Universities

HL Deb 06 December 1993 vol 550 cc787-808

5.33 p.m.

Lord Annan rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what action they will take to reduce bureaucratic burdens on universities.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper because the Government have inflicted four bureaucratic burdens upon the universities during the past three years.

The Higher Education Funding Council requires universities to create mechanisms for ensuring the quality of teaching. The council next requires a quite separate assessment by another quango of the quality of each subject taught. Thirdly, it requires the quality of research in each department to be assessed. Finally, it requires the costs of such research to be calculated in what one can only call a grotesquely complicated way.

I shall not weary the House by examining each of those processes in detail; I shall take just one. In my hand hold the book for those who have to assess the teaching in another university. It runs to 63 pages. It begins by setting out 11 criteria which they will have to use. It then sets out another six criteria that universities must satisfy in order to enable the outside assessors to judge whether such teaching is excellent, just satisfactory or unsatisfactory. That is called a template so as to impress universities that the Higher Education Funding Council is in the forefront of technology.

Three copies of the self-assessment must be sent to the Higher Education Funding Council. Universities must also provide five statistical indicators on entry profile, expenditure per student, progression and completion rates, student attainment and what employment or further study each student entered when completing his or her first degree.

Next comes course documentation under six headings. Samples of the written work of each student, including marking schemes and exam papers, must be produced. Details of intake and progression, welfare services, staffing and staff development, academic development plans, outline of management structure and quality control must be provided. Finally, the university is asked about the resources allocated to the subject being assessed; for instance, the number of books purchased by the library or the bench space per student in the laboratories.

Oh, I quite forgot—the university is also asked to provide subject information for each student and a monitoring report on teaching for the past three years. Oh yes, and it must provide timetables and the prospectus. Perhaps I should add that one of the statistical indicators is a demand to calculate what expenditure per student is incurred in central and administrative costs. Perhaps the noble Baroness can tell us what light those figures will shed on the quality of the teaching.

And what of the wretched assessors? They are presented with five supplements telling them in minute detail how to do their job, how to make notes when examining a class, what questions to put to students, how to meet teachers, how to produce, first, the feedback report and then how to write the assessment report. They are told, Do not use descriptions such as good or very pax, as these words have no clear meaning on the HEFC three point scale. After 11 supplements the document ends with three appendices. In one appendix it is stated that the specialist assessors must be acknowledged experts in one of the four subject areas to be assessed and have sufficient authority to command the respect of the institutions. Perhaps the noble Baroness can explain why one of the assessors of law at the London School of Economics was a member of Bradford University's peace studies department.

Your Lordships will be wondering how such a torrent of bureaucracy came to drench the universities. Let me hazard a guess. Put Professor Graeme Davies, the chief HEFC executive, into a room with a dozen able and industrious colleagues, all skilled in examining, and present them with a draft. Thal draft will be amplified, refined, altered; it will grow in volume as more sagacious observations and more sapient proposals are made. From the first those adroit men and women will be on their guard. Have they satisfied the council that they have created a system of assessment that no body of critics in or outside the universities can fault? They can guard their reputation only if their report is so thorough that no one will be able to accuse them of overlooking some item of information, however remote, that might be thought relevant.

Next, the HEFC itself will cover up in case the civil servants in the department give them a jab and a left hook. Those are the civil servants in the department who for years have been gloating in anticipation of getting their hands on the universities. In fact, the department itself is apprehensive that the Treasury will say that the audit is inadequate and therefore the case for the funds the department is asking for has not been made out.

Why has this inquiry and the three others been forced on the universities? I am sure the Government will reply that since student numbers have risen so dramatically universities need to develop new techniques for teaching. That is true. Universities have been forced financially to take far more students, with fewer staff to teach them and no money for extra buildings or ancillary resources. Meanwhile, the extra productivity of the dons—if I may use that word—has been rewarded by their income declining in real terms.

Of course, there is no perfect correlation between money and academic quality, but there must be some connection between the two. If laboratories are so overcrowded that students cannot get into practicals, if libraries are so destitute of basic books for courses, what kind of education can students get? The point I am trying to make is this: it may well be that universities should now revise their teaching methods to take account of the fact that we are moving to mass higher education in this country. But are the Government and the HEFC going about it in the right way?

