, when Graham Stringer asked whether league tables might be an incentive to have directly or indirectly this impact you said you could not see that that was necessarily the case. I have seen no example of league tables where people do not want to be at the top rather than at the bottom and I have seen no example of league tables introduced by politicians without the point of blaming the people at the bottom and rewarding the people at the top by incentivising people. Putting those two questions together can I ask you to reconsider your response as an academic?
Q254 Chairman: Could you do it fairly briefly?
Dr Rust: I am sure that league tables incentivise people; what I hope I said was I personally know of no evidence that a university has changed its system or even a department changed its system in order to artificially create higher marks.
Q255 Dr Harris: Human nature ends at universities, does it?
Dr Rust: I just do not know of any evidence; I have not come across that happening to my knowledge. The other point is - and in support of the argument that we just do not know what the reason for more firsts and 2:1s is - in fact it is not as simple as saying it has just gone up and gone up. The latest work that Mantz Yorke has done, which is on the Academy website, looking at 13 years, shows that for different subject disciplines in fact it has gone down, so within the same institution and using the same systems you will have had some places where in fact the grades have gone down rather than up, so it is just more complicated than to say it is just going up.
Q256 Dr Harris: Professor Ryan, can you first explain to me why universities are uniquely different from every hospital when it comes to the impact of league tables measuring their performance on their behaviour - if you agree with Dr Rust?
Professor Ryan: I do not, of course I do not.
Q257 Chairman: That was a leading question.
Professor Ryan: He is my MP.
Q258 Dr Harris: I said if you agree. It cannot be leading if I say "if".
Professor Ryan: How would I disagree with you? To start at the beginning there once was a version of Ofqual for universities, it was the CNAA. The non-old-fashioned sector gave CNAA-validated degrees and nobody in the CNAA believed that there was anything very clever to be said about whether a CNAA degree in history was more or less demanding than a CNAA degree in sociology or whatever. What was true was that you could not put on a degree course without getting it past the CNAA, it did look at the syllabuses, it looked at your teaching resources and the external examiners came from the CNAA and what they had going for them was they would have been deeply humiliated to validate and approve of courses that other people later thought were not up to scratch. It is not so to speak, therefore, an impossible state of affairs; to my mind the CNAA was much more like the right animal than the QAA. As to league tables it seems to me it just has to be an incentive. If you grade people on the number of 2:1s and the like that they get at the end the temptation is bound to be to smudge the 2:2/2:1 boundary. If you pay them through HEFCE in a way that penalises them for throwing people off courses if they are not up to it then there is bound to be a pressure to hang on to them at all costs. I just do not see how it can possibly work differently.
Q259 Dr Harris: Does anyone want to rebut that? Professor Goodman, you have kept quiet.
Professor Goodman: I have kept quiet, I have been listening with great interest. I do go back - I know we had an earlier conversation about this and there were doubts cast on it - to the external examination system, which is a system that we utilise as much as possible to get the feedback on our courses, because we are only as good as the world thinks we are and if we lower our own standards we are going to be the ones who are going to suffer the results. We use our external examiners and we call them critical friends - I have to say from my end they tend to be pretty critical about the things that they do not like - and then we review our processes in that light. They are only comparative of course between their own institution and our institution, there is not this kind of overview.
Dr Harris: But external examiners can only do what you ask them to do, so if they do not know whether the tutors told the students what questions are coming up there is nothing they can do about that. If they are only asked to arbitrate between two borderline cases they will do that very well no doubt in an external examiner way, but is not the whole question how you use external examiners, especially if you depend on them, and is there a variation in the way they are used between institutions?
Q260 Chairman: May I add to Dr Harris's question, do you ever go outside the Russell Group for your external examiners, are they not friends first and then critical second?
Professor Goodman: I am pretty sure we do go outside the Russell Group for our
external examiners but I could not give you a case here and now, and I myself
have been an external examiner in non-Russell Group universities, including in
fact this university here. In
Q261 Dr Harris: And if they do badly and you fall in the league table there will be an impact on you.
Professor Goodman: No, I am nervous whether I have taught the students sufficiently well to answer the questions that I will not have been setting.
Q262 Dr Harris: It is a selfless nervousness rather than a self-interested one.
Professor Goodman: Possibly.
Q263 Chairman: Professor Price, can you come in?
Professor Price: You asked if there was a rebuttal. A short answer is given that the assessment standards exist within the academic communities, academic communities are very protective of their standards, and although the suggestion that there is an incentive to push 2:1s into the class of firsts my experience, both as an external examiner and within my own institution, is that academics will resist that because they have a very strong view of standard. There are issues with the external examiner system and in our evidence we have pointed out that there are some inconsistencies in the standards that they apply, but they do have a critical friend role. Also in relation to the community issue, very often external examiners are operating as individuals rather than necessarily representatives of their disciplinary communities, and it is quite a difficult thing to do as an individual academic when you are asked to be an external examiner to actually do that, if the support mechanisms are not there in place to ensure that you are representing your community rather than your individual view of standards.
Q264 Mr
Boswell: I just wondered if I might ask the
head of my former college what I hope is a serious question, whether if CNAA
had certain merits he would have envisaged extending that kind of system to the
Professor Ryan: In my rash youth I actually went on record as saying it would do us a whole lot of good.
Q265 Mr Boswell: But it is no longer your view.
Professor Ryan: Given that they abolished the CNAA and in the name of the autonomy of the post-1992 group and the rest of them, it really is water under the bridge. I think, actually, some such body would do everybody good; being able to give a coherent account of why you do what you do to your peer group.
