Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-16
Topic: Education
Ralph Matthew Palmer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendments in this group. All have to do with collaboration and my wish that the OfS, in the structure of the Bill, should be able to generate collaboration between universities. The first area, in Amendment 89, is in access plans. Universities spend a lot on encouraging access, but they do not do so in an evidenced or collaborative way. For instance, it was in the papers yesterday, I think, that Oxford is still spending £12 million a year on bursaries, which has been shown to be the least efficient way possible of encouraging access. I have seen several examples of projects which do not have any form of evaluation at the end People commonly comment that we do not seem to be generating best practice, learning from it or spreading it. That is a great waste of money, which we are extracting, mostly, from individual students as part of their fees. Now that we are taking control of this process through the OfS, we ought to have much greater stewardship of the money that is being extracted from students, and make sure that it is being spent effectively. To my mind, the OfS should be responsible for making sure that that happens and it does not happen, in my experience, at the moment The second area, in Amendment 91, is the GREAT campaign. This was one of the innovations of the 2010 Government and has been, to my mind, a great success in many areas, but it has been half-hearted in knowledge and education. The principal reason for that has been that universities and schools have not collaborated to nearly the extent that they should have. The strong go out and market on their own name; the others are reduced to using agents that the British Council no longer controls properly. Particularly after Brexit, we need a much stronger and more co-ordinated effort to establish the value of British education. I would like to see universities wholeheartedly collaborating with this—and with a degree of compulsion, if my amendment is encouraged—to say that, yes, they all have a role to get students for themselves but they also have a role to promote British education as a whole as they do it, and to collaborate with what we are doing to promote British education Amendment 92 requires that the OfS be allowed to communicate with current and former students of providers. If we are to build something worth while out of all the work we are doing in the universities, as a basis for trading worldwide and for our relationships, a modern way of doing that would be through an electronic network. To build such a network, we must have contact with, or a means to communicate with, the people we wish to be members of that network. Yes, of course overseas students who have been to a particular university may well be cultivated by that university, to some extent to extract money from them but also to communicate with them. However, it ought not to be a separate system of 100-plus individual providers—or, if we take all the higher education providers, rather more. We ought to support all our graduates in China as a network of our Chinese graduates, giving them access to similar networks elsewhere in the world and to the network in the UK The difficulty with trying to run such a thing over LinkedIn is that you do not know who people are and you do not know who to trust. A network we ran on the basis of who had been to our universities would be much stronger and would have a strong community of values in that everybody in it would have been through the same long experience of receiving a university education in this country. It would form a great basis for international trade over the years, providing strength to us but also to them. Much more than just the education in this country, they would have a lifelong connection with each other and with this country, which would serve them well. To do that, we have to be able to require higher education providers to allow the Government, through the OfS, to communicate with their students; obviously not to extract their details willy-nilly against the Data Protection Act but to require the higher education providers to communicate with their students and say, "The Government would love to involve you in this new network they are building. If you want to join, sign here". That is an important thing to do. We need somewhere in the Bill the ability to give the OfS the permission to require higher education providers to communicate with their students on behalf of the Government or the OfS On Amendment 93, we do not have the information we should on destinations after university. We make attempts to do it; we have a six-month survey, which is sort of complete, and we make various attempts to sample what is happening later in life. We need to do better than that, and for that we need universities’ collaboration. To understand where each university course leads is an important part of informing students what is going on. Lastly, Amendment 445 picks up the Student Loans Company as a source of ways of communicating with domestic students. That is to some extent an adjunct to the earlier amendments but it is also a proposal made by the Higher Education Policy Institute as a way of improving our student loan recovery from people who have gone to work overseas. They instance the experience of New Zealand as a country that has instituted a similar system and has found that its recovery from graduates who are now overseas has been much better since they have had this kind of access I hope the Government will take all these amendments positively, because they lead to positive results. I beg to move.