THE OPEN UNIVERSITY

HL Deb 23 May 1974 vol 351 cc1604-22

2.34 p.m.

BARONESS LEE OF ASHERIDGE rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have any proposals on the future work and progress of the Open University. The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity to bring to your Lordships' notice the progress that has been made by the Open University, but perhaps more important, I am grateful that I have the privilege of discussing with your Lordships my very strong fears at the present moment because of some of the difficulties that now beset it. Of course, it is common knowledge that this University had a difficult birth, but that was only to be expected. There were all kinds of misconceptions to be got out of the way. Then there are always those who are blindly conservative, who dread any form of innovation—and I am using the word "conservative" at the moment with a small "c", because in the other place I found myself surrounded by those of little faith from every point of the compass.

But, fortunately for me, I had also some exceedingly good friends. Earlier to-day I was reminding Lord Robbins of an occasion at Covent Garden away in the grey dawn when we met there together. The Open University was mentioned in a derisory way from some source or other. He came up to me and said, "Do not let them break your spirit". I treasured those words at that point of time, because I was almost despairing of finding any top civil servant who would give me really friendly counselling. Then at that moment, who comes along to Belgrave Square, where we had raised our flag of independence, but Sir William Armstrong. It is always helpful to have the boss on your side. So there I was. There was a great deal of doubt. One can forget about the superficial kind of doubts, but an entirely different matter was the perfectly proper intellectual criticisms and scepticisms of those who treasured the quality of universities, who feared that some gimmick might be imposed on them, presuming to use the name "university" without through its scholarship justifying that term. It was very encouraging when doubts were of that serious nature. I do not think Saint Paul or any of the other saints ever struggled harder than I did to convert the doubters into supporters; and that was done with considerable success.

So we got going, and my great advantage was that the Prime Minister gave me total delegated responsibility. Following that, our planning committee was set up, and I knew when Sir Peter Venables agreed to preside over the original planning committee that I was in very safe hands. He kept it on the straight and narrow path and would not allow any deviation. He said: "The Prime Minister has asked us to establish an independent university and that is what we are going to do".

But we have at the moment reached an extraordinary situation. In a letter to The Times the other day, I put the core of some of the present difficulty. It seems almost incredible that for the year 1975 only 3,000 new students are going to be accepted and over 30,000 applicants turned away. There will be the 3,000 new students. There will be another 11,000 students who were turned away last year, making a total of 14,000. But how extravagant can we be? This country has a genius for throwing away its assets. We established with great difficulty an Open University. We are now finding that it is meeting a very real need, and when applicants come along we are actually saying to over 30,000, "We cannot take you on".

I want to ask noble Lords what kind of madness they think this is. I am not to-day going to deal at any length with any specific points, because I am too conscious that later in the debate very great experts will take part—indeed, that I shall be followed by the noble Lord who is the Chancellor of the Open University and, incidentally, also a student of the Open University. It was a great grief to us when we lost our first Chancellor, Lord Crowther. We could not have had a better or more able friend. He was worldly wise, he knew the ways of the City, he knew the academic world. Therefore, we are doubly fortunate in that when losing Lord Crowther, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, was gallant enough, not to say reckless enough, to be willing to take on this very serious assignment.

I shall say very little about what was crucial in the early days, which was to establish the right contacts between the B.B.C. and the academics who were working at Walton Hall. At the B.B.C.'s end, there was Sir Hugh Greene. We had attracted to us some of the most distinguished academics in their respective fields, and it was understandable that they looked a bit askance when they were asked to work on equal terms with educational and television experts at the B.B.C. But again, fortunately for us, Sir Hugh Greene understood perfectly what we were seeking to do and with the help of the noble Lord, Lord Goodman—who was acting, as usual, as an inspired middleman—we overcame a great many of the early difficulties, and made it quite clear that we were having no truck with those who wanted us to have a kind of "dawn patrol", with the idea that the time that no one else wanted on radio or television was good enough for a great university. We got rid of that idea.

The noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, is in his place, and I am glad to see that he will speak later. He will not mind my saying that I had a certain apprehension when Sir Hugh—not the devil we knew, but the saint we knew—vanished, and in his place, came the noble Lord, Lord Hill. But I am bound to say that very soon we all found that we again had an absolutely staunch and invaluable friend, so there was no problem at all that we were going to be let down. We now know that we need a great deal more radio and television space. I hope that one day we shall have a fourth channel; not the whole of it, but I hope that in the main it will be used for educational purposes.

