HL Deb 14 March 1984 vol 449 cc745-51

3.50 p.m.

Debate resumed.

Baroness David

My Lords, from the number of speakers it is obvious what an important and entirely relevant topic higher education is at the present time. When the suppliers and the consumers of this commodity, in both the public and private sectors, are being subject to cross-examination, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Annan, for putting down this Motion—particularly so as we shall be able to hear the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, make his maiden speech. He, as a prime mover in the setting up of the Open University, will I hope be speaking on that, and we all look forward to hearing him.

The terms of the Motion are very wide. As we are in a fortnight's time to have a debate on education and training and the White Paper, Training for Jobs, I propose not to talk of further education today, important though it is—not least for the preparation of students to enter higher education. Many questions are being asked at the present time of the universities and colleges by the UGC and the NAB. Whether all the right questions are being asked is another matter.

The Labour Party would have welcomed a wider debate on the whole future of higher education, its aims and needs over the next 15 years until the end of the century, and the role it should play in satisfying people's educational aspirations. Instead, the Government seem determined to restrict the terms of the debate to consideration of ways of cutting higher education provisions. I hope that here today we can go well beyond that and thereby perhaps influence the Government in their decisions.

The DES, in the Report on Education No. 99, made certain assumptions about falling rolls. We want to challenge those assumptions. In the report, a fall is shown in numbers entering HE from 162,000 in 1982–83 to between 123,000 and 132,000 in 1987–88. From a Written Answer I received from the Minister on 27th February, I understand that the assumptions underlying these projections are under review but the revised projections will unfortunately not be issued until around Easter. The figures have been queried by the CVCP, the Association of University Teachers and the Royal Society. The Royal Society, in its conclusions, notes that predictions of future demand based solely on gross birth-rate trends are seriously misleading. So far, the DES has failed to grasp the reality of increasing numbers of traditional candidates for higher education from social classes I and II and of the well-documented trend of the increasing participation of women.

The proportion of university women undergraduates has risen from 30.6 per cent. of the total in 1970–71 to 41.3 per cent. in 1982–83. In both France and the USA they have achieved parity of participation rates; in Canada, there are now more women than men in the system. Therefore, it is surely right to assume that this factor in the intake of universities will be steadily rising; this we must hope for. Those who listened to the debate initiated by the noble Baroness, Lady Burton of Coventry, last week will know that women have a very long way to go in achieving parity with men in the professions, in industry, and in public life. Women have not done badly in this House, but we shall not feel that we have really got there until we have a woman bishop on the Bishops' Bench and a Lady Chancellor.

However, taking into consideration those two elements of an increasing entry of those in social classes I and II (both because of the birth-rate not falling so fast there and because of social mobility) and the increasing number of women, the CVCP and the AUT predict that university admissions will go on rising until 1990. Then there will be a dip in demand for places to the current level of provision by 1995, but after that demand will rise again in excess of present provision.

There are other matters to consider. The past year has seen the greatest number of applications for places. In 1979, 53.9 per cent. of applications were accepted and, in 1982, there were only 46.4 per cent. Some 25,000 well-qualified young people have been denied places in the universities since the UGC imposed cuts in July 1981. Many of them found their way into the public sector, which responded typically quickly to need. It is irritating and, indeed, dishonest for the Government now to be congratulating themselves on an increased age participation rate when their intention was quite the reverse—to reduce the numbers overall and, therefore, the cost to the Exchequer. The numbers applying can surely be expected to go on rising with the increasing numbers staying on at school and at college (for whatever reason), and with the improvement in standards and performance which Sir Keith Joseph has said he is determined to achieve.

To aim to reform the school curriculum, to educate more young people in science and technology, and so on, and yet to cut and make impossible the next higher stage of their education, seems sheer lunacy. We want much wider access. We hope that young people from working-class homes who have so conspicuously not been going on to higher education will in future be taking their part in it.