Q266 Mr Boswell: Is that with reference to the standards that you yourself have set for your institution?
Professor Ryan: What you teach, how you teach it, how you examine it, whether you have a coherent account of what you think you learn from these exams. After all, what I sent to the Committee was my usual bleat about the QAA dumbing us all into the middle because everybody now knows, in pretty good outline, what they are going to get examined on because they have been lectured by the course deliverers into what is going to happen, tutorials now match that and so, roughly speaking, it is very unsurprising that a university like Oxford, where the filtration mechanisms have been operating on the kids since they were six, gets 95 per cent firsts and 2:1s because if they cannot do that, what in heaven's name could they do.
Q267 Dr Harris: I suspect it is not six; it is probably minus nine months actually.
Professor Ryan: That is right, Mozart in the womb.
Dr Harris: What would you do to stretch them more if you are saying it is all moving to the middle, to stretch the better students?
Q268 Chairman: That is not what your Vice-Chancellor has just told us.
Professor Ryan: He said that we behave absolutely virtuously; we do behave absolutely virtuously.
Q269 Chairman: But with a preordained set of rules.
Professor Ryan: Within the constraints of a system which is locked in place by HEFCE and the QAA and whoever else. I do not think the QAA does no good because it means that you do not end up being catastrophically disorganised.
Q270 Dr Harris: With the current structures can you break out of this? If Ryan was in charge.
Professor Ryan: If I was in charge the place would not last three weeks, but that is rather different. What I would do would be to have, so to speak, a high honours paper - I would behave rather like the Ivy League and I would say if you want to get high honours - I am not wedded to our system.
Q271 Dr Harris: Like an A*.
Professor Ryan: Yes, I am not wedded to our classification system particularly, but here is the thing: you have a question, you have a day in which to produce the kind of answer at which your tutor opens his eyes and says "My God, I could not have done that at your age." There are ways of letting people rip and if they are good, they are very good at it. The best five exams I ever saw were at Hatfield Polytechnic, five married ladies in their early 30s who had all said to each other "Let us go get a degree" and they were amazing. Nobody else touched them for five years before or five years after, they were fantastic. It is not a question of where you are or where you come from, it is a question of being given the chance to break loose.
Q272 Chairman: I will leave that there. I am going to skip most of the next question but I really wanted, Professor Price, to ask you the very straightforward question whether you feel that the Higher Education Achievement Report will make a difference to the area we are talking about, so that if we have this broader report and forget the classification of degrees we will suddenly go back to Utopia and Professor Ryan will be happy.
Professor Price: I would say I think it is a shift in the right direction. Whether it is something that will have utility in terms of the way lots of different stakeholders use it is an interesting question.
Q273 Chairman: Any other views from the panel?
Professor Goodman: I do agree with Alan to some extent; I do think the 2:1 category perhaps has become too broad and we could divide it in the way we divided the second class degree 25 years ago into upper second and lower second. I do think a first class degree is still something that is spectacular.
Q274 Graham Stringer: Can you define what is the difference between a first, a 2:1 and a 2:2 so that we can understand it as a Committee?
Professor Goodman: The criteria that we use in our university which we ask people to
mark against is a 2:2 shows you have done the work, you have understood the
work and you are quite comfortable with the work, a 2:1 is somebody who is
actually able to use the work and show that they can unpick the question and
work around the question and use it in a critical way, and a first class
examination answer is something that really takes you to another level. It is a pleasure to read, you know that there
is something going on there, that it is doing something very, very interesting
with the work. Examiners very rarely
disagree about that 2:1 and the first class category. I find elsewhere as well - I taught briefly
at the
Q275 Graham Stringer: Sorry, I do not mean to interrupt but some of our evidence is saying that actually part of the reason there are more firsts now is that students who used to get good 2:1s are now being put into the first category.
Professor Goodman: I would agree with my colleague here, we are very, very protective about that first class category and we would much rather go under it than go over it. That has generally been my experience, both as an internal examiner and as an external examiner in schools.
Chairman: Can we move on to the last section, please? Dr Harris.
Q276 Dr Harris: I want to talk about plagiarism and its threat. You said in your submission, Professor Price, that so-called bespoke writing services represent a threat to generic coursework-assessed courses. To what extent is there evidence to back up that suggestion that there is this problem of plagiarism?
Professor Price: There is a variety of evidence, some of which suggests there is a problem and some of which suggests that it is a problem of the design of the assessment - in other words you can largely design the opportunity for plagiarism out of assessment processes.
Q277 Dr Harris: You can.
Professor Price: Yes, you can.
Q278 Dr Harris: A keen student is going to come and ask you how; I am trying to gauge the extent. What is the evidence to suggest that it is endemic, in brief, in coursework? I am sure there are things you can do, but how far has it got in this country?
Professor Price: You might need to step in and help me here. It varies from subject to subject. Where there are large student numbers some students feel that they are less supervised and therefore attempt to "get away with it" I suppose is the phrase. It largely depends on the extent to which the institution has moved its dealing with plagiarism on. If they have done very little I would say there is a risk that it is quite high; where they have integrated systems, where there is an attempt to prevent plagiarism and there are means by which there is detection of plagiarism it is less of a problem.
Q279 Dr Harris: What you are arguing is that if you put in systems it deters because deterrence is extremely effective, otherwise if you put in systems that did not deter you might reduce plagiarism but you would have a lot of convicts, and I do not know of any place where there are lots of convictions as it were where these systems have been put in.
