Higher Education

My Lords, I declare an interest as being in employment with the Universities of Sunderland and York, and as a council member at Goldsmith’s College. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for, and congratulate him on, opening this debate. He gave us a broad view of higher education and rightly highlighted a number of issues that we will have to address seriously in the next few years. First and foremost, universities are places of learning, research and pushing barriers of knowledge. At a time of globalisation and our need for ever higher levels of skills, their role in those areas is crucial. The debate about how we finance research in universities and our international competitiveness will take place during the next few months. I shall address two other purposes of education, not because they are higher than research and teaching but because they sometimes do not receive the extent of debate that they probably deserve. They are the universities’ responsibilities for, or functions of, civic renewal, and individual opportunity and social change. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Luce, that they perform those functions not as agents of the state but as vital institutions in the country in which we live. I welcome the emphasis which the Government have given to these areas in recent years, in particular the challenge to create new universities in some of our towns and cities in the next five to six years. Any Government who seriously regard regeneration and community cohesion as one of their objectives would let us all down if they did not develop the role of universities in that area of national life. When one thinks that for every 100 university jobs, 89 more are created in the location of the university; that £1.45 billion is spent off campus; and that 42,000 student volunteers work in the voluntary sector, one concludes that one does not know how any town or city can survive in the 21st century without access to a university. I also welcome the Government’s work in widening participation. It is right that we ask how we get more students, both part- and full-time and of all ages and backgrounds, into university. We are nowhere near that yet, and I know that we need more ideas and greater success. However, I sometimes worry that we devote a lot of time to talking about how to get students there and too little time talking about how to keep them there. As we move to a more diverse higher education sector, we welcome its diversity without thinking through its implications and meaning. In terms of access, it means that as we get people from different backgrounds into universities, universities will have to change the way in which they teach and support them. I know from schools that many students going straight from school to university, and many adults going from no learning to university, get there only because the nature of teaching styles and pedagogy, and the extent of the support that they have received at school, have been transformed during the past 10 to 15 years. Too often, they get to university and find a university system that has not adjusted to those changes in teaching style and support that have taken place at school. As long as that is not end-on and as long as those changes are not made, we will continue to see in some universities a fall-out rate that we should fear and do something about. The kind of support that students now receive in schools to get them to university is matched only in Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which have the money to support students at that level. Universities which often take students from schools with lower grades do not have the resource to offer that support. In calling for a more diverse system of university and giving more institutions the title of university, we risk not having an infrastructure that recognises that diversity. I have in mind two areas: finance and recognition. I am not arguing that money should be shifted from research to access or civic regeneration—I would not do that—but that, as long as extra government money goes mainly to those universities that are research intensive, some universities will be forced to compete in that game. If they are good at regenerating communities and in civic renewal, and if they are good at widening access, they need a recognition system and accountability mechanism that gives them resources for doing that. We had that when we had the old polytechnics. I sometimes worry that in creating diversity we might not have an infrastructure that would reflect it. However, I very much welcome the Government’s initiatives on the whole, and just ask the Minister to reflect on those comments when she responds.