argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, in moving Amendment 420, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Wolf, I will also speak to Amendments 421 and 421A in my noble friend’s absence These amendments bring us back to the discussion we had previously about the costs and charges of the OfS. The purpose of the amendments is to probe the issue of who will act to control the costs and charges of the regulator—the Office for Students. Higher education providers will pay these charges, and hence students, at the end of the day, will have to bear them. The OfS is referred to frequently as a regulator by Ministers and others talking about the Bill, but nowhere is it clear in the Bill whether or not the OfS will have to sign up to the Regulators’ Code, published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2014. If it was clear that the OfS was covered by the code, it would provide some of the reassurance sought in a number of amendments to the Bill The code for example requires that regulators must consider how they can best minimise the, "costs of compliance for those they regulate"— the issue behind some of these amendments. They also, "should avoid imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens", and, "should carry out their activities in a way that supports those they regulate to comply and grow" As your Lordships can hear, the language of the Regulators’ Code is both clear and supportive. Can the Minister provide assurance that the OfS will sign up to the Regulators’ Code? It would be helpful in providing clarity and reassurance to the sector. I beg to move.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Government Operations
Alison Wolf (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I want to repeat what has been said by a large number of people in the Committee this afternoon about the issue of fees paid and how this is looked at and moderated. It seems fundamental to the future of the relationship between the regulator and the sector. An awful lot of what one gets from reading the Bill is the sense that they will be at odds—that the regulator is there to punish, to force, to fine and to search. Ultimately, that is completely destructive. The most destructive thing of all will be if people are fighting constantly over the nature of fees, what is legitimate and what is not Therefore, rather than repeating comments that I made in connection with an earlier amendment, I simply say how fundamentally important this issue is and how very much I hope that the Government will look carefully at the structures that are being set up. Fees and payments go to the heart of everything. As a policy researcher, "follow the money" is always what I say to myself. It would be very helpful if the Minister were able to assure us that, following this House’s deliberations on the Bill, that is one of the things that the Government will look at in terms of other legislation and statutory requirements, and that they will look at how, going forward, the OfS will interact with the sector in a way that is mutually beneficial rather than being made up of constant arguments and turf wars.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Government Operations
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I thank the Minister for her detailed reply and her very strong assurances in this area. I thank noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, a healthy relationship between the regulator and the sector will be hugely important to success. The assurances that the Minister has given us, and indeed her agreement to look further into whether the OfS should sign up to the Regulators’ Code, are extremely helpful. Again, speaking as an engineer and a former vice-chancellor, I think the language of the Bill is sometimes quite hard for a novice reader to understand. The language of the Regulators’ Code is excellent; it is clear and simple and is about building an effective relationship between the regulator and the regulated. It would be a real assurance for the sector if the Government looked hard at the OfS signing up to it. I thank the Minister for her reassuring response, and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, Amendment 429 is in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf. This is a probing amendment to investigate the relationship between the two higher education regulators—the Office for Students and the Competition and Markets Authority. The perception of overlap between the two regulators, the potential for conflicting advice and requirements, and the perception of the difficulty of collaboration under Competition and Markets Authority regulation are all issues causing concern in the sector. As an aside, this is part of the reason behind our desire for the OfS to promote both competition and collaboration I ask the Minister: would it not be possible for the sector to work with a single regulator, the OfS? If this cannot be the case, will she explain how the two regulators will work together with the sector to ensure they support, "those they regulate to comply and grow", as the Regulators’ Code says? I beg to move.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Alison Wolf (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I strongly support what my noble friend Lady Brown said. Up until now, higher education has been fortunate in that it has had relatively few different regulatory authorities. The OfS will be quite different from anything that we have had before I refer to other sectors. I personally know the social care sector quite well. Those of us who have worked with or in this sector or the health sector, for example, know that, when you have more than one regulator, if they overlap or if it is not really clear who is responsible for what, you get regulatory and expenditure creep. This is not necessarily what the regulators mean—at least, not at the top level—but it is very much the experience that one has. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, referred to this earlier in our deliberations. He talked about the problems that you could have in the health sector as a result of Monitor thinking that bringing institutions together was not a good idea when other people thought it was This is a probing amendment to ask for clarity, if not total simplicity, because there are very real costs when a sector does not have it.