Professor Price: I am not saying it is just deterrent that you put in, in fact just deterrent does not work at all, we need very much to get students to understand the role of academic integrity in the work that they do.
Q280 Dr Harris: Can we be certain that we know how much there is when we are not picking much up, because I am not sure we are picking that much up.
Professor Price: The processes of investigating these are still developing.
Q281 Chairman: Dr Rust.
Dr Rust: On the one hand at one stage you used the word endemic and then we are saying we are not picking much up; if we are not picking much up, maybe it is not endemic and maybe it is not the problem that some of the newspaper headlines suggest.
Q282 Dr Harris: I used the word endemic in a question, is there evidence to support the assertion?
Dr Rust: I appreciate that. I think some of the reactions have gone over the top, that it is an academic thing and those sorts of headline. It is yet another thing where it is the standard academic answer, more research needed.
Q283 Dr Harris: More research grants.
Dr Rust: Yes, just give us the grant and we will do it. This has come about for a variety of reasons and clearly one of them has been technology. There was a concern that the internet made it much easier to cut and paste, but of course technology has also made it easier to identify plagiarism, so in fact it may be that we are just identifying more easily and in fact there is no more plagiarism now than there was in the past, it may just be easier to detect. The crucial answer is exactly what Margaret said, that there is not one kneejerk answer, you need a holistic answer to this and that is training the students so they know about academic integrity, having detection mechanisms and reasonable penalties that are known across the institution - standard penalties which will be imposed if necessary - but also course design that designs out as much as one can the possibilities of plagiarism in the assessment tasks being set. A 15-minute viva is very difficult to plagiarise.
Mr Boswell: And resource-intensive.
Q284 Ian Stewart: Luckily for me as a registered PhD student I was supposed to ask you how it happens - I mangle the English language so much my supervisors would know immediately. You answered the question that I was supposed to ask you, how do you deal with it, but in a strange sense how it should be dealt with you have just explained, but is that the way you actually deal with it currently?
Dr Rust: I am not going to claim that Brookes is perfect but we have got a
bit of a reputation in this area. One of
our colleagues is currently seconded in
Q285 Ian Stewart: Is there any cohesion in trying to apply these principles to stop this across institutions and who is checking that?
Dr Rust: Across our institution we have in place what are called academic conduct officers in every school. That is part of getting a common tariff so that you have a common institutional treatment rather than different tutors treating similar cases differently. We have put money into the Turnitin software and currently there is training going on across the whole institution for that; so, yes, we have taken an institutional approach. Clearly the most difficult is the staff development around designing it out in your assessment tasks.
Q286 Mr Boswell: Is there a network across different institutions too so that there is a counterpart who will tip you off if something is going on, who will say "Have you noticed this piece on the internet that seems to have got rather popular?"
Dr Rust: There is something at JISC, the joint information group.
Q287 Chairman: Can I just ask, Professor Ryan and Professor Goodman, your views on plagiarism before I bring this to an end?
Professor Ryan: Because we still stick to the old-fashioned, three-hour, unseen exam there is just a lot less scope for it getting into the assessment system. There is plenty of scope for it getting into the tutorial system and it is not uncommon for the occasional miscreants to be told that it is better if they read a lousy essay of their own than a rather good one done by their girlfriend which she happened to have read the previous week. There are interesting difficulties in that of course some people do not really have an idea of what is and what is not plagiarism for a start; some people think that what it is all about is cut and paste. They have had A-level teachers who have told them to use this word, this word and this word so they find a nicely crafted essay and they put it in on the grounds that it has got the words in that they have been told to use. There is a very large culture, but the fact that Brookes has as it were academic conduct officers pushing the idea that if this is your work and it is your degree then it had better be yours - that you just need to keep pushing.
Professor Goodman: One of the curious features is the fact that we do, as Alan said, find the occasional first year undergraduate is plagiarising their tutorial, which is not examined, it is not part of the degree per se, suggests that it is a lack of comprehension about how you do use sources properly. There is a need to educate them and, clearly, the follow-through from the school system has not really worked properly there, we need to spend time at the school end explaining to them how you use sources and how you put your project work together as well.
Q288 Ian Stewart: In a higher degree how do you plagiarise in a literature review as distinct from plagiarising in fieldwork?
Professor Ryan: The really horrid cases actually tend to be people handing in somebody else's PhD and I have had a colleague who said he was sorely tempted to say to a candidate "Why did you change the title of chapter 3?"
Chairman: On that note we will leave that hanging in the air. Why did we change chapter 3 could be the title of our report. Can I thank very much indeed Professor Margaret Price, Dr Chris Rust, Professor Roger Goodman and Professor Alan Ryan; thank you very much indeed. We will reconvene in ten minutes.
Witnesses: Mr Gregory Andrews, Student, Mr David Child, Student, Ms Victoria Edwards, Student, Ms Meagan Pitt, Student, Mr Jun Rentschler, Student, Ms Sally Tye, Student, Oxford Brookes University, gave evidence.
Q289 Chairman: Can we come to our final session today in
Mr Rentschler: My name is Jun Rentschler, I am half German, half Japanese and I am
in my second year at Oxford Brookes studying major in economics, minor in
business. Besides my uni work I am also
vice-president of the Brookes Business Entrepreneurship Club. I did choose my course before I came to the
university; I was looking at economics especially in
Q290 Dr Harris: Why did you choose Oxford Brookes in the end?
