Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-03-06
Topic: Education
Robert Kerslake (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 19 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I have already declared my interest as chair of Sheffield Hallam University board of governors. On this amendment, I should also declare that Chris Husbands, the excellent vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, is the chair of the teaching excellence framework panel established by the Government to oversee the development of the TEF The effect of this amendment would be to prohibit the use of the TEF ranking in either the setting of the student fee cap or the number of students that a university can recruit. This would apply to both national and international students, so preventing the possibility that the TEF ranking might be linked to the issuing of student visas. Others will speak on this latter issue in a moment. I would like to focus on the issue of linking fees to the TEF It is important to be clear at the start of this particular debate that there is a lot of agreement on the issues of teaching quality and fees when taken separately. Across the House, there is widespread support for the Government’s efforts to raise the profile and improve the quality of teaching in our universities. Students paying £9,000 a year are entitled to expect a consistently high quality of teaching, wherever they undertake their degree. This has been true for many universities and many courses, but not enough. There remain differences of view about whether the approach currently being taken to the TEF by the Government is the right one. This will be the subject of a separately debated amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. However, there is absolutely no argument about the need for an assessment of teaching quality and for data on such things as student satisfaction and job outcomes to be freely available. The Government’s announcement of a genuine lessons-learned exercise for the TEF after this trial year, and the extension of the pilot phase of the subject-level TEF by an additional year, are both welcome Equally, there is an understanding that student fees need to be able to rise to reflect inflation. The Treasury should not have been surprised when most universities increased fees to the maximum cap of £9,000 in 2012. This largely reflected the loss of other government funding. Our universities have been spared the gruelling austerity of other parts of the public sector, albeit at a cost that has been passed on to students and, for many, to future taxpayers. However, I have no doubt that a properly argued case for further inflation-level increases will, and indeed should, get the support of Parliament. The issue here comes from the Government’s plans to circumvent the debate on fees and allow inflation increases only for those universities that have achieved silver or gold rankings. There are four main reasons why this approach is simply wrong First, the TEF is not ready. There is not yet a settled methodology. Indeed, the very fact that the Government have agreed to a fundamental review this summer, including how the metrics are flagged, the balance between the metrics and the provider submissions, and the number and names of the ratings, tells us that we are some way off where we need to be on this. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, put it so well in Committee, the TEF is being asked to bear too heavy a load. As things currently stand, universities ranked gold and silver will be able to increase their fees, but bronze-ranked universities, perhaps 20% of the total, will not. Yet in our debate on the TEF the Minister stated clearly that bronze should be seen as a worthy rating. Whichever way we look at the issue, this is an approach to fee setting that has not been properly thought through My second reason for not making the link is that the TEF rating will relate to the university, not the subject or course. We will not see subject-level ratings until 2020 and yet we know that it is perfectly possible to have a mediocre course in an otherwise excellent university, and indeed vice versa. It can be argued that the TEF ranking gives an indication of the overall student experience at a particular institution, but the variation which so obviously exists within institutions makes that argument quite unconvincing My third reason why this is a bad move is that, if the case for the link is being made on behalf of students, we know that the body which represents them, the NUS, is vehemently against the proposal. Its argument is a simple one: there is no evidence of a relationship between increasing fees and increasing quality of teaching. It seems very hard to argue the case for a shift towards a student voice as a consequence of student loans and then to completely ignore the clear view of student representatives up and down the country My fourth and final argument is that there is absolutely no need to provide this particular incentive to improve teaching quality. The impact of the TEF, coupled with the demographic and other changes we are experiencing, will provide more than enough incentive. University-age pupils leaving school have fallen for four years and are set to fall for another six. The total reduction will be 20%. At the same time, maintaining and growing the number of overseas students is likely to be a real challenge. Put simply, we do not need to put further pressure on what is already going to be a challenged system To conclude, there is a strong case for promoting teaching excellence and for allowing student fees to rise in order to reflect increasing costs. However, putting the two together in the way the Government are currently proposing is both ill judged and unfair. I beg to move.