I have here a folder which simply vibrates with wails of woe. I shall select the most comprehensive statement to show how unbelievably cumbersome these inquiries are. The statement was drawn up by the University of Edinburgh, which was visited by three auditors. The university had to submit documents weighing well over a hundredweight. Two hundred people prepared them at a total cost of eight man years in staff time and the photocopies required cost £3,500.

Teaching in every department in every university is to be assessed every five years. That will mean 500 man hours spent in staff time within the universities and 400 man hours spent by staff assessing other universities. Edinburgh estimates that photocopying will cost £3,000 per year.

Research is no different. The research of every department in every university is to be assessed for quality every three years. To cope with that demand, 20,000 sheets of paper had to be submitted by the university—staff time, eight man years.

Finally, the funding of research has been transferred to the five research councils. Each separate individual item has to be accounted for in the several hundred different research grants which the university receives. The cost in time is five man years per year—and for this the departments get not one molecule of extra research or of better quality research. The university simply loses vast amounts of time in research output each year. I may add that a study of how a university should account for its use of research funds was proposed by a firm of accountants and business consultants, not one of whom was in academic life. And what do these research councils get?—simply an illusion of greater precision.

Is this just propaganda from Scotland's most famous university? Ask Professor Charles Townsend at Keele. His department has just been assessed. He calculates that 200 man hours were spent and the assessors seemed to be distinguishing between teaching and learning analytically. That is quite a hard thing to do analytically. Ask the vice-chancellor of the new university of Plymouth. He says that his university is being turned into a mechanical production factory, dominated by ideology. But it is not the ideology of the class struggle. It is the ideology of consumerism and accountability. The truth is that, at the very moment when the universities have been screwed financially and need every penny to keep teachers in post and research on the boil, a vast new administrative burden has been put on their shoulders that removes what money they can cobble together for teaching and forces the teachers to become low grade administrators.

But there is a larger and more tragic reason why the Government have imposed these new burdens. During the past five years the Government have shown that they do not trust universities to teach or to research; and yet these were the institutions which throughout Europe and Asia, and even in North America where funds are vastly superior, were envied and praised for the dedication of their teachers and the overall quality of their research. They were not like some, at any rate, of the LEA maintained schools. The Government, rightly in my opinion, determined to tackle the low ambitions, the low level of attainment and the disgraceful lack of concern for the children by the interest groups in so many of our schools. But did the department ever receive bulging postbags of complaints from parents and students about neglect and skiving by university teachers? They know they did not. Of course there were cases of teachers who did not turn up at classes, who failed to comment on written work or who were drunk or offensive—but they were very few and when one unearthed a case of that kind, one dealt with it.

It would have been perfectly reasonable for government to have said to the universities, "We can't expand on the old lines. Mass higher education is going to give you a lot of problems and what is more we can't give you much money. In fact, owing to the needs of schools and further education, we're going to give you very much less money. But we can give you some advice. Will you have a look at these suggestions for monitoring your teaching and scrutinising your research? And would you bear in mind that we must get a lot of graduates who are employable in industry, commerce and the professions as well as graduates who will adorn the world of culture and the intellect? Please tell us how you are going to do this and help us to change the system. We trust you".

But no. No such message reached universities. The Secretary of State will not tell the universities what his policy is and how they can help him to achieve it. Instead, ever since the noble Lord, Lord Joseph, became Secretary of State, universities have been told that they are backward, self-serving and responsible for the poor record in British trade and industry. They have been told that they are incapable of reforming themselves. The HEFC was set up, not like the UGC as a buffer between government and the universities, but as an arm of government under direction of the Department for Education.

Let me not mince words. The Government treat universities like so many piles of dung. The Government no longer trust universities to assess their own activities. They intend to reshape higher education, taking business as their model, giving universities a bottom line as low as possible and adding a few increments to some to take account of special excellence in teaching or research. The excellence is to be judged by quangos set up to push the universities around.

What is the result of the Government trying to manage the universities? Universities were first told that their grant depended on the excellence of their departments in research —although the polys, which have now been upgraded to universities, were never prepared or intended to do research. No one knows whether a department is graded on the performance of its stars in the department or the aggregate of research in the department. No one knows whether long-term research is put on a par with short-term research. Both are very important. Now that teaching is under review enormous energy is spent by the dons in manipulating the formulae to generate the highest possible grant. They call that creative accounting. That is what happens when government are perceived as an enemy.