I do not want to linger, because I know that there are others who will take part in this debate who can enlarge on those aspects with greater authority than I can. But I do want to say that the very virtues of the Open University can become a disadvantage. By that I mean that, first of all, we have to establish its academic status; there can be no compromise whatsoever on that. I even had friends of mine in my own Party who seemed to think that what was more essential was to go ahead with a kind of reach-me-down pair of old trousers to patch up some of the more naked parts of adult education. I explained at the time that you would never up-grade adult education in that most conservative of Departments, the Department of Education and Science, unless you could do it from the top downwards, and you should not try to go up the other way. I now believe that those working in this difficult and invaluable field of adult education, struggling with people who left school at 14 or 15, and all the rest of it, now realise that the Open University is their most valuable ally.

First, we had to establish the fact that those who were prepared to accept the disciplines of study—and maybe greater and harsher disciplines than at a residential university—were not going to be discouraged, indeed insulted, by being offered a second class degree. Please let me say that the Open University is not a kind of educational ghetto for the poor. It is not a poor man's university, a rich man's university, a white man's or black man's university, and it is not specially for the able or the disabled. I want to stress that. I hope that we will get rid of all this nonsense about there being something sadly wrong because in the first year its graduates were mainly teachers, instead of miners, engineers or dustmen. That was exactly how we planned it, and it is what we wished. To-day we are often asking teachers in this country to teach subjects that they themselves were never taught. We are asking teachers to-day to teach subjects about which they desperately need their knowledge brought up-to-date. Of course the teachers were first off the mark, and they had financial and other inducements and advantages in taking their degrees, but that was precisely one of the purposes for which this university was established.

I repeat again that from strength we can provide all kinds of ancillary services. We can help the physically handicapped. May I say that I hope that the newly appointed Minister for the Disabled in the other House will observe that the Open University can do more for the physically disabled than all our other universities put together. It is already doing that, and it will do a great deal more in the future. In saying that, I am not denigrating the work of the older universities, but in the nature of things the Open University is better able to do this work.

When I look back on my own undergraduate days. I remember two professors to whom I listened eagerly and whom I have loved and respected for the rest of my life, but we did not waste our time on the others. Most of us here who have had university education know that in the closed shop of a residential university there can be some rather dark corners. I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, being perhaps rather indiscreet and nodding his head in, I think, agreement. But you cannot have dark corners in an open university. Instead of a loading scholar being confined to a narrow group of students in his physical presence, we can have the leading scholars of the world—and we can draw them from all over the world—instead of being confined in a room projected on radio and television. There is no limit to the numbers that they can reach. No one is forced to listen, but the whole idea was that we should bring the best in higher education within the reach of all those who could be advantaged by it.

I mentioned those who are physically disabled, and the work that the Open University is beginning to do for the blind, the deaf, and those who are paralysed. But we really must behave ourselves. We cannot expect this University to carry out all the normal duties of bringing forward both undergraduates and post-graduate students, then load on to its back as well a whole world of students with special difficulties, and carrying special expenses that other universities cannot be expected to take. What I am hoping for to-day from your Lordships' House is that those of your Lordships who are concerned for students in general, and those who have a particular concern for the disabled and others, will make it clear to the Government of the day that we are not irresponsible people, that we are not doing shallow special pleading, that we know all the difficulties, but all the same more money must be forthcoming.

Originally, we said that the minimum intake was 25,000 students a year if we were to keep the advantages of scale. What is the sense in throwing away those advantages? I see the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, who, I hope, is taking part later. I do not think I need be very wise to anticipate that she will say something in favour of women who might otherwise be unable to be advantaged by higher education. We all know of the young women, and the older women as well, who for certain years are tied to the kitchen sink. They are looking after their children. They love their homes, their children and husbands, but they often feel intellectually starved. Again, this University has a claim on all of us, because it can also go right into the home. It can look after the daughter who is perhaps tending sick parents or sick relatives, and the mother who is looking after young children. It can do all that.