Mr Rentschler: I did come to the
Q291 Chairman: A bit of accident and a bit of design. Meagan.
Ms Pitt: My name is Meagan and I am originally from
Q292 Chairman: What was your first choice just out of interest?
Ms Pitt: UCL.
Q293 Mr Boswell: And it is a vocational course, you are not doing it just because you have an interest in law, it is because you would like to be a qualified lawyer.
Ms Pitt: Yes, I would.
Q294 Chairman: Sally.
Ms Tye: My name is Sally Tye, I am a third year history student. I am also student representative for history
and have been for the last three years, and I also sit on the recruitment
sub-committee for history. I chose
history before the university; my first choice was actually
Q295 Chairman: That is a great recommendation.
Ms Edwards: My background is slightly strange. I had my first baby when I was 16, I met my husband at 15 and left school with only a handful of GCSEs. We then went on to have a second baby and then somebody said to me while I was working in a bar "Why don't you do a degree?" I thought okay, what can I do, and I came to Brookes and did a teaching degree. I taught for eight years in primary school, had another four babies, but all the while from my first baby I really wanted to be a midwife but ended up teaching because it seemed very sensible. After my sixth baby, having gone down to two days teaching a week, I decided that it was now or never in terms of making the change. I would love to say that I chose Brookes because it is the best university, I think it is wonderful, but actually my family would not let me go away and be a student anywhere else so I had to stay here.
Q296 Mr Boswell: You live literally up the road.
Ms Edwards: I live in Witney.
Q297 Mr Boswell: That is still some distance actually.
Ms Edwards: Yes, but Brookes is the nearest.
Q298 Chairman: Okay. David.
Mr Child: My name is David Child, I am in my fourth and final year doing MEng
motor sport engineering. I considered
several universities -
Q299 Chairman: It has lived up to expectations.
Mr Child: Definitely, yes.
Q300 Chairman: Okay. Gregory.
Mr Andrews: My name is Gregory Andrews, I am in year two architecture. I chose architecture to do first before I chose my university but I chose Brookes because it was the only university of the ones which I applied to that had a 24-hour access pass that you could get, it had a proper studio environment where the work was done at Brookes as opposed to the other universities where you came in for your tutorial or came in for your lecture and then you went home and did your work where you lived, in your accommodation and so forth. Brookes has a studio work environment and it puts that first before anything else. There is also quite a large input, there are 120 students in first year, 20 in two years and 100 architects so there is also quite a large year to learn from. It was more the studio work environment that I chose first.
Q301 Chairman: This is a question really to those of you who have come to Oxford Brookes straight from school, which is four or five of you.
Mr Rentschler: I had a gap year.
Q302 Chairman: If I start with you, Gregory, what sort of careers advice did you get which helped you make your decision about (a) the course and (b) university? Be as frank as you can.
Mr Andrews: We used to have a careers lesson once a week in that they assessed the current subjects that you were studying for A-level and then pointed you in the direction of which courses were suitable. We also used certain internet websites to help us make a choice.
Q303 Chairman: Was it good enough?
Mr Andrews: Yes, I think so.
Q304 Mr Boswell: Can I just ask if I may, in these answers can you factor in a comment about whether anyone gave you exposure to the alternative routes, either to vocational education or straight into work. Was it just seen as you must go to HE and this is where you could go or was it a balanced choice?
Mr Andrews: My school definitely chose HE first.
Q305 Chairman: Did you get any vocational advice?
Mr Andrews: No.
Q306 Chairman: David.
Mr Child: To answer that question the school I was at definitely pushed towards higher education for the majority of students; in the cases where they saw it was not appropriate or there was a sensible other route they would push other people that way, but certainly as far as I was concerned they never really pushed any other options. As far as selection of the university and the school pushing me towards one or the other, there was not really any help, if I am frank. They misunderstood what I was going to university for; they thought I wanted to become a mechanic and not an engineer, so consequently tried to push me away from that. What actually made the decision for me was my father really. He did electronic engineering for his degree quite a few years ago and he always wanted to do what I am doing, but at the time was pushed away for exactly the same reasons as the school tried to push me away from it. I am very glad that he stepped in and told me this is actually what you want to do.
Q307 Chairman: Sally, what about you?
Ms Tye: We had an enrichment session every week where they had lots of different people come in and talk to us. It was mainly geared towards higher education but we also had a lot of the Forces because where I live is quite a Force-based area - the Army, the Air Force and things would come in. If you were a student of a certain grade band you were very much pushed to go into higher education. My younger sister is just going through it at the moment; she does not want to go to university, she wants to get a job, but because of her grades the school has actually been very difficult and her form tutor has not been very good with her at all about trying to get her into other things. In terms of doing more vocational subjects, if you have a certain grade area you are not really encouraged - not at my school anyway - to go and do vocational things or even things at college, it is all university, university.
Q308 Chairman: Meagan, can I just say on this last round you had obviously made the decision to do law, you fancied a career in law and you applied to Oxford Brookes and had a place at Oxford Brookes.
Ms Pitt: Yes.
Q309 Chairman: Was it laid out to you who would be teaching you, how many contact hours you would have, what would be the nature of the programme, and has it lived up to expectations, or did you not even bother about that?
Ms Pitt: They had a broad overview in terms of what they would be teaching us and what the outcome of that would be, so skills and in terms of the knowledge that you would gain, but in terms of the amount of hours you would be studying or who would be lecturing you, I was not aware of any of that.