I am afraid that the noble Baroness will have up her sleeve a list of the occasions when universities were slow to respond to government. The noble Baroness will recall that I am something of a blackleg among former vice-chancellors. I spent much of my time as an active vice-chancellor trying to persuade universities to bring down costs instead of howling for more money. I backed Sir Kenneth Berrill's proposals when he was chairman of the UGC to curb student unions—proposals not unlike those the Government are bringing forward—at a time when the then Master of Birkbeck, with whom I clashed, and other vice-chancellors and principals opposed them. I shall be interested to hear what the present Master of Birkbeck has to say on these proposals when we consider the matter in committee next year.

As regards overseas student fees, student loans, even on tenure and differential payments, I consider that the Government were right and the universities were wrong. I recollect how often universities missed opportunities to respond, but with the exception of the University College of Cardiff where a misguided and stubborn principal decided to run his institution into deficit rather than retrench to meet the cuts of 1981. With that one exception universities were not scandalous in wasting resources. They operated with a tiny administrative staff. Nearly every penny went into teaching and research with the result that they cannot, at the drop of a hat, provide the kind of documented reassurance that government are now demanding. I do not believe that they deserve to be bullied and kicked around with contempt as is happening today.

Baroness White

My Lords, perhaps I may interrupt the noble Lord, because he mentioned one particular university. Perhaps I may point out that we did get rid of the person in question.

Lord Annan

My Lords, a little late perhaps, but nevertheless I take the point. The Government have announced a programme of massive de-regu]lation. Why not start with a little de-regulation of the universities? The Home Secretary has said that the police are hampered in fighting crime by excessive paperwork. The universities are hampered by exactly the same thing at the moment.

One of the paradoxes of Conservative Governments has been that they want to privatise services and reduce the number of civil servants, but they multiply bureaucrats. As the well-known journalist, Mr. Lunchtime O'Booze, used to say, "Surely, shorne mishstake".

So I appeal to the noble Baroness to put these matters to rights and I look with some hope of success for two reasons. She did so in the schools this summer. When her right honourable friend fell ill she sorted out what had become an administrative scandal and reduced the vast bureaucratic burden of testing performance in the schools. Could she do the same in the universities?

The second reason is this, and it is more serious: very few Ministers—and certainly not the present Secretary of State—have served in the Armed Forces. But the noble Baroness has. She was in the WAAF and she will know that the first duty of an officer is to gain the confidence of the men and women under him or her. If she can do that they will follow and face discomfort and dangers that they would never have believed that they would have been able to do. Trust is everything. Can she now (and I am sure she can) give us some leadership? Can she stop using the HEFC as a sewage disposal plant and treat the universities not as ordure but as the rich soil in which the generations to come will grow to maturity? She would restore trust if she could tell the universities that it is up to them to monitor their teaching and research. If she cannot, I fear that what will happen in the universities will be what happened in the schools—there will be a boycott. I await her answer with lively expectation.

5.53 p.m.

Lord Beloff

My Lords, I would share the "lively expectation" of the noble Lord, Lord Annan, were it not for the fact that I believe that the malady is even deeper than the one which he has diagnosed. What we have seen in relation to the universities is not merely the imposition of the absurd and nonsensical regulations, assessments, audits and all that rubbish which the noble Lord, Lord Annan, spoke about but, going back even earlier, a general unwillingness to accept what is accepted in other walks of life and in other aspects of government; namely, that there is a cost to bureaucracy; that it is possible to do the right thing and yet to do it in the wrong way. It is a curious thought that the present Chancellor of the Exchequer—since he adopted his latest guise, he keeps telling us of the importance of not overspending on administration and doing everything in the most economical way—seems to have thought nothing at all about this during his tenure of the secretaryship of state at the Department for Education.

Some of the examples are glaring. Perhaps I may give some which have been put to me by one of the newest universities. As noble Lords know, at the moment students have fees which are paid by the local authorities. Eventually they are reimbursed from central government. But while that goes on the individual student and the individual university has endless trouble dealing with the variety and large number of local authorities from which the students may be drawn, in chasing up payments which have gone astray or which have failed to arrive on time. No doubt at the end of it the local authorities have some communication with the department in order to recover the money which they have paid out. One would have thought that, as the local authority awards are simply an historical result of the fact that many years ago when there was very little public support for students such awards were given, that is hardly a reason for them to retain the function. They have no discretion in the matter as regards mandatory awards. They retain that function when it could be done more simply.

