HC Deb 26 July 1974 vol 877 cc2152-65

Order for Second Reading read.

7.7 p.m.

The Minister of State, Department of Education and Science (Mr. Gerry Fowler)

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

The purpose of the Bill is to extend the scope of mandatory awards under Section 1 of the Education Act 1962 to courses for the new Diploma of Higher Education and the higher national diploma and to bring within this section of the Act awards for students following initial teacher training courses. It also provides that the requirement which makes eligibility for an award dependent upon educational qualifications prescribed by the Secretary of State shall be restricted to courses designated as comparable to first degree courses. The Bill is intended to come into effect from 1st September 1975, when it is planned that new regulations to be made under it will come into operation.

Perhaps I may say a few words about the present position so that the House can understand the changes that are proposed. Section 1 of the 1962 Act imposes upon local education authorities a duty to make awards to those students taking full-time courses leading to a first degree or courses designated by the Secretary of State as comparable to first degree courses, who satisfy a residential requirement and possess educational qualifications that are laid down in regulations made under the Act. These qualifications are two A level passes or their equivalent.

At present, students following courses of initial teacher training—other than post-graduate courses at university departments of education—are eligible for awards from their local education authorities under arrangements approved by the Secretary of State under Section 2 of the 1962 Act. These awards are, in practice but not in form, mandatory. Students following post-graduate courses of teaching training at university departments of education receive awards under Section 3 of the 1962 Act, and the cost is met by my Department.

Awards for students taking courses of further education are made under Section 2 of the Act and are entirely at the discretion of local education authorities.

The need for the Bill arises in the first place from the introduction of the new two-year diploma of higher education courses. It was the previous Government who proposed in their White Paper "Education: A Framework for Expansion" in December 1972 the introduction of new two-year courses with a normal entry qualification of two A levels leading to the Dip. HE. They proposed also that students following such courses should be eligible for mandatory awards.

These proposals are being put into effect by the present Government. Schemes for the introduction of the new two-year courses leading to the Dip. HE are already in preparation in a number of colleges. Most colleges will not he ready to start their courses until September 1975, but I know of two such courses which are likely to start this September. I understand that, in the light of this Bill, local education authorities are willing to treat those courses as though they attracted mandatory award, although at present the award would be discretionary.

The Dip. HE is intended to serve both as a qualification in its own right and as a stepping-stone to a degree or other qualification. I sometimes think of it as a stepping-off and a stepping-on point, because I hope that some people will be able to break their higher education and then come back into the system at a later point. I hope that it will prove attractive to students who are unwilling to commit themselves from the outset to a teacher training—B.Ed.—-or other degree course.

I regard it as essential to the success of the new Dip. HE courses that students following them should be eligible for mandatory awards, as the White Paper proposed. The present Bill will provide for this.

My right hon. Friend and I have received strong representations from outside bodies, including the student organisations, that the HND should receive parity of treatment with the Dip. HE in respect of awards. I have every sympathy with those representations. The HND is similar in level of the Dip. HE, and although it has a lower minimum entry qualification—broadly, one A level or the equivalent, though many students entering in fact have two A levels—its terminal standard is roughly comparable to that which we expect of the Dip. HE.

Our estimate is that at present there are about 17,000 students in England and Wales on HND courses, excluding overseas students, and of them about 14,000 are in receipt of awards from their LEAs, although not all of those 14,000 receive the level of grant which they would have if their awards were mandatory.

I have always regarded the HND as an essential component of our further education system. It is vocationally oriented, it is concerned with applied rather than with pure studies, and it is highly valued by industry and other employers. I do not consider that support for it can any longer be left entirely to the discretion of local education authorities. All students who gain admission to HND courses and who fulfil residential requirements should be guaranteed an award, as, indeed, they have long been in Scotland, under rather different arrangements. This can be done only by bringing them into the mandatory system.