Q310 Chairman: Was it important to any of you who you would actually be having as a tutor, as a lecturer, who would be guiding you, how many hours you would have? Did anybody say that was important?
Ms Tye: I actually chose history at Brookes because of the research rating, the department is very highly rated for research and I have actually seen the benefit of that throughout my degree.
Ms Edwards: Getting a clear idea of the hours involved and when lectures would be was incredibly important to me because of child care, and even more so in my second year as my mother who was doing most of my child care passed away in the summer, so it has become more difficult for me. I do not know whether partly it is because the tutor team for midwifery is very small at five main tutors who are in a lot of contact with us, they are easily contactable all the time, they do their best to address any queries and are as flexible as they can be with us. All of that was very important to me and I felt that Brookes did all they could to give me the information I needed.
Q311 Mr Boswell: Did the others get that sort of exposure at any stage? When you got here was there a statement of what you would be expected to do and when you would be expected to be here?
Ms Pitt: Yes.
Ms Tye: Yes.
Q312 Mr Boswell: And that was reasonable. If you had any particular need, one might have had a religious need or something else, would they try and accommodate that as well?
Ms Tye: Yes, I would say so.
Q313 Chairman: I want to move on now and bring in my colleague Ian Stewart about the quality of teaching. We have been running an e-consultation during this particular inquiry and this is what one post read: "At the university I am attending the courses are pitched at a level that ensures the least intelligent in the class is able to pass. We are frequently 'taught the exam in tutorials. Assignments and practicals are poorly conceived. Feed back is rare. I believe this is a product of the department having to meet pass rate targets in order to secure funding." Does that ring a bell?
Ms Pitt: Not at all.
Ms Tye: No.
Q314 Chairman: If not, Jun, what is the quality of your teaching here? Nobody is listening so you are all right.
Mr Rentschler: I am in two different fields because I am doing business and economics. I am very happy with my teachers and my lecturers in the economics field but in business it is more that I do not like business that much.
Q315 Chairman: You are not engaged as a student.
Mr Rentschler: I am engaged but I just prefer economics, so I am majoring in economics, I am taking the majority of my modules in economics and I like my economics teachers. Business is not really mine and I do not like the teachers that well either.
Q316 Chairman: How would you describe good teaching?
Mr Rentschler: You can really tell a good teacher when he actually knows what he is talking about and has all the background information but still can bring it together and just give you a framework of what to study at home, just give the important framework, the basic main points of what the subject is about and then you can go home and you know what to do, you know which gaps to fill. Obviously you cannot cover everything in a lecture.
Q317 Chairman: Does it matter that they are world-class researchers?
Mr Rentschler: It does not matter to me at all. We have quite a lot of international teachers in the economics field which is quite interesting because some of them teach economics in their home country - economics in Asian-Pacific countries for example - which is very good, but then again we have some problems with language, some of the lecturers are quite hard to understand, especially for me, because I am not that familiar with English.
Q318 Ian Stewart: Your English is better than mine.
Mr Rentschler: Talking and understanding it is different.
Q319 Ian Stewart: Absolutely. Universities are taking a lot of trouble to train lecturers but are there areas where you would like to see developments in lecturers' training, perhaps to meet needs that are not met for you?
Mr Andrews: I see particularly in architecture that there are a lot of two tutors to one student; every Monday and every Thursday it is one tutor to one student, so you have one-on-one tutorials and although they only last 15 minutes as far as design work is concerned you learn more in that than you would at any other time. My tutors also contact me on Facebook and by email on a regular basis too.
Q320 Mr Boswell: And it is well-prepared when you do meet them.
Mr Andrews: Basically I submit my work and they comment on it, but I get a precedent study every week, at least one, so they have done their research on my project. They also communicate between each other so if one person was not there they would know how far I have progressed in between.
Q321 Ian Stewart: That is in architecture studies; is that the same experience across other studies?
Ms Tye: In history we get voluntary tutorials and they are working to implement it more within the department. I did not realise for my first year and a half that I could go with my essay question and have a tutorial on it; however, once I did my grades improved dramatically. I actually pushed this in a meeting and they are actually working now to implement it. Basically you have the option of a tutorial for every single piece of work you do, and that is one-on-one for as long as you need the help. Also you can email them and they email you back and things like that, so they are very accessible.
Ms Pitt: In terms of law you are welcome to go and see any tutor, in particular if you email them during office hours, and that is something I found very helpful in terms of one-to-one. However, in terms of seminars, because there tend to be quite a few of us in a seminar ---
Q322 Chairman: Give us a number, ten, 15?
Ms Pitt: I would say between 15 and 20, not that everyone always comes, but it is around that number. It would be more beneficial if it was more than an hour because I often find myself not being able to ask all the questions that I want, and even though I could go to them at a private time I would just forget the question. It would be more beneficial if they extended that hour seminar.
Q323 Ian Stewart: Is that because you are stimulated by the larger group?
Ms Pitt: Yes, it does encourage discussion which does bring up more questions so I think we need more time.
Q324 Ian Stewart: Are you taught by research students, higher degree students or part-time tutors?
Ms Pitt: All of them are lecturers in the seminars and they are very good at their jobs I have to say, especially considering that coming from school to university it is a big step between independent study and being spoon-fed. That was the most difficult thing for me, I think, so it is important to have a teacher that has the right balance between knowing what they are saying and being able to say it in a way that I understand. In terms of that balance they are quite good.