But there is another aspect of this which worries me greatly, possibly more than anything else. At the beginning when we decided that only the highest academic standards would be acceptable a number of distinguished men and women took their academic life in their hands and went out to the muddy wilderness of Walton Hall. They had to put on their gumboots to reach their rooms and faced all kinds of physical disabilities which they did not mind, but when we employed them we stated that they would have the same terms of employment as at other universities. In other words, they would have opportunities for research as well as for teaching and preparing programmes. Frankly we are not keeping our word to some of those people and we have no right to expect them to continue in our service unless we make it quite clear that we admire the courage which they show, that we respect their scholarship and that we will not go on exploiting them to the extent we are doing.

My Lords, there is so much ground to cover. We have in Dr. Walter Perry a distinguished Vice-Chancellor—I say that not because he comes from my own university—and I am sure that he has put before the Government a compelling case for more financial help if we really want this university to carry out all those various commitments. However, I would make one word of criticism of Dr. Walter. I think he is too modest; I think he may be in danger of being battered under by the Department of Education and Science and the Treasury and I would just say that there would have been no Open University if, in the early days, we had not fought so hard for what we believed was the absolute minimum of financial support to give credibility and possibility to this scheme.

At the present moment the university is bombarded with requests for courses in all kinds of subjects, including occupational courses. It will willingly do that extra work. I was in India in October and I found there that the Minister of Education had been at Walton Hall thinking of an Open University for India, which is nonsense if you take it literally, but they were adapting parts that would be suitable in the sub-Continent of India. I was in tiny Mauritius where I found again great excitement about the Open University. But you do not have to go to the poorer parts of the world. I have here the shortened version of the work of the Open University for circulation in America. The Open University has its offices in New York, because there are so many demands for advice, consultations and adaptations. We must consider the problems of the disabled. There are also many women who have never had opportunities owing to domestic circumstances and there is the whole wide world outside these shores where there is faith in British scholarship and where countless people want to know about us.

In conclusion, because I am conscious of the speakers who will follow me and who will talk with great expertise, which I cannot equal, I say: can we not do one thing properly? Must we start something so often and then denigrate it? Cannot we maintain the standards of academic excellence, give the extra laboratories, libraries and other facilities the university requires? Let this concept spread its wings throughout the world and remember that in doing so it is not only sustaining its own prestige, but is also doing a great deal for the teaching of the English language throughout the world and for respect of this country's scholarship.

2.57 p.m.

LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY

My Lords, in joining the noble Baroness, Lady Lee of Asheridge, in asking this question I know I am expressing, on behalf of all your Lordships, our gratitude to her for raising this important subject this afternoon. It is a matter of policy which should demand the highest priority within the field of higher education. The experiment of the Open University is of tremendous value. But it is no longer an experiment; it is a proved success. In any terms you care to name, whether it be of human beings or cost effectiveness, the Open University comes out tops. I think we can say that this is one of the achievements which will most be put down to the credit of the last Labour Government, which introduced the concept, and we all know how much is owed to the noble Baroness herself. Like her I will not attempt to move over the wide number of subjects which one could raise in this connection at the moment. Many of us hope, as does she, Mat with the coming of a fourth television channel we will be able to augment seriously the work of the Open University. It is possible that there are many ancillary services which the Open University can give in the whole field of adult education, but if I interpret the noble Baroness's feelings rightly these services must come second and after the proper use of the Open University for the undergraduates and now for the further degrees for which people are studying.

It is, of course, a university which I hope will get a great deal of sympathy from the Secretary of State of the Department of Education and Science. For he has gone on record as saying that he is against selection at 11, 12, 16, 18 or any other age. Many indignant people have written letters to The Times and other newspapers saying, "How can you have such an absurd thing as a comprehensive university?" My Lords, we have a comprehensive university: it is the Open University, a university where, in a way, the students select themselves. Unfortunately, owing to lack of space, which is really lack of money, there are not as many as we should like, but they are selected on order of application. No one is turned down because he or she has not the entry qualifications, although of course some people are given the advice that they probably are not yet capable of taking advantage of it. But we have a comprehensive university and I hope therefore that the Secretary of State will back his words with his actions and his actions with money. I think attention should be paid to the experiment which the last Government brought in, to my mind unadvisedly, of bringing in some people at 18. Now, I know this is an experiment and there may be a considerable case for continuing it for quite a long time until a judgment is made. But in my view it is a great pity if people are excluded from the Open University, as indeed they are, because some of their places are taken by this second-thought experiment of what you can do with 18 year olds who for some reason or another do not go to the ordinary universities. We know already that in fact there is not a great demand for these places and that the drop-out rate is extremely high and this is possibly something which the Government should re-examine.

