No, I will make some more progress.
The higher education White Paper emphasises repeatedly that the driver for the changes is that half of job vacancies from now until 2022 are expected to be in occupations requiring high-level graduate skills, but there is little clarity on what that means. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) asked earlier, does that include levels of technical professional competence? If so, why is there no strong linkage with the skills plan released by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills just two weeks ago? There is an obvious need for crossover between the skills plan and the higher education Bill, but the disconnect between them makes even less sense now that the Department for Education will be taking on skills and further education policy. If the opportunity for students at 16 and beyond to switch between higher education and vocational routes is to be real, why is the skills plan not linked directly with the HE White Paper?
A recent University and College Union survey showed that less than 10% of respondents recalled learning anything in school about higher education before year 9, or having any contact with a university. The Education Committee I served on and Peter Lampl at Sutton Trust have said for a number of years that it is imperative we give young people the aspirations they need at a much earlier age, so that they can make more informed choices about their future educational plans. I would like to see much more about that in the Bill, as I am sure would the rest of the House.
There are also huge question marks, following the changes to the mechanisms of government, about where the money is coming from. Will it all transfer over from the new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy? With the existing cuts across that Department, where will the resources to implement these wonderful changes come from, especially since the Department has huge school funding issues to fix?
The Government strategy for expanding HE and skills rests on their “loans will cure all” philosophy. As we have already seen, however, that is no guarantee. Less than 50% of the money allocated to the 24-plus advanced learner loans was taken up because of resistance from older learners. BIS had to return £150 million unused to the Treasury. On top of that, students have already been hit in the past 12 months by the triple whammy of scrapping maintenance grants for loans, freezing the student loan threshold and removing NHS bursaries. That has damaged social mobility for the most disadvantaged students.
The Bill places immense faith in the magic of the market. Central to its proposals are a concentration on creating a brave new world of what the Government are calling HE challenger institutions, which are likely to be private and for-profit. Before any Government Member jumps up, let me say that we are not in any way, shape or form opposed to new institutions. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State has had her say. I speak as someone who taught for nearly 20 years in what was a new institution, the Open University, which is one of the proudest boasts of the Labour Government under Harold Wilson. We will take no lessons from Conservative Members on that. The Government propose that new providers could be given degree-awarding powers straight away. Students would in effect be taking a gamble on probationary degrees from probationary providers. Who is going to pick up the pieces if it all goes wrong? It is still unclear what resources the proposed office for students will have to police this progress. What if the problems are not picked up until students have been working for their degrees for, say, 18 months? As I have said previously, the White Paper chirrups about the
“possibility of exit being a natural part of a healthy market”,
but students are not market traders and they do not easily slip a second time into the womb of higher education when they have been let down by that new shiny market.
Cutting corners in the process of becoming a higher education provider also poses a serious risk to staff and students, and increases the risk of public money being misused. We know that in 2011 concerns around BPP and the Apollo group caused the previous Secretary of State, David Willetts, to pause a major extension. Previous expansion of private providers in other jurisdictions has already affected the reputation of their higher education systems, with reports of phantom students, fraud and low quality of education. As Research Fortnight argued in May:
“The government’s proposed reforms are being billed as bold and innovative but in fact they are no such thing.”
It says the wording
“proportionate for the Bill’s regulatory aspects”
is “code for light touch” and that
“instead…the UK government has instead decided to emulate a model from which many in the rest of the world want to escape.”
Encouraging universities or new providers is important, but
“the title of university needs to be seen as a privilege…not an automatic entitlement”
and,
“in the long term it is quality that is at risk if the proposed legislation becomes law.”
One example of a potential threat to quality, which concerns a number of universities, might be the proliferation of private medical schools. Three new medical schools will be opened in England by 2017 and possibly as many as 20 may seek to enter the market in the next few years. These schools will be able to operate free of some of the restrictions facing publicly funded medical schools, in particular around the recruitment of home, EU and international students. That will create a distorted playing field, where existing institutions are unable to expand home or international intakes without penalty. It is also feared that they will have limited engagement with research, lowering the standard of medical education in the UK.
Baroness Alison Wolf was a part of the excellent Sainsbury report to which the Secretary of State referred earlier. In June, fresh from a stay in Australia, which has had its own provider controversies, she urged caution on the back of the experiences in higher education she had found there. She said:
“The Australian experience confirms the madness of the removal of caps on enrolments. I think it is morally outrageous that we encourage young people to take out these big loans and give up years of their lives when it is increasingly becoming obvious that in some universities the average earnings of graduates is lower than the average salary of non-graduates.”
UCU added its concerns, not least about the removal of minimum student numbers from the criteria for university title. So why are we scrapping the right to confer title by the Privy Council? In the rest of the world that might be seen as a symbol of excellence and scrutiny. The problematic unfolding and development of the office for students, certainly in its early years, means it will not be able to have the same sort of international clout, and it removes the role of Parliament from either approving or disapproving the university title as a backstop.
The alternative White Paper, produced by a broad group of researchers and academics—it is a good read—has also done us a service by reminding us of the history and chequered process over alternative providers under this Government and their predecessor. In December 2014, the Public Accounts Committee robustly criticised officials from BIS for repeatedly ignoring warnings from the Higher Education Funding Council for England about the for-profit sector. In the report published in February 2015, the Chair reported that
“Between 2010-11 and 2013-14, there was a rise in the number of students claiming support for courses at alternative providers, from 7,000 to 53,000. The total amount of public money paid to these students…increased from £50 million to around £675 million. The Department pressed ahead with the expansion of the alternative provider sector without sufficient regulation in place to protect public money.”
My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) has already referred to the famous photographed private memo casting doubt on BIS’s ability to solve this problem.
The Secretary of State talked about past objections. I think it was a recycling of something the Minister said recently to the Higher Education Policy Institute conference, although she did not go quite so far back as the Minister, who took us back to the 1820s and the “cockney universities”. When the Minister was asked what these new institutions would look like, having already had a lukewarm response from Google and Facebook, he could only say that a lot of them were interested.
The concern is for students whose institutions are forced to close. It is still unclear what resources the proposed office for students would have to police this or how affected students could be financially compensated and given a clear plan for completing their education. The White Paper says that all institutions will have an exit plan for their students, but how will it work? The Government’s own equality assessment admits:
“Ethnic minority students are more likely to come from a disadvantaged background which may mean that they cannot access the same financial or social resources as white British students in the event of a course or campus closure. We therefore expect”—
not “demand” or “will organise”—
“protection plans to have a greater impact on this group.”