The Royal Society paper Demographic Trends and Future University Candidates, concludes that the proportion of 18 year-olds in social classes I and II will rise from 27 per cent. in 1977 to 40 per cent. by 1988. There is bound to be greater demand for HE from this quarter. Mature students can be expected to come forward in much greater numbers, both for their own satisfaction and for retraining in industry and commerce. Early in 1983 the Institute of Manpower Studies stated that, although the recession might be suppressing the need for more trained graduates, training for the future was vital.

The institute emphasised that there is a training lead time of five years. On their projections, there will be insufficient graduates to meet the needs of an expanding economy. They drew attention specifically to electronics, computing and similar disciplines. I was interested that in two recent debates in this House—that on the joint report of ACARD and the Advisory Board for the Research Councils and that on industry which was held two weeks ago—there were repeated criticisms of the cuts in higher education and of course of the inadequate funding of research.

I am glad that the noble Earl, Lord Swinton, spoke of continuing adult education. The Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education—now defunct and with to date no successor to carry on and put into practice its policies and recommendations—did a lot of work on continuing education and part-time degrees. I should like to pay a warm tribute to Richard Hoggart and his council for their pioneering work. If the Government do not respond—and with rather more than the rumoured extra £50,000 for the National Institute of Adult Education—I shall consider it as positively insulting those who for six years did so much to publicise and prove the need and the demand for continuing education.

Adult education seems sometimes to be a totally blind spot with this Government. The report which they called for, The Legal Basis of Further Education, which was a largely agreed document between officers of the department and local authorities, appeared in June 1981 and has been ignored ever since, in spite of a great deal of prodding by me at Question Time, I may say. Much expenditure on further education at the moment is ultra vires, the report said; and if no action is taken soon one cannot help hoping that LEAs may be taken to court by frustrated parents and students or litigious ratepayers. Of the cuts in the Open University budget and the reduction of opportunities for mature students there, others, I know, will be speaking; but I must ask the Government for an explanation for one thing to do with the Open University. The Open University launched last October management education courses. Two thousand five hundred students have already been recruited. Block bookings have come in from substantial and middle-tier firms. Barclays Bank has lent a quarter of a million pounds in order to get these courses going and has done so at reasonable rates of return, unlike loans from the DES, where full interest has to be paid and the capital paid back within four years.

The Open Tech, created to educate more technicians, who are much needed, has gone up-market and started management education courses with around £2 million from the MSC. It is funding other agencies to reinvent distance learning at management level. Strathclyde has got £360,000 and Bucks. College of Further Education £700,000. So public money is duplicating effort. Do two Government departments not know what each is doing? I hope that the noble and learned Lord can throw some light on this extraordinary story.

Coming back to continuing education, in January there was published the excellent report of the Continuing Education Working Party, set up by the UGC, which the noble Earl mentioned. Its 23 recommendations I should like to read out in full, but I will refrain and be content with two: first, that the stated policy of universities should be to regard continuing education as a central part of their role and to give it status and recognition equal to research and to the traditional teaching of young undergraduates. And, secondly, that, in order to encourage universities to provide more part-time degree and diploma opportunities, the UGC should provide grant commensurate with that given for full-time students. The report happily echoes many of the recommendations in the Labour Party's consultative document, 18+: Expansion with Change, and, indeed, many of those also in the Leverhulme Trust report, Excellence in Diversity: Towards a New Strategy for HE. So, if the Government are not to ignore the very many powerful and well researched arguments for expansion of opportunities for mature students, they will have to revise very quickly their policies of restriction and contraction. The motive behind these policies seems to have been the simple desire to reduce public expenditure, even though this motive has now assumed the disguise of a restructuring of the whole system of HE. No one would deny that there was room for rationalisation, that the advanced further education pool was uncontrolled, but our contention is that there has been no well-thought-out policy for achieving a balanced and progressive system for education and re-educating the future generation who will be the innovators, the researchers, the managers and the teachers.