But there is one major point which I wish to make to-day, along with one major series of questions I wish to ask the Minister of which I hope by rather informal means that I have given him some notice. One of the most important ideas of the Open University is that it should be a university of the second chance; that it would give people who did not have the possibility of going to an ordinary university a chance to get a university degree, and to earn one. I think there is still something lacking with regard to some of the least well-off of the people who might be the best students of the Open University. It has been calculated that the real costs to someone taking an Open University course is something in the neighbourhood of £500 over the whole period of the course—an amount which is almost certainly going up; my figures may be well out of date. These costs are covered to some extent by grants, but these grants are not mandatory grants, they are discretionary; and there is a wide difference in the various ways that different education authorities make these grants. I think this should be corrected. I really think that if we are to deal with the Open University and to give it a fair crack of the whip, these grants should be made mandatory and should cover nearly the full costs.

This is particularly so because some of the people who could most benefit from the Open University are the worst-off. There are women who are divorced, possibly, or widowed, or even deserted, who have children to look after, who are living on the edge of the poverty line and who cannot afford these extra costs. There are disabled people who are in the same situation; and there are people who are unemployed who are in the same situation. The sum of £500 over a period of four or five years may not sound a great deal, but to these people it is a lot. Furthermore, it falls unevenly in its impact on many of them because, for instance, the real costs may depend on how far they live from one or the teaching centres; and if they are going regularly to attend a teaching centre then, even with the best will in the world, the very wide distribution of teaching centres is such that they may incur very real costs.

These people may be (indeed, one knows that they very often are) deterred from trying to get this degree, which would be not only something which we would all want them to have for its own sake but something which might enable them to give back something to the community afterwards, for the costs involved—the costs which, in theory, are not really meant to be there. I know that if there is real hardship then there is a hardship fund, but as we all know that is not the right answer. The machinery should be there from the beginning, to make certain that no one cannot afford to go to the Open University. This is the situation at the moment, that some of the people who could most benefit from it cannot afford it. I hope that the Government will really look at this problem and establish a blanket scheme so that everyone who could benefit from it will be able to take advantage of it.

3.4 p.m.

LORD GARDINER

My Lords, I am particularly grateful to my noble friend Lady Lee of Asheridge for asking this Question and for so enabling this House, for the first time, I think, to consider this unique institution; and, of course, as all your Lordships know, if the fact of the Open University is due to any one person it is due to my noble friend Lady Lee. May I say at the outset that I agree with her in what she has always maintained about the Open University; namely, that what matters most is its academic standards. She has always fought for this. There was a danger that it might either be, or be thought to be, a "soft" way to get a degree, but I think that at the time at which we are speaking one can say that the whole British educational world now recognizes that it is in fact more difficult to get a degree at the Open University than at a conventional university.

My Lords, it has seemd to me that perhaps the best help I can give to your Lordships' House in this field is to explain how the Open University works, which of course a great many people do not know at all. This is not a surprise, because it is unique. One of the difficulties is the time taken by the academic and administrative staff at Milton Keynes to deal with the vast numbers of educationists who come there from all over the world to find out how it works. The British Council has laid on a course which takes a fortnight, as they reckon that it is not possible to understand how it works in less than a fortnight. I am bound to say that when the Senate did me the honour to elect me Chancellor, and I naturally wanted to find out how it worked, I found it extremely difficult. I read stacks of the minutes of the Council and the minutes of the Senate and the innumerable other committees which all universities, apparently, need to have, and I came to the conclusion that I should never really understand how it worked unless I saw it on the ground. It was really for that reason that I became a student until, at long last, I know how it works.