It has been suggested that the Government are now looking at ways for students themselves to pay fees. That is not a topic on which we need enlarge. But my impression is that, were that to happen, we shall have a situation where the students are required to pay their fees in drachmas and at a bank in Lapland. That is the normal procedure of the Department for Education.

We know that to be the situation because of the experience of student loans. Noble Lords may remember—at least some noble Lords will remember—that when the student loans scheme was presented to this House, several of us pointed out that if you wanted the students to pay a proportion of their educational costs—and this is not something with which I disagree—there are simple ways in which it can be done. There is the Australian way of a graduate tax or any other automatic recovery. Instead of that we have this business set-up at vast expense in Scotland and the students have to borrow from it in ways which again add enormously not only to calls on their time and their purses, but also to calls on the time of the university. The university has to interview for at least 15 minutes every student who asks for a student loan.

There are endless forms to fill in. We have heard a lot about forms and there will be a lot more. So whenever there is something that could or should be done, for some reason this particular department of state goes about it in the most clumsy and expensive way which increases the burden on university institutions. I shall give another example. As part of the business culture to which the noble Lord, Lord Annan, referred, we now have performance-related pay increases whereby universities are asked to rate or to account for those who might be given a rise because of their performance. The universities create records of achievement for that purpose. They put it all on computer. That is the modern way. Then, at the last minute, they receive pages and pages of forms—I have some here—which they have to fill in about each individual member of staff, the questions not being identical to those as regards their own records. Again, a huge administrative burden is thus placed on the universities.

I sometimes wonder whether there is any understanding at all in the department about what it means to take people away from their proper business of teaching and research to fill in forms and to carry out interviews that are not strictly necessary and whether, when we talk about expanding the budget for higher education, enough attention is paid to the fact that so much of that expenditure is wholly and necessarily unproductive.

Of course, there are even more grotesque things happening when it comes to universities the reputation of which, as the noble Lord said, might be thought to be impeccable. I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, will give some examples of the unnecessary expenditure that is being imposed on the University of Oxford, so I should like to take one or two different points. Universities are now obliged to inform the higher education funding council of their strategic plans, including their aims and objectives. It has not so far been possible to discover from the council the difference between an "aim" and an "objective", but we can take it broadly that we know what is meant. But why do we need to ask this question at all? In the case of the University of Oxford, its aims or objectives have been set down for 600 years and are, that there might never be wanting a succession of persons duly qualified for the service of God in Church and State". Do we need any other statement of a university's objectives? Is it necessary that they should be entered on forms, computerised and homogenised? And goodness knows what happens to that information when it gets to the department.

Then there is the question of assets, which is very much at the heart of the business culture. Universities are required to state their physical assets. They are to value them, at both market and replacement prices, and they are instructed, in the course of so doing, to consult the local valuation officer of the local planning office about what might be an alternative use for those buildings supposing that it was necessary to find one. There has been some reflection given—I cannot say that there has been serious study—in Oxford about an alternative use for the Radcliffe Camera. A swimming pool? What could be an alternative use for the Sheldonian Theatre? No one seems to have thought of one. What could be an alternative use for the Bodleian Library? Could it be an outpost for the bureaucrats of the Department for Education, who are bound to need more and more buildings if only to store the hundredweight of documents which they insist on receiving?

Then there is the question to which the noble Lord, Lord Annan, rightly drew our attention in relation to the whole apparatus of assessment and control, the so-called "assessment of quality". It is necessary that students and those who support them (perhaps their parents) should be assured that they are getting roughly what they or the state is paying for. One cannot simply establish an institution, award a degree and say, "You have now got what you came for".

Unlike any other noble Lord I have had personal experience of that problem in setting up what is now the University of Buckingham. There were two possible models. There was the model of the Council for National Academic Awards—that late and unlamented body—which was to measure inputs, which are very like the kind of stuff, alas, that we are now getting from the department, but more modest in their demands. That proved to be a dead end. There was the other model, which proved to be the right course, which was that where degrees were in subjects which were to lead to a practical occupation—to some occupation in the real world —the people to judge them were the professional bodies concerned in the law and accountancy in the case of Buckingham, and in other areas. We decided that only courses which they approved should be offered. On the more academic side, the system of external examiners, which has become harder to deal with because of the enormous growth in the number of universities and departments, had always and rightly been held to be itself a guarantee of quality.