Another reason for bringing HNDs into the mandatory system is the serious risk, in my view, that demand for HND courses would fall off if they were not to attract mandatory awards once Dip.HE courses existed and did so. This could have the effect of seriously reducing the supply to industry of manpower suitably qualified at this level, a risk which seems to me quite unacceptable.

I should emphasise that the HND has characteristics which clearly distinguish it from all other courses with one A level entry requirements. It is closely geared to the needs of industry and is validated under national arrangements by joint committees on which the Secretary of State is represented, thus enjoying a status and prestige which other qualifications such as college diplomas do not share. I hope that the extension of mandatory awards covering all Dip HE and HND courses will bear witness to the seriousness with which this Government have taken the Labour Party's commitment to the extension of the mandatory award system.

Now, a word about teacher training awards. Hon. Members may well ask why it is necessary to provide for students following initial teacher training courses to be entitled to mandatory awards when they already receive awards which are mandatory in practice. The necessity arises as a consequence of the introduction of the new Dip.HE courses.

The development of unit-based, or modular, courses which may lead to any one or more of a degree, a Dip.HE or a teacher qualification means that it will no longer be administratively practicable to maintain for awards purposes a distinction between studies leading to the teacher training qualification and others. The Bill accordingly provides that awards for students following teacher training courses should be brought within Section 1 of the Education Act 1962 and thus made mandatory in form as they are already in practice.

At present Section 1 of the 1962 Act makes eligibility for a mandatory award dependent on educational qualifications prescribed by the Secretary of State. The Bill removes this requirement except for courses designated as comparable to first degree courses. That is to say, acceptance for a first degree course, a Dip HE course, an HND course or an initial teacher training course will be regarded as sufficient evidence of educational suitability. One reason for this change is that it would be anomalous and unacceptable for a student with one A level to qualify for a mandatory award on gaining entry to an HND course but not to do so if he exceptionally gained entry to a degree course.

More generally, the change will benefit those students, mainly mature students, who are accepted to study for a first degree although they have not got the formal educational qualifications required for a mandatory award. The great majority of them, I must add, do in practice get discretionary awards of equal value from their local education authority, but the Government consider that this ought to be made a matter of entitlement.

I should like to emphasise that the abolition of prescribed educational qualifications is intended to remedy the anomalous position of students exceptionally admitted without the prescribed qualifications and that the Government will expect institutions to be vigilant in maintaining the existing high standards of degree courses. I hope that no one will suggest that the removal of this requirement will in any way lead to a decline in standards. That is not the intention, and we have enough faith in the universities and the CNAA to know that standards will be maintained throughout higher education.

Rather different considerations apply to courses designated as comparable to first degree courses. These are courses where there is not the safeguard of university or CNAA validation to ensure that entry standards are maintained. For students wishing to take these courses, therefore, eligibility for a mandatory award will continue to be dependent on educational qualifications prescribed by the Secretary of State. These will continue to be two A levels or their equivalent.

Clause 1(1) extends the scope of local education authority mandatory awards under Section 1 of the Education Act 1962 to include full-time courses for the Dip HE and HND and courses—whether full-time or part-time—for the initial training of teachers.

Clause 1(2) restricts to courses designated as comparable to first degree courses the requirement which makes eligibility for an award dependent on educational qualifications prescribed by the Secretary of State. The other provisions are supplementary or formal.

I do not envisage that any significant increase in public expenditure will arise from most of the provisions of the Bill.

The cost of extending mandatory awards to students taking FIND courses depends mainly on the number of students now supported from sources other than their local education authorities, who might decide to take advantage of a mandatory award. It is estimated that there are about 3,000 such students in England and Wales. If, say, about half of them received local education authority grants under the new arrangements, the additional cost might be about £700,000 in the academic year 1975–76.

That is the purport of the Bill, and I have pleasure in commending it to the House.

7.20 p.m.