In the first place, it is open. My distinguished predecessor used to say, "It is open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas". You require, of course, no academic qualification to become a student. If you left school at 14 and have not studied anything for years, you may be advised to go to a college to take one of the short courses on how to study, but that is up to you. Then, my Lords, it is multidisciplinary, so you can engage yourself at work in one faculty the first year and another faculty the next year. It works on a basis of credits, which is of course quite common in America and elsewhere, though not here, except, I think, in Scotland. You need six credits for a pass degree and eight credits for an honours degree. Most of the courses gain you only one credit. There are exemptions for existing academic qualifications, the maximum exemptions being three credits. Most people—the large majority—find that they can do only one course a year. One or two of the foundation courses rate two credits; most of them are one-credit courses, although there are also half-credit courses. So, of course, you can take your time. The quickest you can possibly be if you do two courses a year, which is the maximum you can do, and if you have the maximum exemptions because you already have a university degree, is two years. That is very exceptional. If you have no existing academic qualifications you may, and probably will, do one course a year for six years to acquire your six credits.

Once a month you receive your course materials which are written by the academic team. It is usual, I think, to judge the academic standards at a university by seeing what is the percentage of doctorates among the academics. Judged by that standard, the Open University comes next after Oxford and Cambridge and before any other university; and the course materials are extraordinarily good. They are usually in four units, so one is part of a week's work. I say "part of" because, of course, there are the set books to be read, there is a radio programme and a television programme every week, and once a week you can go to your local tutorial centre to see your counsellor and your tutor. These centres are all over the country, usually held in some form of educational establishment in the evenings. We operate by the calendar year. Every course starts in January, and for many courses a compulsory week's residential summer school is required; and it closes in November with examinations. You are in fact marked all the way through. Every month you have a computer-marked assignment and a tutor-marked assignment. You are additionally marked for your work at summer school, and the concluding examinations are marked by outside examiners.

The biggest group so far is comprised, as has been said, of teachers. I cannot help thinking this is for the good of the education of the country. Many teachers have nothing but their teacher training certificate, and here is a teacher teaching, say, science in a secondary school who is really only one move in front of the form. Now he will be a fully qualified science teacher. I should have thought that would do a great deal to raise standards generally.

The second largest group are housewives. The teachers, of course, have something materially to gain because they get additional remuneration for their additional qualification. Many students have nothing to gain at all, and that applies I think to most of the housewives. In my own tutorial group there are in fact twice as many women as men; the teachers as a proportion are declining; the women students are increasing and they are doing it for a love of learning. One of my fellow students in my group told me that she became an Open University student simply because her children were studying particular subjects and she wanted to be able to understand their work so that they could all discuss it together. We have, of course, a certain number of husband and wife teams who are both students of the same subject. Indeed, we have many groups. I do not think my noble friend Lord Harris is here now, but I should like to say how very sympathetic and co-operative the Home Office has been in relation to long-term prisoners, of whom we have now I think some 200 students of the university.

My Lords, many comparisons can be made between this unique system and the conventional university. For my part I am naturally glad to know that we are the last university in the country which is likely to have a riot on the campus, because we do not have any students on the campus—or only occasionally. But if you do go to Milton Keynes on the day when for some reason or other there are present students as well as staff you can be pretty sure that all the serious looking men and women in their thirties and forties, and men with short hair, are students, and any bearded or long-haired young men will almost certainly be staff. There is a similar difference on degree days. We did get everybody into Alexandra Palace last year; that can never happen again. This year I have so far conferred degrees in Edinburgh and Cardiff, London and Manchester, and am about to do so in Belfast and in Birmingham. At a conventional university on degree days one sees a proud father or mother photographing their son or daughter in cap and gown. With us, of course, it is the proud children photographing mum or dad.

The family is enormously important. Nobody ought to dream of becoming a university student unless he has the active support of the family, otherwise it is hopeless. It is no good pretending it does not interrupt life as a whole because it does. There is absolutely no comparison at all with the amount of time which I am having to devote, even part time, as an Open University student and the amount of work that I had to do at Oxford to get a degree in law 50 years ago. One needs a great deal of determination to see it through.

The course fees and summer school fees, and the cost of the set books, amount to about £100 a year; so if you are going to take four years the cost would be about £400. Most local education authorities are prepared to consider a grant in needy cases, if only for the summer school fees. But, of course, the course affects life as a whole. The children have to accept the fact that between certain hours on certain days dad or mum will be studying in some bedroom and cannot be interrupted. My wife always knows that on Thursdays, which is my tutorial night, I shall not be in for dinner until 9.15. Great staying powers are required to see this through.

