Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-03-08
Topic: Education
Alison Wolf (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 62 to 66, 88 and 93, tabled by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and Amendment 72, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, to all of which I have added my name. I declare my usual interest as a full-time professor at King’s College London, but also note that I am a founding editor and editorial board member of Assessment in Education, a leading international academic journal in the field I have listened with interest to all the remarks made by other noble Lords and have agreed with the overwhelming majority of them. I just want to comment on an issue that is at the heart of the amendments to which I have added my name. It concerns the profound difference between using a single composite measure and having a wide variety of measures that are reported separately One of the prime rules of assessment—indeed, of measurement—is that you do not throw away information if you can avoid it. The Government have, rightly and repeatedly, emphasised their commitment to transparency and to giving students better information about teaching quality and other aspects of the higher education courses to which they might or do subscribe. But the trouble is that a composite measure is the opposite of transparent. It is also a problem that it is seductively simple: three stars, four stars—how can one resist it? We believe it is somehow objective because that is how we respond to a single number. In modern societies, we love rankings. But if we add up measures of different things and produce a single number, we are not being transparent and we are not being objective. What we are presenting to people, first, throws away large amounts of information and, secondly, imposes our value judgment on those different measures. When we use different indicators, add them up and create a single rank or score, we are denying other people the chance to see how it was done. It is irrelevant whether you gave equal weight to each measure or decided to do all sorts of clever things and weighted one thing at threefold and another at a half; the point is that by doing that, you have imposed your judgment. The students for whom these are designed—the students we want to help—may have different interests from you, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has pointed out That is why I support the proposal from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, that a scheme to assess quality must report individual measures individually. It is also why I completely agree with the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, that the last thing we want to do is impose on Governments, quite possibly for the next 30 years, the obligation to create rankings In this case, we are not even adding apples and oranges, which at least are both pieces of fruit. We are adding up things that are completely different. If the numbers are measuring or representing different things—and doing so with varying degrees of error, as is always the case—adding them up will compound the error. Obviously it would be nice to have a wonderful single measure, but the fact that we would all like one does not mean that it is better to have an unreliable one, rather than not have one at all. On the contrary, it is worse We know why most universities have signed up to this. On Monday, the Minister pointed out that if they do not agree to link TEF scores to fees they will, "lose £16 billion over the course of the next 10 years".—[Official Report, 6/3/17; col. 1140.] Universities are in a corner and over a barrel—as we have heard, that is exactly how you would feel if you were the vice-chancellor of Warwick It seems to me that this is all quite unnecessary. The Conservative manifesto did not commit to rankings, to a single measure or to labelling people as gold, silver or bronze. It said that students would be informed of where there is high-quality teaching. That is something to which everybody in this House would sign up. I very much hope that the Government will continue to listen and will move away from a current commitment that can only be harmful, for all the reasons that people in this House have talked about so eloquently this afternoon.