My Lords, I wish to speak to my Amendment 69 very much in the spirit of the powerful speech that we just heard from my noble friend Lord Lucas. We definitely need more information about student outcomes. One way in which that information can be presented is the absolute information on the absolute outcomes. I am sure that the Minister will be eloquent on that. There is nothing in my amendment that tries to suppress any of that sort of information—far from it. However, the way in which the legislation is currently drafted means that it goes out of its way to exclude a different sort of equally valuable and relevant information: how our higher education institution is doing relative to the types of students that it has. That is a measure of distance travelled; it is a measure of how a university is performing, given the students that it recruits.
We have heard several important interventions in the course of our debate about students with special educational needs. A university that recruits an unusually high proportion of students with special educational needs, within the approach set out by Ministers, will not be able to signal that it does that; it may just appear to be a less well-performing institution. To offer a second example, which I know is a source of deep frustration and shame to us all, we should look at the performance of students from ethnic minority backgrounds. For any given level of academic qualification, a graduate from an ethnic minority background may do less well in the labour market than a graduate of similar academic achievement but not from a minority ethnic background. That is shocking; it is also a description of the British labour market as it is today. This would mean that, on the approach set out by Ministers, a university that had a disproportionately high number of graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds would do less well on labour market outcomes without the university being able to display its commitment and what it was doing.
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With these two approaches, the absolute data need to be complemented by data relative to the backgrounds and attributes of the students. That is the best way of putting pressure on higher education institutions to raise their performance, because otherwise they will be tempted to appear to raise their performance on the
standard set by Ministers by selecting the students who are easiest to educate and are going to perform best.
I also think it really matters for prospective students. Of course they want to see the absolute performance of the university, but they may also wish to see how students like them perform at the university. This makes it possible to follow up in the spirit of the intervention of my noble friend Lord Lucas, who talked about giving parents the information needed on how their child might flourish in a particular university environment. It is very relevant for them to know “How do children like mine do at university?”
So all that I am asking is that, as well as the measures of absolute performance that Ministers want, they also expect information that shows how universities are doing relative to the characteristics of their students. It is how, for example, the TEF—the teaching excellence framework—is already done. We should leave it to individuals to compare the information collected in those two different ways. They are both of value—I think of equal value—and it is a pity that the current framework of legislation in the Bill goes out of its way to prioritise one sort of data over another sort of data that is equally important for all of us who wish to hold universities to account for their performances.