Finally, if I may say something on the subject of money, it seems extraordinary that for the Open University, so highly regarded and going so well, the last Government should have cut the grant to the extent that they did. There is a demand for continuing education which we can hardly meet. We have a certain number of what we call post-experience courses, but we are at present under call from doctors, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists, public health inspectors, chartered accountants, bankers, architects, and even the Lord Chancellor has asked for help in courses for the retraining of magistrates. We cannot at the moment touch any of these. The basic figures are the ones to which he has referred; that is to say, we know now, although the list of applicants for 1975 is not finalised, there will be about 44,000. We must, of course, give precedence to the existing students who have already started reading for a degree. If you allow for them that leaves only 14,000 places, and as we always operated on the first-come, first-served basis we have to take next the 11,000 who had to be turned down last year. That means that we are left with only 3,000 new places and shall have to turn away 30,000 students. As my noble friend has said, this means that we shall lose our economies of scale.

The capital cost of an Open University student is about 6 per cent. of the capital cost of a conventional university student—that is, if you disregard any living accommodation which a conventional university may have to provide. If you include that, the Open University student cost is about 3 per cent, of that of a conventional university. The conventional university has to provide lecture halls which are used for only 32 weeks in the year. The staff/student ratio is quite different. The average conventional university ratio is one academic to eight students; in the Open University it is one academic for 180 students. All this cost-effectiveness is going to be minimised unless the Government restore the university's grant to what it used to be. It costs about £4,000 to make a 24-minute television programme. That cost is exactly the same whether 10 students or 10,000 students are looking at it, so that the cost of additional students is comparatively small.

My Lords, I think I can say that the university has made a splendid start against the most enormous difficulties. How my noble friend ever got it through administratively, I do not know. How the Vice-Chancellor and his colleagues got it started in the time they did, I do not know. It is, as I have said, a unique contribution to a method of education, parts of which—correspondence schools and so on—have been found before but never combined as they are in the Open University. I hope very much therefore that my noble friend Lord Garnsworthy may be able to tell us that the Government are seriously considering their part in relation to the future of this unique organisation.

3.19 p.m.

VISCOUNT SAMUEL

My Lords, I should like to express my own wholehearted support for the Open University and, like previous speakers, to pay my tribute to my noble friend Lady Lee of Asheridge. Without her skill in piloting it through, it might never have come into existence. I think part of her success was due to getting the top people on to the planning committee. One of them we shall hear to-day, the noble Lord, Lord Fulton. Some Members of the Party opposite were doubtful whether the whole thing was worth while, and not all Labour leaders were persuaded to give their support. The late Mr. Iain Macleod dubbed it as "nonsense". But with the personal support of Harold Wilson when Prime Minister on a previous occasion, as the noble Baroness has said, the University came into existence four years ago.

Teaching began in 1971, and some students have already graduated and have their B.A.s. The noble Baroness, Lady Lee of Asheridge, complained about the limitation on numbers. There are two kinds of people: those who say, "my cup is half empty", and those who say, "my cup is still half full". I am not alarmed at the slow growth of the University. It has to grow by stages, and the fact that it has no less than 42,000 students spread all over the United Kingdom to my mind is a tremendous achievement, and if more money is available through the years it will play a leading part.

My noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner called the Open University "open" because it was open to all, and he has stressed that there are no entrance examinations. I should like to elaborate on that a little. Many school leavers do not go on to any university because at that time they cannot afford the time or the money; some do not see the need of a university education; some are not able to pass the entrance examinations required of all other universities; and many do not have the persistence to start and to carry on to the end. Later in life many realise the number of occupations that are closed to them, and many teachers who thought that a Teachers' Training College Diploma was enough find later that they need something more.

One can enter the Open University at any time in one's life as soon as one has decided, and as the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, has said, it is the university of the second chance. It is true that lots of hard work is involved, as my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner has explained. There are six courses, less exemptions if you have professional qualifications. I understand that each course involves about 350 hours of work, which works out at two hours a day throughout the year for six years on top of earning a living. Some give up, but most persist in spite of the greatest difficulties. I should like to commend to your Lordships' attention a book that has just come out called The Open University Opens, edited by Jeremy Tunstall. It is a book by 30 contributors and to my mind it is a model of what such a book should be. Ten students there relate some of their experiences, but the most important chapter of the book is the first which is, "An Interim History" by Brian MacArthur, the editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement.