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): I thank the Minister for his explanation and the further detail he supplied. I would be interested to know whether there is any thought that there might be an MoU between the regulators. I also ask him to encourage the CMA to produce some advice for universities in simple language to explain its role and how it works alongside the OfS. I very much hope that we will hear more about a potential MoU and, in the light of his detailed explanation, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Alison Wolf (Crossbench, Unknown): I thank the Minister. For part of the last five minutes I felt as though two different plays were going on in the Chamber, somehow scheduled on the same stage. The issue is not, to repeat, whether there should be new providers. The amendment clearly supports that. The issue is whether without direct intervention activity we will get the degree and type of diversity that the country needs. I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, for his suggestion, which would at least place the importance of this firmly at the beginning of the Bill. I hope that we might pursue that. This is not about hoping or having faith that new little providers will do all these things. We know, factually, that they will not, just as we know factually from the whole history of apprenticeships that if you throw it open in the way that is proposed for higher education and just wait to see what people will get from the general fee regimes available, you will not get the expensive ones Of course I will withdraw the amendment for the moment, but I hope we can return to it. This is not necessarily about committees—I share noble Lords’ views about committees—but about making sure that there is a clear function and duty on the Secretary of State to address these issues. I would very much like to pursue the noble and learned Lord’s suggestion, and I hope we can return to that on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, we have heard about the importance of international students in the context of soft power and global Britain. I want to talk about the importance of international students from my perspective as an engineer. They are crucial to the delivery of our industrial strategy and to the UK being able to develop the STEM skills that it will need to deliver that strategy When I was principal of the engineering faculty at Imperial College, many of my engineering courses had more than 50% overseas students. Those students were not taking the places of UK students; they were providing the additional fee income that enabled Imperial College to provide the outstanding facilities to train UK students in key engineering disciplines. Some of those courses would not have been sustainable without the income from our overseas students. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has highlighted to us a number of times that universities have used additional funding that they now get for arts students in order to subsidise the high-cost subjects An outstanding institution such as Cranfield, for example, relies on overseas students to run the wide range of industry-focused Master’s programmes that are of huge benefit to UK industry. Again, those programmes would not be sustainable without the higher levels of overseas student fees that they can charge. These overseas students are critical to enabling us to maintain the quality of engineering education in our universities that will enable us to ensure that UK students can develop the STEM skills that we will need in future.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Martin Rees (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I support the amendment. I do not have much to add to the eloquent comments that have been made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and other speakers. I would like to express bafflement that we are still banging on about this issue, which surely has been a compelling argument for more than two years. In the time of the coalition there was already discussion about this but the Government resisted, although there was clearly support for this within BIS It is clear that what is happening is an own goal in a number of ways. We need these students in our universities for academic reasons, to sustain specialised courses, to maintain academic quality and to make friends in the long term. It is a matter of perception as well as reality. The reason why the numbers from India plummeted more than from China was that the Indian press were able to present the message that students were not welcome any more in the UK. So perception is very important. We will lose a great deal of soft power in the long run if we maintain this perception. The present Government’s policy is baffling, not only to many of us on the Cross Benches, but to many people within the Government and on the Conservative Benches. George Osborne expressed concern about this, and other Ministers have too There is the separate issue of whether we should be more liberal in allowing graduates with talent to stay in this country. Our policy has been strongly attacked by James Dyson, one of our leading entrepreneurs, who presented a report for the Conservative Government On all these grounds, I support this amendment and renew my bafflement that it is—at least up till now—meeting so much resistance from the Government. I hope that there will be a change of view and a realisation that it is an own goal to sustain this policy.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
David Hugh Alexander Hannay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I am most grateful to all who have taken part in this extremely lively and, I think, rather useful debate—useful, at any rate, if the Government Front Bench has understood the depth of feeling around the Committee. I took a slight risk in saying that my amendment was likely to draw support from all corners of the Committee. It is always a bit unwise to say that before it has actually happened. I thank everyone for preventing me suffering the ignominy of having wrongly predicted that. In fact, it has turned out to be the case I do not wish to get into a long argument with the Minister except to say that he has put before the Committee arguments which we have heard for about six years. I accept absolutely that the action taken by the Prime Minister when she was Home Secretary to close down "dodgy" language schools was valuable and necessary. I just wish that the Government would not now snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, because that is what they doing. They have cleaned up the biggest problem in the area, yet still go on introducing measures and using language which discourages overseas students. Therefore, I hope that the noble Viscount will use the gap between now and Report to reflect on the views of the House, which were so strongly expressed tonight. I hope I am not disobliging when I say to him that I propose to withdraw this amendment but not because of the reasons that he advanced.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
David Hugh Alexander Hannay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I have listened carefully to what the Minister said—although I was fairly appalled by some of the script that he had been given to present to the House. The answer to his question about what would happen if the Government wanted to make the provisions for the amount of work students could do during their study here less generous, but also wanted to increase the amount of time for which they could stay on in the labour market afterwards, is perfectly simple. You can do the second any day you like; as for the first—no, you cannot do it. It is not very difficult to answer that question As for setting things in concrete, of course that would not be happening. The amendments would allow the Government to make the rules more liberal any day they liked. It is just that they could not make them more restrictive. That is all. It is not a huge thing because of course the Government, as the Minister himself recognised, can any day they like come down with a piece of primary legislation saying, "An appalling loophole has appeared. Here are all the statistics and evidence for it and, despite this provision in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, this will override it". They can do that, if they have the evidence. At the moment, they have no evidence whatever. Such evidence as there is is that some 1% of students overstay. I will not place the whole weight on that because I know that the figures are based on fairly small samples, but the Government do not have any figures at all Of course I will withdraw the amendment now, but I am afraid to say that I do not do so because of the arguments that have been advanced in favour of withdrawing it. I say very clearly that we will return on Report and I hope that the Government, instead of polishing yet another series of unconvincing reasons to not accept them, will find some way of accepting them. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Ruth Deech (Crossbench, Unknown): Has the noble Baroness brought her mind to bear on whether the students who solicited the cheating essay would also be caught up in the criminal offence? This is not really my area of law, but I suspect that conspiracy to commit a criminal offence might catch those students As has been said—and as I know from my experience as the independent adjudicator for higher education—many foreign students, some for quite innocent reasons, get caught up in this. Part of the cure is to have better orientation for foreign students to explain to them what is expected. This applies in particular to Chinese students. I am painting this with a broad brush, but apparently they are told from the age of five onwards that one should collaborate rather than compete, and that one should listen to every word the venerable professor says and repeat it in exams, which is not the way we do things. They are therefore innocent in their own minds, so we need to clarify this amendment and ensure that foreign students know what is expected of them.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, noble Lords will be glad to hear that I will move Amendment 470 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Wolf as quickly as possible. This is a probing amendment with a simple purpose. We have many distinguished research institutions with long track records of PhD students receiving excellent support. However, some of these institutions are not able to award their own research degrees but have to do this through university collaborators. Examples, I believe, include the John Innes Centre and Rothamsted Research for plant sciences, and Pirbright Institute and the Moredun Institute for animal diseases The purpose of the amendment is to ask the Minister to think about whether there is an appropriate route to offer these institutions a path to research-degree awarding powers, should they wish to obtain them. There is a very strong focus in the Bill, understandably, on what is required for new institutions to get taught-degree awarding powers. These institutions come into a very different category. They are typically smaller and with smaller numbers of research students. Will the Minister be happy to think about whether there is an appropriate route to research-degree awarding powers for these institutions? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts. I beg to move.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-09
Topic: Education
Alison Wolf (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, the Bill we are debating today is an enormously important one. I declare an interest as a full-time academic at King’s College London The Government are creating the environment in which universities will operate and thrive or decline over many years, probably decades, and are changing it profoundly. Because a country’s universities and the nature of those universities are so central to what a country is—to its values, politics, culture, research and innovation—the Bill is truly important to the whole nation. Yet, curiously, the Bill has nothing to say about universities, as you will find if you have a quick search of the document. It says quite a lot about the university title, and at one point it refers to unauthorised degrees at, "a university, college or other body", by grant, but that is it. Otherwise it refers consistently to "providers" Clearly, the Government do not think that the term "university" is meaningless. If it were, neither the Government nor higher education providers nor universities would be so occupied with the university title When I dug around a bit, I found that previous legislation also has extraordinarily little to say on the subject. The 1992 higher education Act refers simply to use of the name "university" in the title of an institution, and informs us hopefully that, if the power to change the name is exercisable with the consent of the Privy Council, it may be exercised, with that consent, "whether or not the institution would apart from this section be a university" There is nothing more on what a university is. The Minister has kindly confirmed, in replies to Written Questions that the term is not defined in legislation but is a "sensitive" word under company law, which means that you need permission from the Secretary of State and a non-objection letter before you can use it in a business or company title.
Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-09
Topic: Education
Julia King (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I have put my name to this important amendment and speak in support of it. I declare my interests in higher education, as indicated in the register, and declare and acknowledge the research support from colleagues at Universities UK and my university, Aston University As the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, says, UK universities have an exceptional international reputation for teaching and scholarship in many forms. They are places where teaching and research are intimately interwoven. Undergraduate programmes benefit from research-based learning, and graduate students and researchers are beneficially involved in teaching. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Stern, commented very positively on that in his recent review of the research excellence framework. Universities are places where new academic fields grow from interactions between colleagues in different disciplines, and places where the encouragement of independent thought and the challenge to the status quo delivers technological change and innovation. Indeed, that is why so many large companies, such as Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, engage closely with universities—for example, through their university technology centres—to ensure that academics can challenge the stove-pipe thinking that can develop in large corporations As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, has commented, the autonomy of UK universities is recognised by our European colleagues as key to their exceptional positions in the ranking tables. Surely a broad and inclusive definition of the functions of something as important as a university in the UK is to be welcomed. That proposed in the amendment encompasses the key ingredients: autonomy; free speech; academic freedom; interdisciplinarity; teaching, scholarship and research; and, of course, the mission to contribute to society. We must recognise that being a higher education provider, delivering high-quality teaching, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for being a university. I look forward to the Minister’s response in this area.