On the first of these, I agree that the Government have one or two reasons to worry. They have moved too rapidly—not in abolishing the binary line because I think that the former polytechnics are doing well enough—but in suddenly giving university status to a number of colleges with no real or first-hand experience in the area of higher education. One such case has come to my notice—as legal proceedings are not unlikely I cannot reveal more—in which a university, newly created from a college, advertised a course in a professional subject as having been approved by the professional body concerned when, as it turned out when some suspicious parent inquired, the course had not even been submitted to that professional body.

Therefore, I concede that some precautions are desirable when there is such breakneck expansion. However, it does not seem in the least necessary that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge or the former distinguished polytechnics which are now universities should suddenly need to be inquired into as to the quality of their teaching or research.

All of it means a diversion of resources. Some noble Lords may think that the humanities are not all that important and may ask why I do not talk about the sciences. I recently met a professor of chemistry at a major polytechnic, which is now a university, who said that he was quite desperate because the amount of information, assessment and bumf that he was required to furnish was costing a relatively small department money that it really could not afford because, in the noble Lord's phrase, it took away man hours from his proper job.

In Oxford, the member co-ordinating the chemistry assessment exercise was occupied on it for two full weeks. What happened to his students during that period? Are we not in fact cheating students out of what they have the right to expect?—concentration upon their progress and the welfare of the teaching staff, not concentration upon filling in unnecessary forms from a department which seems, as the noble Lord, Lord Annan, said, to have no confidence in universities and, I would add, also no understanding of them.

We have been accustomed—again, it is a phrase more usually used in the world of science—to peer review. People submitting papers to learned journals often have their papers submitted to other authorities in the field. What we are having, alas, in the assessment exercises is not peer review, but what I can only describe as "underling review"; that is to say, the persons reviewing are not as well qualified as the persons whom they are assessing. I have had, from an eminent Cambridge historian, a poignant set of remarks about people who knew nothing about the subject, who knew nothing about Cambridge's method of teaching, erupting into tutorials and asking questions which had no relevance to what was being done.

I am aware that I have taken some of your Lordships' time, but the subject is important, and it is important to get some things on the record, because I do not want Ministers to be able to say, "Oh dear, we did not know any of this". So I propose, and I rarely do this in the House—I hope that noble Lords will forgive me—to read extracts from a letter from a distinguished historian, who is not from Oxford or Cambridge, but is a fellow of the Academy, who has taken part in one of the history assessment exercises. He writes: I think the whole exercise is deeply flawed because it is, like so much in this audit-obsessed world, concerned overwhelmingly with presentation and process. As an academic I rather expected the academic content and credibility of what was taught to figure prominently; it does not. I was sent all sorts of material on, admission statements, staff development, student facilities etc.; but virtually nothing on what the students were actually taught. When I asked to see bibliographies, seminar lists and hand-outs on essay titles, I was told that the Funding Council' s check lists did not require these. Nor would the assessors be normally in a position to assess them. On this occasion I was the only historian on a visiting team for assessors … I remarked in my report that the university in question might well be teaching nonsense excellently, but that would not make nonsense arty less nonsensical". On the fundamental point about resources, he said: The dry-run exercise in which I was involved entailed four persons in at least 2½ days' preparatory work, 2½ days on the visit and at least ½ a day on the report. The Department lin question must have spent several days in man-hours in preparing the massive dossiers—two huge folders, whose postage alone costs £14 each, let alone typing, duplicating etc.". It is no good, as in The Times this morning, the Secretary of State setting out noble objectives for the future of the universities unless he, his colleagues, and his officials are prepared to tackle the problem of folly, and waste of money and of time.

6.15 p.m.

Lord Dainton

My Lords, I cannot match the flights of oratory of my noble friend Lord Annan or the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, and I shall not attempt to do so. There have been so many Education Acts since I became a Member of your Lordships' House that it has been difficult for me to keep track of them. However, I have the clearest recollection that, at the time of the passage of the Education Reform Bill, it was then the stated intention of the Government that institutions of higher education should be freed from excessive bureaucratic control.

At that time, my spirits rose a little, and should have risen more, at hearing such fine words, but life has not just taught me to be cautious, I am also a chemist, and chemists have a long tradition, dating forward from Robert Boyle, of being somewhat sceptical. In view of what has happened, that may be just as well.

