Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-11
Topic: Education
Stewart Sutherland (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, this amendment has two themes: transparency and accountability. I have to say to my colleague the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that there is a degree of scepticism out there. He is right to have identified it but I think he is not right to have overly easily dismissed it. There is a degree of scepticism in the Committee and, indeed, in the academic community. It may just be the usual academic neurosis, but so be it; let us do what we can to reduce it This amendment is in the interests of transparency and accountability. There is a worry that we do not know a great deal from the Bill about the criteria that will be used to make judgments about academic and teaching quality. I am not surprised at this; there was the same problem when Ofsted was set up and there was a big argument. It is easier to begin to talk about academic quality there, and how we measure it, because school systems are much more homogenous than university systems. University systems range in teaching, and the range of teaching and types of teaching and courses is much less homogenous than in schools. That meant it was possible, at the end of the day, which is why Ofsted still lives, to produce an inspection system that carried some conviction We are not proposing through the Bill—I am pleased by this—a wholescale inspection system; we are proposing that judgments should be made about the quality of academic work, and teaching in particular, and the quality of academic education. I would like to know how that is to be assessed. Is it by student opinion, is it by degree results—it is easy to twiddle them—or is it by employability? The latter is important but it may depend on the part of the country in which you live or in which the university is situated. So one could give a whole range of possible criteria This amendment is actually a companion to Amendment 22. I did not realise it at the time because I had not seen Amendment 22—but it is. It is effectively saying to the Committee that there is room here for further consideration. The main line of accountability will be the annual report. I agree that that is not just worth doing but essential, especially in the early days. It may just be that the annual report gives us all the information we need, but in the Bill—not least in Schedule 1, which we are debating at the moment—the annual report looks much more like a request for an accountability report that you would send to a vice-chancellor to be sure that the money was spent above the board and in a due and appropriate fashion—which I am sure it is. But the Bill specifies a great deal about how you account for financing but not a great deal about how you account for the quality of research, which we will come to, and initially, at this stage, education. How do we do it? I was stimulated further by—would you believe?—listening to Radio 4. The distinguished historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has a series at the moment on the Reformation. He started by reminding us that this is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation and set it in the context of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. What do these three things have in common and what do they have to do with the Bill? What they have in common is that they were all the children of university activity: the kinds of activity that go on in universities. If we are going to assess the quality of education, where is our place in that great pantheon of Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment? These are the values on which western civilisation still exists. That is where they came from I am not asking for a committee that will assess the published works of academics and say, "Ah, we have a future Enlightenment contribution here", but for much less: something that at least gestures towards the question of how you assess educational quality. I do not think that the Bill does that My solution—I cannot think of a better one at the moment but I may come back to this—is to say: let us have the annual report but insist that these matters which relate directly to the quality of education, and I list three or four, should be a specific point of report, not just whether the books are square. Let us see at the end of the debate that they will have in Parliament—that is the one concession that Ofsted got when it was set up; the annual report would be laid before Parliament and would not be a matter simply for the Department for Education—that the annual report laid there deals with these matters and is debated by the constitutional system that we have, with Members of Parliament in this House or in the other place able, because there is transparency in the information provided, to hold to account how the system is developing. I genuinely hope that it will develop well, and by and large I think it will. But that is not certain, and giving interested parties the opportunity to debate it on an informed basis in Parliament could be one way of making that more likely. I beg to move.