How much research, I should like to know, has gone into the value in lifetime rates of return to the community and to students themselves of a degree? In reply to a Question for Written Answer, I was told that recent studies in the DES suggest that the average real rate of return for full-time first degrees is of the order of 20 per cent. to the student and 5 per cent. to the community. But a discussion paper The Economics of the Degree Industry by Professor Robin Marris of Birkbeck College suggests that it is much higher at 7.6 per cent. and possibly considerably higher than that.

Instead of a positive and constructive policy by the education Ministers, there has been an almost Pavlovian reaction in accepting any demand for cuts and then there has been retreat. Last year, some universities were actually fined by the UGC for admitting extra students. Now we are told that universities are allowed to take in extra students but with no extra money. Over 4,000 university staff have been forced to take early retirement or so-called voluntary redundancy, with, perhaps, over-generous terms, to judge by the numbers who leapt at it.

But then the effect on the age structure of those remaining and the shortage of researchers for the future dawned on the Ministers and the New Blood scheme was introduced. Has there really been any saving of public money? I understand that £80 million had been saved in recurrent grant between 1980–81 and 1983–84. But £80 million has gone in redundancy and retirement payments and compensation. Provision for New Blood and information technology posts has cost £6 million and will go on rising until at least 1986–87. It seems an Alice in Wonderland situation. Action has been ill thought out, haphazard, opportunist and inept.

I have said that the Labour Party favours much wider access to higher education for women, working-class students, students from the cultural minorities, mature students and part-time students. In order to achieve this wider participation, the awards system must be re-examined. It is 20 years since the Anderson report on awards—which was then a progressive document—brought us the present basic structure, and it is time for a new look. The 16 to 19 area is in a real mess, but that is for another time. In higher education, the dividing line between mandatory and disretionary awards is becoming increasingly blurred and artificial. The original rationale was that mandatory awards should be available for students taking courses of higher education which had a strictly policed entrance qualification—normally two A levels or equivalent—but the whole administration of this matter has become increasingly theological, even Byzantine.

In 1978–79, the Council for Local Education Authorities, with the co-operation of the DES and the SED, established an officer working party to study the matter. It suggested that the criterion for a course to be accepted for a mandatory award should be that the course took the student up to the point where he could embark on his chosen career. The report was welcomed, but no action was taken. Action is urgently needed. The system is creaking. May we please hear what is the Government's thinking on this subject? I assume that they are thinking, and if not they ought to be.

Another point which needs clarification is the position of a student who is regarded as independent of his parents and their income. At present, three years' self-support is needed but in these days many young people, through no fault of their own, may find themselves unemployed. I believe that there has been some relaxation of the rules, but it would be helpful if, in the reply to the debate, the present position could be made clear.

Perhaps the most important subject which we should be discussing today is the relationship between the private and the public sectors, in which I include the voluntary colleges. On them there is a lot to be said, but, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry is to speak, I imagine that he will make their case. The question of the relationship between the two sectors is raised in both the UGC and the NAB questionnaires. The time is surely ripe for a real advance towards unifying higher education. This means equalising the resources in all senses, moving towards co-operation and planning across the binary line. Mergers may be possible and they are being investigated in certain cases where, geographically, the two institutions are not far apart.

It was, after all, the present Prime Minister who in her 1972 White Paper, Framework for Expansion, coined the phrase "the higher education family" to cover both the university and the non-university sector. Members of a family may not always see eye to eye on all issues, including financial issues, but they should stand together and take an interest in each other's affairs. I think it is not unfair to say that, at present, many people in the university world come fairly near to withdrawing the hem of their garment from non-university higher education affairs. Of course, there are exceptions and it is good to know of the close co-operation between Mr. Christopher Ball, Chairman of the NAB, and Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, chairman of the UGC, and that they attend each other's meetings. With the appraisal that is now going on, surely this is the time to take some very positive steps forward.

