Higher Education

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Luce, on initiating the debate and I thank him. I should like to see higher education keep up its quality but become more equitable and fully tap into the talents of bright young people from lower income families. It is not only important for them as individuals but for the economy. This requires three things: aspiration; information; and support, mainly but not exclusively, financial, which needs to be focused on young people who are still at school. I shall not say anything about tuition fees as I think that many others will, but as they rise and young people have to borrow money to pay them, which has to be paid back later in their lives, that turns the focus on to maintenance. Many young people do not want to have to borrow even more money for their maintenance and living expenses during the three or four years that they spend at university. Many of them work while they are studying. The problem with that is that many of them spend far too long working, which affects their studies. For example, music students have to spend many hours practising their instruments and find it difficult to take a job while they are studying, although they may occasionally do the odd gig to help their bank balance. The Government offer maintenance grants based on family income and the Access to Learning Fund supports students with particular financial needs. The Government have also charged the Office for Fair Access with the task of promoting and safeguarding fair access to higher education for under-represented groups, especially in the light of the introduction of variable tuition fees. OFFA says that by 2009 around £300 million a year will be paid in bursaries for low income students. However, it is widely accepted that the funding distributed by universities and the Government is not enough and that although student loans are available at slightly below commercial rates, many potential students are reluctant to take on a burden of debt that can add up to tens of thousands of pounds by the time they graduate. I investigated what a student would have to do to get the information he or she needs about the support that is available. It turned out to be a complex job. Looking at the websites of the various universities, I found out what Oxford is doing in this regard, which the noble Lord, Lord Patten, mentioned, and that Cambridge is offering similar bursaries and scholarships. Importantly, both those universities work with teachers as teachers give students the aspiration to attend the best universities. They have open days and invite teachers on to their campuses. We have heard about the Liverpool scheme and Imperial College offers bursaries under the study support bursary. There is a City & Guilds scholarship for engineering students and the R W Barnes Education Fund for engineering, physics and maths. There are many similar subject-specific grants and bursaries. Many things are being done, but an awful lot of universities are under-spending their access fund money by, on average, about 19 per cent. I should like to know why that is. Are people not applying? I have come to the conclusion that students lack information because it takes so much time to find it out. The National Audit Office has urged the Government to set up a, "““single source of comprehensive information for all Government grants, loans and bursaries””." Can the Minister say what plans the Government have to do that? It is no good having all these initiatives if students do not know about them. Before I finish, I should like to say one further thing about further education. Many further education colleges, apart from providing courses leading to degrees, provide the courses that give the students the qualifications to apply for degrees. Unfortunately there is a gap here, because a lot of those students find it very difficult to cover childcare and other kinds of costs while they are studying. The Helena Kennedy Foundation, of which I am privileged to be a patron, helps to fill this gap by providing smalls bits of funding to adults who are necessarily in low-paid jobs because they do not yet have the qualifications to gain entry to these access courses so that they can then go on to higher education. Many of them have a lot of success, but there is a need for more of that sort of funding.