My Lords, as ever from the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, these are excellent suggestions and I strongly commend them to the Government.
I would just like to add to his second proposal, which is to
“facilitate universities’ communication through the Student Loans Company with their graduates without passing any personal data”.
He said that this was so that universities could market to the graduates what the universities can do for them, which is excellent in respect of lifelong learning. However, equally valuable is marketing to the graduates what they can do for the universities, in particular what mentoring opportunities they can provide for current students.
As noble Lords know, students from better-off backgrounds, particularly those who have gone to schools with strong university and graduate traditions, provide a dense web of networks, employment opportunities, advice on employment destinations and so on. Graduates who are not endowed with those advantages, even while they are at university, do not have the benefits of such developed networks. Graduates
could be engaged much more systematically in providing mentoring opportunities, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, says, at the point at which universities generally lose contact with their graduates, which is often quite soon after graduation, though the more years that pass, the more they lose contact. When graduates are 10, 15 or 20 years out of university, they are reaching senior positions in their professions and are often in quite niche organisations, such as voluntary organisations. Advertising to them the opportunity to mentor students, which, in my experience, graduates are very willing to do, could be a real and significant benefit to existing students.
Like other noble Lords, I am often contacted by students, just by virtue of the fact that they know who I am, asking for mentoring opportunities and seeking advice. There are very few of us who would not provide that as a matter of course, and I think the same would be true of graduates. If they were harnessed in a systematic way, which this would make possible, it could be transformational for the life chances and career destinations of graduates, particularly those who do not come from graduate families or from schools with lots of graduate connections.