Mr Child: I would just like to comment that the staff in the school of
technology are very approachable; if you need to speak to a lecturer you can
just go to their office and speak to them, they are more than happy to let you
stop them during a lecture and ask questions and have a discussion. The thing that probably stands out for me the
most is that my twin brother did an undergraduate degree at
Q325 Chairman:
Ms Edwards: We are a small cohort; we were 14, we are now 13. We have five tutors and because midwifery is such a practical subject half our course is spent in practice hours either at the John Radcliffe, the Horton or in the community. They are all tutors who have a long background in midwifery, they are all practising midwives themselves and also they have the whole academic side of it to bring to us as well. Out of our cohort of 13, ten of us are mature students so the midwifery tutors are particularly tuned in to our needs as mature students - the majority of us have children and families. It is not that that means we are asking for special treatment constantly, but we bring something different to the course and our needs are slightly different as well. We have a personal tutor who is responsible for all of us through the whole three years, so we can approach her at any time, and because we are a small group with a small group of tutors we know the tutors very, very well and we can contact them via email, we have their mobiles and we see them and only them in our lectures so it is good.
Q326 Chairman: Can I just follow up on that really across the piece, but you do
not all have to answer this. When Glen
and I visited a university in
Mr Rentschler: I have to say that I am quite dissatisfied with the feedback. I do not know how it works in the other
schools but in the business school in the first year I submitted some work and
I got I do not know how many per cent but it was quite good, say it was 72 per
cent. The lecturer told me it is a good
piece of work so I said "There is one-third missing, where is it?" and she said
"You cannot score better than 80 in the first place" and I said "All right,
what is missing then?" She said it was
just the general impression or something like that and so I could not improve
anything; I did not know what I did wrong, I did not know how to improve my
work, and that has been similar throughout the last two years. Compared to my school education at home in
Q327 Chairman: Any other comments on that?
Ms Tye: I have had a very different experience. On every single piece of work - we usually get a piece of work midway through the semester and then at the end of the semester and we get the cover sheet marked with all the different requirements and what mark we have got with comments at the bottom. Usually on an essay we have to go for a tutorial to pick up our work and they go through it with us as to what we need to do. If we have done a presentation then usually at the end of the presentation we get feedback on exactly what we have done wrong and why we have got the mark we have got. With exams and things that are right at the end of the semester we usually get an email saying if you want to come back in and pick up your work and discuss your grades you are welcome to in the following semester, so that is even when they are not teaching us.
Ms Edwards: I have had a mixed experience. The two exams that I have sat have not been midwifery-based - one was a physiology exam and the other was a research exam and they were generic across all the healthcare professions. Those two I have had no feedback from, just a mark, but all the essay assignments that we have handed in for midwifery they tick on the criteria sheet where you came on that but then there is an A4 page on the front and through your work you will find numbers, one to whatever, then you look at the A4 sheet and it is number 1 "You could have expanded this point a bit more", "How about discussing this ..." or number 2: "Don't use colloquialisms" or whatever it is. You can go through the essay and they will give you lots of feedback.
Mr Child: I would say it is varied, it depends which lecturer it is to be honest. Some are absolutely brilliant, you get reams and reams of paper back telling you everything you could have done better and even highlighting the points that you actually got right and making a deal of the fact that you did it this way and that is a very good way of doing it. That is a positive, but with other lecturers you just get a mark back but in all fairness for the lecturers who just give you a mark you can go and speak to them, you can arrange to go and see them and discuss the work, so there is always the option for feedback if you feel you need it.
Q328 Chairman: Do most students take advantage of that or if the mark is good enough they do not?
Mr Child: It depends what your mark is to be honest. If it is a good mark people are quite content with that, if it is a low mark they will be more insistent on finding out what went wrong.
Ian Stewart: Unless you are Jun and you want the other eight marks.
Q329 Mr
Boswell: Can I just ask a separate question
about your interaction with other students on a course. You were talking about relatively small
seminar groups which all of you have experienced at some stage, although you,
Gregory, said you had one-to-one tuition on an intensive basis for a quarter of
an hour at a time. People often say the
tutorial as practice down the road is the apogee of learning and the supreme
test. How much value do you attach to having
your peers in the room, people doing the same course as you and being able to
bounce ideas off them as well? We might
start with
Ms Edwards: It is hugely important because a lot of what we come across in practice is very emotive and can be quite distressing or can be really thrilling, and when your emotions are going up and down like that and you are dealing with those situations that we are it is really, really important in a safe and confidential environment to be able to discuss those things.
Q330 Mr Boswell: Would anyone else like to comment?
Ms Pitt: In terms of law the fact is that there is debate and disagreement in itself, so it is important to get the other person's opinion because what they think I might never have thought of but it is a valid point. That is quite important so I would agree with that.
Mr Child: Two things on this one. Tutorials being optional, the number of people turning up varies depending on which subject it is. They are useful for improving your understanding and helping with the specific coursework, but one point I would like to make is that the former student project that runs is a non-marks based project so you do not actually get any academic grades out of that, it is purely you wanting to be involved to learn and to work with your peers, which is something the school pushes very hard and is certainly an invaluable experience.
Q331 Mr Boswell: Just for the record the Chairman and I would say it was a remarkable outcome and - I know you could not be there, David - that presentation at the Commons was really worthwhile, it was brilliant. I would acknowledge everything you say, that you do not have to get marks to do good work, perhaps we should say that. Can I just probe briefly the link between research and teaching? I do not know for a start whether any of you know how research-intensive your tutors are, whether you looked them up on the internet before you decided to honour the university with your presence or whether you have views as to whether their being research-strong is good for you as a pupil or not; any views on that?