As Lord Gardiner has said, this idea of an Open University has already been widely copied. Several are planned for the United States, and even Israel, which is ready to try anything, has begun to plan for one. But here I should like to utter a word of warning. There cannot be short cuts. Certain novelties in the Open University at Milton Keynes are not really essential. You do not have to have the United States credit system; and you do not have to have a university year that runs from January to November. Those are conveniences but they are not essential. But there are four things in my opinion that are absolutely vital. You cannot have any kind of entrance examination; you must have correspondence courses and tutors whom the students can meet; you must have specially devised television and radio programmes with your own text books; and you must give a degree that is accepted by all other universities as a basis for post-graduate study.

The United Kingdom network of part-time tutors is spread all over the country and their numbers run into several thousands. Summer schools are given in empty university buildings. Tutors meet students, unlike other correspondence courses. The number of headquarters staff is very considerable—1,500. Even so, as Lord Gardiner has explained, the cost is much less than that at an ordinary university. There are no student classrooms; you do not have to have student libraries because the students can use their own local libraries; and for science there are no expensive laboratories required because science students are sent their own equipment to use at home. Incidentally, this is so ingenious, so cheap and boxed so carefully that it is being bought by many African and Asian Governments for use in their own schools. Even the specially prepared radio and television text books are getting a wide sale outside the university.

I will end by saying that I think the University is a brilliant idea. It has already proved itself. I am not too unhappy at its slow growth; it still has to work itself in. But, together with the National Health Service, I should like to suggest that the Open University is one of the biggest contributions made by Britain in the second half of the 20th century.

3.28 p.m.

THE LORD BISHOP OF SAINT EDMUNDSBURY AND IPSWICH

My Lords, I feel brash at making any contribution to this debate when people of such experience and knowledge of the Open University are speaking. I was persuaded that I should take part by conversations I have had with two graduates in the first batch of graduates of the Open University and one of the tutors. Those two first graduates expressed to me the sense of personal enrichment and fulfilment which had come to them through the courses they had taken. This seems to me very much a dimension of life in which I am concerned, both personally and professionally. I believe that to a large number of people in this country the Open University is giving an opportunity of enrichment and maturity which, for one reason or another, they were denied when they were young. I think also it is of value to the nation in that it is reducing, even if perhaps to only a small extent, the educational disparities to be found in the population. It is giving to people who did not have it earlier the opportunity to receive higher education.

I understand that in 1973 the Government requested the Open University to experiment with the admission of school-leavers at the age of 18 instead of 21, and this has already been referred to during our debate. I do not know the reason for this request—perhaps I ought to have tried to discover it before speaking—but my immediate reaction, and that of other people who are concerned with these matters to whom I have spoken, is one of some perplexity, because there are educational facilities, not only in the universities but in polytechnics and other places, available for those school-leavers who are competent which would give them the kind of higher education they desire. These opportunities, until the Open University was established, were largely denied to older people who in the course of their lives had come to realise gaps in their intellectual equipment of which they had not been conscious when they were leaving school.

We have been told several times in this debate of the insufficient resources which are available for the Open University to enable it to meet all the demands upon it from people who desire to continue their education in this way. I share with, I believe, the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, some dismay in case the use of the resources available for the 500 18-year-olds who started this year leads to the diversion of opportunity from those people who were the primary target, so to speak—in other words, those for whom the Open University was primarily designed to help.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lee, referred to the services offered by the Open University to particular kinds of people as "ancillary services", and she mentioned people who were disabled in various ways. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, mentioned long-term prisoners, and it seems to me that if some advantage is given to people in those categories, this would be a most important service on the human level. I wonder whether the authorities might consider that some weighting of this kind could be given to applicants from the areas which the Plowden Report in 1967 called "educationally deprived areas"—those areas where educational facilities are not so freely available as in some other areas.

My Lords, I could really sum up this whole debate by a piece of what might perhaps be considered ecclesiastical jargon, and simply say, "Amen" to everything that has been said in praise and gratitude for the work which has been started.