The increasing importance of local authority higher education needs to be more fully understood. It provides for nearly one-third of a million students following over 10,000 courses in nearly 400 local authority colleges. I quote from NAB's paper: The characteristic features of the sector lie in its variety, its flexibility, its responsiveness to the local, regional and national needs of industry, business and the public services, and its openness in terms of non-traditional access. About 150,000 students are on degree courses, many of whom are mature entrants…and a significant minority have come in without fomal qualifications. There are already more first-year home students on full-time and sandwich courses in the local authority colleges than in the universities. There were 4 per cent. fewer students in the universities in 1982–83 than in 1981–82; 7 per cent. more in the public sector. Even with the restrictions now being sought on expenditure there, it is expected that there will be more first degree students there than in the universities, even though the number of postgraduates will rightly be larger in the universities and, obviously, research should be primarily in the universities. The noble Lord, Lord Annan, suggested taking away some of the degree work from the colleges, but if that is done how many young people will be deprived of their opportunities, and the nation of much needed qualified manpower?

Many questions are being asked about length of courses, length of terms, methods of instruction, short vocational courses and so on, and it is right that there should be such questions asked. If there is to be change and greater flexibility in the system, it must apply in both sectors. We must avoid an outcome where the universities go on their present way more or less unchanged, and the public sector is expected to pick up the pieces and take on what is left over at a lower unit of resource.

Why is the university student so much more expensive? It has been very difficult to get up-to-date and comparable figures. A reply from Mr. Brooke in December last gave the net institutional average annual recurrent cost per student in 1981–82 as £3,120 for a poly and £4,400 for a university student. Of the £1,280 differential, £500 relates to teaching alone, not research. Can this difference be justified?

Dr. Rickett, director of Middlesex Poly, said in a recent talk that the difference in levels of resource for students is related to the staff-student ratios and the salary levels in the two sectors.

It is not only a matter of salary levels at comparable grades; it is also that the universities are allowed in excess of 40 per cent. of their posts at senior lecturer/reader grades and above, whereas in the public sector there are few institutions which have 25 per cent. of their staff at principal lecturer level. This position has been worsened by the decision of NAB to reduce the unit of resource by about 11 per cent; in the universities the unit of resource has been maintained.

If you look at the mixture of disciplines in the polys, 60 per cent. of the courses are in science and technology and in administrative and business studies, with 16.5 per cent. in art and design and other professional courses. So over 75 per cent. are providing just what the Government say they want. Let the universities concentrate, if they will, on their academic values, provided they do so at the same level of cost as Coventry Poly applies to its very successful engineering department and its research on wave energy.

Each sector should not necessarily be doing the same things. They can be different. Variety of provision is needed. What we would like to get rid of is the pecking order: universities top, polys next; other major institutions third, minor colleges fourth. I wish I knew how to get rid of the élitist attitudes, if we are to advance as a unified nation we must. We should aim at what Anthony Crosland wanted to achieve and which he explained in his speech at Woolwich Poly in 1965: The Government accepts this dual system as being fundamentally the right one, with each sector making its own distinctive contribution to the whole. We infinitely prefer it to the alternative concept of a unitary system, hierarchically arranged on the 'ladder' principle, with the universities at the top and the other institutions down below. Such a system would be characterised by a continuous rat-race to reach the first or university division, a constant pressure on those below to ape the universities above, and a certain inevitable failure to achieve the diversity in higher education which contemporary society needs". He then outlined the need for vocational, professional and industrially based courses in higher education, but continued: … a system based on the 'ladder' concept must inevitably depress and degrade both morale and standards in the non-university sector. If the universities have a 'class' monopoly of degree-giving, and if every college which achieves high standards moves automatically into the university club, then the residual public sector becomes a permanent poor relation perpetually deprived of its brightest ornaments, and with a permanently and openly inferior status. This must be bad for morale, bad for standards, and productive only of an unhealthy competitive mentality". We have come much too close to what Crosland did not want to happen. We have the "ladder". The question is, how do we get off it and have a really close co-operation and equal prestige? The people teaching and learning within each sector should know they are doing an equally important, if different, job. If, when the noble and learned Lord replies to the debate, he can make some positive suggestions as to how the higher education system could be made to work as one unified system, there will be real change and a brighter future for higher education and for the country.