Ms Tye: I am a big fan of research and the history department has a particular strength in research, which you do see in your lectures a lot; you are consistently getting figures or analysis or theses coming - we have not quite published this yet but we just thought we would throw it at you, see what you think. History is a research-based subject so if you did not have people right at the forefront it would be a serious detriment to the level of learning you are getting.
Q332 Chairman: Can I just check on that? If I am researching Henry VIII and the Tudors - I am not, but let us say I was - and I am a real expert, I know everything about the Tudors and Henry VII's ships et all, but you are being set work on 19th century social and economic history, how does that help, having a researcher working in a totally different area?
Ms Tye: You would not, you are taught by people who are researching in that area.
Q333 Chairman: You are stuck with whatever they are interested in.
Ms Tye: No, because they are very good, they tend to encourage you to actually challenge their ideas. I am doing a module at the moment with a guy called Roger Griffin who does fascism and he has got a very definite idea of fascism, but he is still outlining what everybody else thinks and he is there, "Does anyone want to challenge me, does anyone want to give anything different to this?" and a lot of time they are asking you does anybody want to do an independent module, does anybody want to do research and work with them, challenge their ideas. I wrote an ISM for someone and totally challenged what they believed in and they were totally okay with that.
Q334 Mr Boswell: Is that pretty well true across the various schools in your experience?
Ms Pitt: It depends for me personally on the area of law that we are talking about because for theoretical subjects like legal method and constitutional law I prefer someone that is more research-based and knows what they are talking about. In terms of areas like contract, tort, commercial I would prefer someone who has actually practised in the field so they know the nitty-gritty of it and not just the whole theoretical side, so it depends.
Q335 Dr Harris: You really want the person who is writing the exam paper, do you not?
Ms Pitt: Yes, probably.
Q336 Dr Harris: To what extent do you think you are going to get that? Obviously you have not taken your exams yet but to what extent do people know which of the lecturers to have particular regard to, depending on whether they are on the exam board this time, or whatever the equivalent is?
Ms Pitt: I tend to look at past exam papers. I am only an undergraduate so you can see who did the previous year's and if they are still there that tends to be the person who is doing the exam, so from that I kind of listen to what they say.
Q337 Mr Boswell: There is some game theory in this. Can I just ask you - my final question - about we hear from perhaps other institutions that sometimes people complain and they say we have got a really good tutor in this department, the only trouble is it is a five-rated department and we never see them and the whole thing is in the hands of graduate students or whatever who teach us. Do you ever get that sort of a problem, of tutors never around to teach you? On the whole I must say you have described situations where your tutors are accessible; is this because they are not very research-intensive or are they super-people?
Mr Child: Certainly the point on research, from your previous question and this one, there is a mix. Some lecturers are research-intensive, some have apparently no interest, but that is only from what we see. However, I suspect it is rather different in engineering to what it is in other subjects in the fact that although people doing research are pushing the knowledge and understanding we also have a fair few lecturers who have had many years of industrial experience and certainly within the automotive and motor sport sectors any developments in technology and general engineering practices are not necessarily published and do not necessarily have research as such to go with them in the traditional sense, so you do learn from lecturers who are doing current research and are aware of current research, but equally and just as important, if not more important, you are learning from the people who have been there, done that and understood the fundamental engineering principles of the situation they are applying, which has not necessarily been made aware to the general community.
Q338 Mr Boswell: It seems to me that there is a germ of an agreement with Meagan on that in that you are saying there are some people who will be great on materials science or aerodynamics in principle and somebody else who will fix you up a new diffuser overnight if that is what the Braun team needs.
Mr Child: Yes, exactly, there is the academic side to the research and the lecturers who are recognised as good researchers and for the work they are doing, but equally there are other people who are not interested at all in publishing research or having any recognition for it; they are more interested in the final result and how to do things, so to be able to learn from both types of people is invaluable.
Q339 Dr
Harris: Meagan, what is your feeling about
law students at the other university in
Ms Pitt: In what context?
Q340 Dr
Harris: There is another university in
Ms Pitt: No. We saw quite a bit of them in Freshers' Week because all of us were out and I met a couple, but they were not really that keen to stick around and talk to us.
Q341 Dr Harris: How do you and your colleagues feel, do you feel that they are going to have some advantages over you?
Ms Pitt: Definitely.
Q342 Dr Harris: What are they?
Ms Pitt: In terms of law, as far as my interpretation is, it is all about
prestige, is it not? Even if I have a
first from Oxford Brookes and another person has a first from
Dr Harris: That is right.
Ian Stewart: It is funny the V-Cs could not tell us that.
Q343 Dr
Harris: That is an allegation made about
students at
Ms Pitt: Yes.
Q344 Dr Harris: Or is it employers?
Ms Pitt: It is employers as well, it is with any university, because they have a ratings system of the best universities for certain subjects so they assume they have higher requirements,
Q345 Chairman: What is it based on?
Ms Pitt: Higher requirements for getting in.
I do not know what you need to get in to
Q346 Dr Harris: It is about three As so do you think it is justified on average that if the entrance requirements to get into that course are significantly higher - three As say compared to three Bs - the products of that course, assuming that it is not badly taught, are likely to be rated more highly by prospective employers on average, all other things being equal?
