Eric Joyce

Labour Party | Falkirk

Higher Education

Mr. Eric Joyce (Falkirk, West): The Government's commitment to increase spending on higher education by 30 per cent. over the next four years—a high level of investment—naturally requires the sector to adapt itself appropriately for the challenges of the 21st century. Some of the proposed changes, it is fair to say, have caused disquiet in some quarters. Today I should like briefly to address two issues hotly debated within the higher education sector at the moment. Some of the objections and arguments put by vested interests within the sector look, given the academic provenance of those putting them, to be based on surprisingly weak grounds.

The first issue is student funding. The Government intend to allow higher education institutions to charge top-up fees of up to £3,000 per year, subject to a number of caveats, including sound access arrangements. I attended a meeting the other day at which some higher education professionals argued that that would create an elitist system of education in the UK. That is an odd argument, since it is clear that our system is already elitist—certainly more elitist than that of the United States—in terms of access by less well-off students to what are considered the best universities. However, our system is pretty haphazard in its elitism.

Elitism based on high national standards is surely a good thing because it is only by such high standards that we will compete with the best in the world, but an elitism based on social class or simply being in the loop is regressive and corrosive. We all know people who attended public schools and achieved quite good A-level results: they were hardly the brains of Britain, but went on to Oxford and Cambridge. On the other hand, many of us also know people from less well-off backgrounds who attained equally good A-level results—in some cases, fine ones—who did not go on to any of our most famous institutions. It is certainly the case that people from state schools sometimes fail to set their sights high enough. That may sometimes be caused by a lack of confidence, but, equally, too few high-grade universities have done enough until now to widen access. It is good to see universities such as Bristol leading the way today.

It is worth noting that many people in the HE sector who complain about elitism per se are particularly good at getting their own children into the elite institutions. We should also be aware of the attempts by the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference schools, which have given Bristol university such grief recently, to ensure that the current strong correlation between social class and access to elite institutions is maintained. It is touching that HMC schools have chosen to highlight the importance of structured interviews and transparent admission procedures over the last couple of months, especially as they have kept quiet about how successful they have been over the years at getting students into Oxbridge and elsewhere on the nod, by knowing how the system works.

What is panicking those schools is not any lack of fairness on the part of universities such as Bristol, but the reverse. The fact is that while the Etons and Harrows have traditionally produced—and still do produce—the academic goods, many of the schools further down the HMC pecking order are aware that their local state schools are now achieving better results than they are, so they face a potentially eroding client base. The fact is that the new access regulator, combined with the reintroduction of grants for the least well-off third of higher education students will, over time, transform the look of some of our best institutions. There will, of course, still be places for public school girls and boys who perform to the highest standard, but greater fairness means that there will also be far more kids from much less well-off backgrounds, which will in turn ensure that standards, even at the best institutions, continually get higher.

The second issue that I should like to cover is, to use the vogue term, mission. I was lucky enough to visit some higher education institutions in China a few months ago, and it is striking that the Chinese Government are investing an enormous amount in 10 or so research institutions. The US already has a higher education system that ensures that some higher education institutions have teaching missions and others have research missions. That is their focus—teaching on the one hand; research on the other. To a large extent, they have been decoupled. That pattern is being repeated across the world, and it is time for us to recognise that we have to go the same way.

The expansion of the HE sector during the 1990s was a great achievement, particularly given the declining per capita resource that institutions had to deal with. However, much of it was done under the assumption of a tight institutional linkage between teaching and research. Where that works, it can lead to great results, but where institutions lack the necessary capacity, but try to conduct research all the same, results can be very patchy. Conversely, only a small minority of academics in our higher education institutions have a formal teaching qualification, and while standards are now improving it is far from true that all institutions with excellent research reputations have equally good teaching reputations. Moreover, it is fair to say that many of our best researchers lack the potential to be particularly good teachers, and perhaps some of our best academic teachers are not personally designed to be world-class researchers. That is why we need to inject coherence into the system to enable some institutions—and departments, in larger institutions—to turn out fine professionals, and others to turn out research of the highest order that is able to compete with the best that is produced by the Americans, the Chinese and other nations who will press us so hard in the years ahead.
Above all, those of us with an interest in, or who work in, the HE system must have a sense of realism about the order of competition that we face from abroad and about how poor access arrangements to date have led to a broad system that is both insufficiently fair and extremely inefficient in terms of exploiting our national talent for best results. It is of the utmost importance that we aspire to all higher education institutions being fit, to world-class standards, for their respective purposes.

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(11th April 2003, c557-559)