Supplementary written evidence submitted
by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
When I appeared before the committee on 18 July to
discuss our Higher Education White Paper and reforms, I agreed
to provide you with some additional information.
BIS OFFICIALS WORKING
ON HE REFORMS
You asked me "What proportion of officials involved
in developing higher education funding policy and the White Paper
have been in the same post since November 2010?" In June
2011 there were 113.8 full time equivalent staff working on Higher
Education policy and student finance, 88% of whom had remained
in post since November 2010 when there were 121.8 full time equivalents.
After the Higher Education White Paper was published in July,
BIS implemented a Departmental-wide restructuring programme but
we took care not to introduce large scale staffing changes until
the Higher Education funding policy had been developed and the
White Paper was published and we ensured the continuity of some
key posts.
THE MODAL
AVERAGE TUITION
FEE
I explained that whilst many institutions had indicated
they would charge £9,000 for some of their courses, the average
fee payable by students is estimated at £8,161 when waivers
and bursaries are taken into account. You asked for the modal
figure. It is not possible to calculate this figure as we would
need to know the headline fee and support figures for every individual.
Institutions have only provided OFFA with aggregate information
on their fee waiver spend. This provides us with enough to calculate
mean fees (the £8,161 figure) because you do not need to
know how this spend is allocated across individuals for that calculation.
However it is not detailed enough to support mode calculations,
I also agreed to share with the Committee any analysis
we and OFFA had done on the Access Agreements—particularly
in respect of outreach. Please find some information below.
ANALYSIS OF
ACCESS AGREEMENTS
I promised to let you have any analysis of the Access
Agreements which OFFA had approved. OFFA themselves may be able
to let you have some further detailed information but I have set
out below some overall analysis. I know that the committee were
especially interested in outreach activity.
We have aggregated the 45 different types of milestone
listed by institutions into 12 larger categories:
The numbers of Institutions using a milestone in
each category are as follows:
| Category | Number of Institutions
|
| Care-leavers | 32 |
| Disability | 79 |
| Ethnicity | 46 |
| Low income backgrounds | 25
|
| Low Participation Neighbourhoods | 103
|
| Mature Students | 46 |
| NS-SEC and Socio-economic indicators | 108
|
| Outreach/WP activity | 113 |
| Part-time students | 11 |
| Retention and outcome | 127
|
| State school indicators | 89
|
| Other | 24 |
All Access Agreements for individual institutions are now available
on OFFA's website http://www.offa.org.uk/access-agreements/ and
may be of interest to the Committee.
Finally, I want to be clear that we are committed to reviewing
our reforms as they bed down and the range of consultations we
are undertaking will help us to do that. We will certainly be
looking at the National Scholarship Programme and evaluating its
operation in its first year so we can make appropriate changes
to put students more firmly at the heart of the system as we build
towards full implementation in 2014. This will include considering
the role of schools and colleges.
I look forward to the committee's final report.
The Rt Hon David Willetts MP
1 August 2011
| 