Ms Pitt: That is unfair because they do not take into consideration the way that you got there basically; to them everything is on paper, three As is three As and three Bs is three Bs but they do not take other things into consideration.
Q347 Dr Harris: These are the employers who are offering the training contracts do not take it into account.
Ms Pitt: Yes.
Q348 Dr Harris: Obviously there are no architects there to give you trouble as it were, but there is presumably history. Do you have a history perspective?
Ms Tye: I actually applied to
Dr Harris: It can work both ways. I want to talk money now, if I may.
Chairman: May I, just before you move on to money ---
Dr Harris: Of course you may, you are the expert in fascism. I am joking.
Q349 Chairman: This is the trouble with
Ms Tye: To be quite honest I have not done history at
Dr Harris: They said it was the same, they said it was not better ---
Q350 Chairman: Just leave me to it a minute.
Ms Tye: Unless I have been taught by an
Chairman: That was absolutely the right answer by the way.
Ian Stewart: The V-Cs should have listened to you first!
Q351 Chairman: I move on subsequent to that, do you think it is important that there is some objective measure which says that a 2:1 degree from university A is of a similar standard to a 2:1 degree from university B? Is it important?
Ms Tye: For employers, yes.
Q352 Chairman: Is it important for you as well?
Ms Tye: Yes, I think it is because whenever you go through school you are measured against your peer group, A-levels are across the board and things like that, so it seems strange that universities are on a different measurement and I think for your own personal sense of how well you are doing ---
Q353 Mr Boswell: If Meagan is right though that there is an implied discrimination by employers, the danger with that situation is that you look as if you have got the same and you probably believe that you have, and indeed you may actually have, but if other people will not buy the currency you are in trouble.
Ms Tye: Yes.
Q354 Chairman: Which is why we are asking the question should there be an objective assessment in your view, and you seem to agree on that.
Ms Edwards: I think so, definitely, because anybody in my situation, if they are living in Newcastle or Stockport or wherever it is, and they have got their family there and children in schools there, you do not have a choice about which university you apply to, so you need to know that your 2:1 from that university is going to be exactly the same as far as employers are concerned. There are lots of reasons why people choose their university and sometimes you do not have a choice. If I had not got a place at Oxford Brookes I would not have gone on the course because there is nowhere else I could have commuted to.
Mr Child: Certainly engineering is a bit different because my degree is accredited
by the
Chairman: Thank you for that, they were very, very good responses. Back to you, Dr Harris.
Q355 Dr
Harris: On this question there is this
research institute called
Ms Pitt: Yes.
Q356 Dr Harris: It also reveals this interesting figure, that by asking the students very clearly how much work they do in terms of both teaching and private study, 40 hours per week, obviously in a shorter timescale at the University of Oxford, and 21 hours per week in total of teaching and private study at Brookes, albeit over a few more weeks. Does that finding surprise you?
Ms Pitt: I do not think so. From what
I know the people who go to Oxford have been from a young age indoctrinated
into a system of working, so to them it is almost second nature, whereas for me
personally, coming from South Africa and then doing my A-levels which I did at
a sixth form college, it was not like a boarding school basically where you
stayed there, you knew when you had to work, it was very independent. The differences for Oxford Brookes students
and
Chairman: Can we just do a question on finance, please; we have three minutes left.
Q357 Dr Harris: On the money side to what extent is debt or income an issue for you in terms of carrying on studying now as opposed to getting a job? Do you have jobs outside?
Ms Pitt: I work during the holidays if I can because the maintenance grant that I have now is not enough so I need to bridge the gap to pay for my accommodation, but other than that I see university as an investment really because I know I am going to do well and I will be able to pay back what I owe in the future. That is not a problem for me.
Q358 Dr Harris: You are not worried about your debt.
Ms Pitt: No.
Q359 Dr Harris: As long as you do not have to repay it until you are ready.
Ms Pitt: Yes.
Q360 Dr Harris: Do you have a view, Sally?
Ms Tye: It was a pretty big consideration for me because obviously I was
coming up just as the top-up fees were coming in, and one of the reasons
Q361 Dr Harris: You are paying for it yourself with?
Ms Tye: By working.
Q362 Dr Harris: Right. Does anyone else have a view on this?
Mr Child: It might have been different if I had come into the system now but given that I started four and a half years ago I am on the old tuition fee system; consequently my debt is not nearly as bad as someone starting now. It would have been more of a consideration but ultimately I decided this is the career I wanted and I knew that eventually I would repay it.
Q363 Dr Harris: Clearly you are a selected sample of people who have not been put off by debt by definition, but you are not yet a selected sample in terms of your future careers. Is the fact that you have, those of you who do, some debt an influence on whether you might be interested in a less well-paid job that really interests you - I do not know if it applies to you, some people are interested in more research or teaching - or a well-paid job that maybe does not interest you that much except for the fact that it will be better paid to pay off your debt and that sort of thing. I know this does not apply to you.
Ms Tye: I am doing history anyway so it is not directly into a vocation, so that kind of says a little bit about the sort of person I am, but one thing that my father taught me - he has a job that he absolutely loves and he said you spend most of your life working, therefore you might as well do something you enjoy. That is kind of what I have always gone by. The debt is always going to be at the back of your mind but I am much more interested in doing something that I get a lot out of and that I enjoy.
Chairman: That is a fantastic place in which to finish this particular session. Can we just thank you all very much indeed for giving a splendid effort this afternoon and demonstrating just what a good university you are at.
Ian Stewart: Well done.