Mr. William Shelton (Streatham)

We welcome the Bill, as far as it goes. It makes good sense to make the Dip.HE a mandatory award and to add the higher national diploma. We also welcome the teacher training awards. Anything that helps improve the status and standing of teachers and removes the difficulties of teachers and those training to become teachers is welcomed by all hon. Members.

Naturally, one always has a slight reservation about the withdrawal of any type of qualification to proceed along any course. However, I think we agree with the Minister that the institutions are perfectly capable of maintaining their own standards. No doubt the matter will be watched, and should there be any difficulties perhaps something can be done later. However, I do not foresee any problem in that area. I understand that the numbers involved are not great.

We have here a Bill about discretionary and mandatory awards and grants. In general, there are several rather untidy and difficult areas where these are involved. It is a pity that some of these areas were not taken into account in the Bill. First, there is the unsatisfactory situation in which many young married women training to become teachers find themselves. It is anomalous that married women aged 20 or less receive an award based on their father's income. If the father does not wish to disclose his income, perhaps because he does not wish his daughter to become a teacher, she can receive no award. This happens in probably only a few isolated cases, but the situation is rather nonsense. For a married woman of 21 or over, the award is dependent on her husband's income. This creates difficulties, though not perhaps in many cases. It is a pity that that difficulty and injustice was not taken into account in the Bill.

I believe that there is fairly widespread dissatisfaction about the working of the discretionary grants system. We must accept that any discretionary system will have variations. That is the very nature of something that is discretionary, but I understand that the original discretion given to local education authorities was not so much on the size of the award or grant but on whether the grant should be made. That is not how the system is working. There are wide and disturbing differences in the grants given to the same sort of students attending the same institutions, studying the same course, who happen to come from different parts of the country. Therefore, one does much better than another, which is an injustice.

Some interesting evidence was given to the Sub-Committee on Education and Science of the Select Committee which reports on further and higher education in the 1972–73 Session. The Association of Art Institutions said: The exercise of discretion given to local authorities results in the infinitely variable treatment of the student from one area to another. The National Union of Students gave a specific example of two students who were studying for the HND course in catering at South Devon Technical College. One student came from Ulster and was receiving £380 a year and the other came from the north and was receiving £280. One can imagine the feelings of the student from the north when he met his colleague from Ulster and found that he was receiving £100 a year less. Fortunately that is one of the awards that will become mandatory under the Bill. We welcome that. Nevertheless, that is an example of what is happening in a good many instances in various parts of the country.

The same criticism was echoed by the Society of Education Officers, which considered the number of hardships to be excessive. Sir James Matthews, the distinguished Chairman of the Standing Conference of Regional Advisory Councils for Further Education, considered that the difference between what one student received because of his location compared with another was far too great and that something should be done about it.

It has been argued that these differences in grants merely represent the differences in local costs. That is an argument that does not hold water, because the student often goes away to a college that is remote from the county which is giving him his grant. Anyway, that does not apply to mandatory awards which are the same throughout the country as are teachers' salaries except those receiving London weighting. I do not think that there is any argument that can justify these differences. It is clear that students have a ground for complaint.

A solution offered by the National Union of Students was to make all grants mandatory. I do not think that I can accept that. There is such a variety and wealth of different types of courses that we must leave discretion with the LEAs. Nevertheless, I regret that some way could not have been found in the Bill—perhaps the Minister could find a way, perhaps by a circular, of drawing the attention of local education authorities to the qualifications and to the various standards—to give much more detailed guidelines for the application of discretionary grants.

Secondly, there is a move, that is supported by influential people, that mandatory awards should be taken away from local councils and that they should be administered by central Government. The prime reason for that move is the substantial expansion of the number of university places that has taken place over the past five or 10 years and the impact that mandatory awards have had. The increased number of mandatory awards has placed a very great financial burden on LEAs and for such grants they have no discretion.

