Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-23
Topic: Education
Robert Stevenson (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. It has shone a light in strange places that I did not think we would ever get to. As a not very good Scottish Calvinist, I am probably the least able to contribute to the debates that were organised by my noble friend Lord Murphy and the right reverend Prelate. However, they make good points and I hope the Minister will be able to help to move that debate forward I do not like the idea that my noble friend Lord Murphy’s institutions have to act illegally but be forgiven in the courts when they are finally taken account of. We should get ahead of the game and try to sort this out We started with the question of how research awards needed to be done jointly between UKRI and the OfS, if that is the body. This is something we will come back to, so it is no disrespect to say that we need not spend too much time on it now, particularly as the principal proposers of Amendment 509 are missing, in one case because of fog and in the other, I think, because of Cambridge. I cannot remember which is which—your Lordships can probably guess. It is therefore probably better if we pick that up when we come back That leaves the central issue posed by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is how we can find a structure in a system that has institutions of the highest quality by all accounts that can provide the assurance, support and effective answers to any of the questions raised by new challenger institutions, without those challenger institutions feeling that their operations and ways of working will be squished in some sort of force majeure that will be offered by the established club The amendments are very interesting. The words that have been used to attack the concept of probationary degrees need nothing further from me; I think that is right. That is not the way the Government should go on this. We are looking at a way of making sure that the quality assessment—the ability to come to an enduring decision about an institution that wishes to seek degree-awarding powers—is done in a way that reflects its ability to fulfil the necessary requirements in terms of capacity, financial security, academic capacity and the rest, but does not interpose somebody else’s view about what the institution should be doing on top of that The right reverend Prelate suggested that some of the stuff he was talking about had been going on since 1533. That puts in perspective people’s worries about a four-year period during which tests are made of whether institutions coming into the system are able to cope. Certainly, my discussions, which were mentioned by others, suggested that people who had been through that process found it valuable, so it would be very stupid to throw it away without further consideration. I went down memory lane with the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, because I started my career in academic administration with CNAA. It was bureaucratic and a little heavy-handed but it worked very effectively. It is interesting that the final vestiges of CNAA still exist in the Open University. Maybe that is where we might want to look, as a future amendment suggests, before we start trying to create something that will not stand the test of time or advance higher education in the UK, and may indeed cause problems, many of which have been raised in this short debate.