Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-09
Topic: Education
Robert Stevenson (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, of course the serious side to the light-hearted comments is that the name will conceal as much as it will reveal about what is going on here. I understand entirely my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s wish to raise this in a relatively light-hearted way and I do not want to be a party pooper but we need a lot more certainty about what exactly this new architecture, which was one of the great calling cards of the Bill when it was first introduced, is actually going to do and deliver A number of amendments further down the list will bear on this and we may well need to return to the name once—and only once—we have decided what we are going to have. For instance, we are now told that the Office for Fair Access will have a slightly different role in government amendments due to be discussed on the next day in Committee. That will change the nature of what the OfS does because, if the government amendments are accepted, it will not be allowed to delegate powers that would normally be given to the Office for Fair Access to anybody else, and it will have to ensure that the director of the Office for Fair Access has a particular role to play in relation to access agreements that are created under that regime. In that sense, the power of the OfS as originally conceived was already diluted at the Government’s own behest. We need to think that through before we make a final decision in this area The question of how registration is to take place is a quasi-regulatory function. We have an elephant parading around the Bill—it is supposed to walk around in a room but perhaps we ought not to extend the metaphor too far—in the role of the CMA, to which I hope the Minister will refer. If we are talking about regulatory functions, we need to understand better and anticipate well where the CMA’s remit stops and starts. The Minister was not on the Front Bench when the consumer affairs Act was taken through Parliament last year, but that Act is the reason why the CMA now operates in this area. It is extracting information and beginning to obtain undertakings from higher education providers regarding what they will and will not do in the offers they make through prospectuses, the letters sent out under the guise of UCAS, the obligations placed thereby on the students who attend that institution and the responsibilities of the institution itself. I do not wish to go too deep into it at this stage because there will be other opportunities to do so, but until we understand better the boundaries between the Office for Students and the CMA, it will be hard to know what regulatory functions will remain with the OfS and what name it would therefore be best put under. "Office" is common to many regulators but the letters in acronyms can also be changed We are back to where we were on the last group: we are not yet sure what the assessment criteria and regimes will be, but perhaps we know more about the criteria than the regime. It is one thing if a committee is to be established with responsibility for assessing the fitness to be on the register and the quality of the teaching as provided. But if an independent body were established and called the quality assurance office or some such similar name, as it would be under a later amendment, it would be doing a lot of the work currently allocated to the Office for Students. I do not have answers to any of these points. I am sure that the Minister will give us some guidance but it would be helpful, when he is ready and able to do so, if he set out in a letter exactly what he thinks the architecture might look like and what the justification therefore is for the name The most poignant point was that made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden: that an Office for Students without student representation on it seems completely bonkers. I do not understand why the Government continue to move down this path. The amendment brought in on Report in the other place was one of sorts to try to move towards that. But it is a measure of the Government’s inability to grasp the issues here in a firm and convincing way that the person who is expected to occupy that place at the Office for Students, as provided for by the amendment, is somebody able to represent students. It is not necessarily a student, which seems a little perverse. I put it no more strongly than that Given that the current draft arrangements in the higher education sector for obtaining metrics relating to the grading of teaching quality in institutions has five students on the main committee and two or three students allocated to each of the working groups set up to look at individual institutions, there is obviously a willingness at that level to operate with and be engaged with students. Why is that not mirrored in the Office for Students? Regarding further use, it is really important that we get that nailed down. If it were a genuinely student-focused body—a provision which many governing bodies have—then the Office for Students might well be the right name for it. But until those questions are answered, I do not understand why the Committee would not accept my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s sensible suggestion.