The result of mandatory awards—and today we are rightly making more awards mandatory—is that the LEAs economise on discretionary awards. It is true that a local education authority should plan ahead and that it should have enough money to meet its obligation to provide for mandatory awards and to do what it wishes in fairness and in justice in providing discretionary awards. But life so often is not like that. When the LEAs find that they have an obligation to provide an increased number of mandatory awards they cut back on the discretionary awards or provide the same number of awards but of a reduced amount. That is precisely the problem that I was talking about earlier.

We must agree that, in general, it is bad practice to separate administrative responsibility from financial responsibility, but a local authority is merely providing a service in terms precisely defined by central Government in providing mandatory awards. There is no room for local discretion. Further, Government determine the financial level of the award and the number of educational places. Therefore, it is Government who should have financial responsibility.

I draw the Minister's attention to the recommendations of the sub-committee I mentioned earlier and the evidence it took. One of those who gave evidence was Sir William Alexander, of the Association of Education Committees, whom we all esteem highly. He regarded this as a necessary change. The Association of Municipal Corporations also follow this line of argument and was generally in support of changing the mandatory grant from local government to central Government.

We welcome the Bill as far as it goes. We are sorry that it does not go a bit further and cover some of the other points I have raised.

7.31 p.m.

Mr. Bryan Davies (Enfield, North)

I want to concentrate on two basic points regarding this Bill, on which I congratulate the Minister. It will be widely welcomed in the education community. In some ways I feel that by introducing it at this stage in the parliamentary Session, and at this time of the year, the Minister is unavoidably hiding his light beneath a bushel.

He will get limited gratitude from the chief beneficiaries, in that we recognise that 99 per cent. of the staff at this stage are deeply immersed in their researches, form which they will emerge in due course to be savagely critical of politicians, while perhaps I per cent. may even be enjoying the advantages of the sun-kissed parts of Europe's beaches.

Similarly, we recognise that at this time of the year a substantial proportion of students are supplementing their grants by hard labour and it is unlikely that they will concentrate with their usual ability on the political scene and the issues that interest them. The Minister may suffer from the fact that even The Times Higher Educational Supplement—that gimlet-eyed guardian of all developments educational, in its slimmer, summer version—may not extend to the Minister that paragraph of praise to which he is entitled. I am not prepared to let my hon. Friend hide his light beneath a bushel on this occasion, because this is a very good measure.

I should declare an interest, as an individual who, prior to entering the House, spent many years in polytechnic teaching. I still do a small amount of part-time teaching. Those of us with experience of higher educational developments in recent years have long been critical of the fact that Governments which preached diversity of educational opportunity in higher education have done less than we would have liked to translate such words into action.

Nothing was more offensive to us than the situation in which courses like the higher national diploma, which was fulfilling an essential need for students, business and industry—and which seemed to be such an important part of the philosophy which launched polytechnics, in terms of their diversity from a purely academic base—received rather less support than they ought have done. In particular, we feel that a course like this suffered, in terms of its student position, in that their grants were subject to the discretions, very varied at times, of the local authorities.

I welcome the Bill as remedying what was not only recognised to be a grievance among students but was recognised by staff to be a barrier to the development of polytechnics along the lines of the 1966 White Paper and the philosophy which informed that development. This is particularly emphasised with the HND, because so often we were aware that the students who entered such a course had often fought their way along a rather more rigorous road to higher education than the straightforward O level A level, sixth-form career. In particular, this caused us to feel that such people merited rather better treatment than the discretionary awards often seemed to allow them.

Turning to the new diploma of higher education, I am not a root-and-branch critic of that proposal but I do have a severe reservation about it. I take this opportunity of bringing it before the Minister. I am in favour of students being able to enter perfectly sound educational courses which last for less than three years.

Indeed, many of us have recognised that the three-year degree course, as a foundation stone of higher education, has some limitations. In particular, we recognise the fact that students have often stayed on for a particularly advanced stage when they needed to secure a qualification which often had no relevance to the studies involved in the final year of the degree course. Therefore, the rationale, in educational terms, of the diploma of higher education is fairly well established.

There have been many exciting developments already regarding the Diploma in Higher Education, but the problem is that while the Minister has argued quite correctly for uniformity of provision between the higher national diploma and the diploma in higher education and initial training teacher awards, he has not argued for uniformity along another tack which I wish to commend to him.

One aspect of the higher national diploma—and it is true of initial teacher training—is that many courses in colleges of education are not subject to the rigours of two A levels entry. Many of us feel that there are many weaknesses in drawing that sharp line of two A levels entry as a basis for entry into higher education. One would have hoped that in the context of the Bill, in which the argument has been presented about the comparability of the DipHE and the HND in terms of financial provision, attention would have been given to the educational arguments for seeking to expand higher education in terms of greater diversity of entry.

Higher education is under a rather unfortunate cloud, in that the 1972 education statistics, published in the White Paper of that year, seemed to indicate a rather lower level of student places than many of us would have wished. The DipHE seems to incorporate the concept of cost cutting and reduction of opportunity rather than its expansion. Had it been introduced in circumstances in which it was a genuine advance of educational opportunity for those who did not qualify under the two A levels entry, it would have been launched successfully from such a base. I hope that we shall be able to put forward a forceful argument in due course for suitable amending legislation.

The diploma in higher education has an important rôle to develop colleges of education. The colleges will need to develop courses which provide a broad based education for the student rather than the narrower teaching qualification which was identified as their rôle in the past.

This measure is introduced at a time which, in both educational and parliamentary terms, can be described as the fag end of term, but it is a meritorious and highly enlightened measure, which will be welcomed in educational circles as its provisions are recognised. I congratulate the Minister on introducing it.

7.38 p.m.

Mr. Gerry Fowler

With the permission of the House I shall reply briefly to some of the points raised.

The hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Shelton) raised points about the system of administering grants. He spoke of the effect of the parental contribution, not least on married women, and the position of married women when not subject to the parental contribution. I am certainly prepared to look at these questions, although they have little to do with the provisions under the Bill or under the Education Act 1962. The points he raised in this respect have more to do with the awards regulations made under the Education Act 1962, and we can change those year by year without the formality of introducing a Bill.

The hon. Gentleman also spoke about the effect of mandatory awards upon local education authorities' provision of discretionary awards. Local education authorities would not need to cut back because of increases in mandatory awards as proposed in the Bill for the simple reason that mandatory awards now attract 90 per cent. grant to local education authorities from my Department and LEAs have to find only 10 per cent. Therefore by expanding the area of mandatory awards, as we do in the Bill, we should not be providing any disincentives to the LEAs to continue with their present provision of discretionary awards, or even perhaps to extend them.

I noted what the hon. Member said about the variation in the level of discretionary awards by LEAs. He will remember that the right hon. Lady the Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher) issued a circular in 1971 urging LEAs to award discretionary grants at the mandatory level unless there were good reason for doing otherwise. It would be a nonsense to have a discretionary system from which we removed the discretion, because it would then cease to be a discretionary system. But that circular is still in force and I hope that LEAs will take heed of its content.

My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, North (Mr. Davies) made a statement, with which I had much sympathy, about the desirability of diverse provision for higher and further education. However, he saw the DipHE as a blocking rather than a broadening of opportunity I do not know what was the intention of the previous Government in 1972 and I can speak only of the intentions of the present Government, but we see the DipHE as a broadening of opportunity by allowing students a wider choice of stepping off points and stepping on points within the higher education system.

It does not follow that if someone is admitted to higher education he must take it all at one go. Nor does it follow that if he finds that he is temperamentally unsuited to higher education, or that he has lost interest, he should have to leave, after two years, with no qualification. In that sense, I see the DipHE as a broadening of opportunity, not a blocking. I hope that the Bill will make a substantial contribution to ensuring that the new course gets off to a good start.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee, pursuant to Standing Order No. 40 (Committal of Bills).

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