Let me take a case. It is different from those already cited. It is a rather simple one compared with those mentioned by my noble friend Lord Annan. It relates to a small part of the federal universities of London which is limited in its subject range in that it has no science, no technology, no medicine, no agriculture and no veterinary studies—none of the complex units of a large civic university. Nevertheless, in common with other institutions, it continues to have many demands made upon it by the Government, the Department for Education and the funding councils.

This year alone, up until the beginning of November, Goldsmiths' College—that is the institution to which I am referring—had received nine consultation papers from the Higher Education Funding Council, each of which required formulation of an institutional view, and no fewer than 45 circulars. It had also to produce academic plans which take a great deal of time and effort to construct. It was also required to produce financial forecasts in great detail for similar five-year periods, although we all know that the funding of universities is not certain for more than one year ahead. All those responses take large amounts of time and effort to complete, and, in the light of funding uncertainties, can reflect only inspired guesses for future periods.

So we have a situation in which an increasing fraction of resources in each university is being devoted to such bureaucracy just at a time when the overall unit of resource —the amount of money provided by government per student year—is falling steadily, and the ratio of students to staff is rising. Those changes are called, bizarrely enough, "efficiency savings". The pace at which those savings are supposed to be achieved has been increasing over the past few years. That is not an isolated case. Every institution of higher education will tell a similar story. What, one may ask, are the beneficial results of all that frenetic bureaucratic activity?

One absolutely certain result is, of course, a depletion of the world's timber reserves as logs are fed into the paper mills, but of more immediate and significant importance is the erosion of the time for teaching, for preparation for teaching, and for research by academic staff; that is to say, erosion of the time to do the job that they were appointed to do. Others have spoken in strong terms of what that means. I entirely agree, as I am sure does every member of every university who has been subjected to this process.

So productivity is claimed to go up but merely in a numerical sense that more graduates are turned out per annum per full-time member of staff employed. But the arithmetic points to the fact that each graduate will have received less attention. In those circumstances quality can only diminish. If because of bureaucratic pressures of the kind that have been so evocatively described lectures are hastily prepared; if the lecturer is not master of his own subject and, more importantly, enthusiastic about it; and if the lecturer is less able to devote time to individual students, then he will not be able to issue an attractive invitation to his students to learn for themselves. This desire to learn, and knowing how to learn, are the most important gifts that any university teacher can give to his students, for they will stand the student in good stead throughout his life. This is, I submit, a rather more significant criterion of quality than all those cited by the noble Lord, Lord Annan, or referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Beloff.

The picture that I have painted is not exaggerated. I have used the cases simply to illustrate the fact that, far from being freed from excessive bureaucratic control, which one understands was the Government's intention, institutions of higher education in Britain today are beginning to sink under its burden. Something must be done to reverse this trend. Universities must be trusted as they once were and the burden of bureaucracy reduced so that the energies of able men and women can be directed to doing well those tasks for which they were appointed instead of having to provide answers to questions which in many cases seem to them to be ill-conceived, unrelated to the realities of the situation and likely to be negated by further inquiries or questionnaires, or a call for a new plan, or indeed for a new education Bill.

For years universities have been going through a period of crisis management necessitated by an incessant flow of government measures, orders, regulations, instructions and inquiries from funding councils and elsewhere. They show little sign of diminishing. Those who are responsible for that should remember the aphorism which relates to crisis management, the author of which I can never remember. It runs something like this: When we find the alligator snapping at our vital parts we don't have the time to contemplate how we are going to drain the swamp". Will Her Majesty's Government at the very least call off some of these alligators so that the swamp can be drained and the others will then die, and, returning to the subject of the debate, so that universities and institutions of higher education can get on with the job which they are intended to do and want to do? They are now seriously inhibited by this wasteful use of time on profitless inquiries on instructions which contain much irrelevant information. If the trust can be restored—and it can be restored only by giving responsibility—the response of the academic staff will be one of enthusiastic collaboration even in the very demanding situation of increasing the size of the universities at the present rate. Every member of staff to whom I have talked believes that it is of the utmost importance to have more young people going through our universities. The academic staff are anxious to do their part but they are frustrated by this burden which they find has little to do with the the day-to-day issues with which they are faced when they are trying to do their job.

6.25 p.m.

Baroness Park of Monmouth

My Lords, I too cannot possibly match the splendid pyrotechnics of the first two speakers. In contributing to the debate I can do no better than to quote the words of the outgoing Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, which is my university. He recognised the need for public accountability by universities for public funds, but he said: in practice, more and more detail is being demanded, and this inevitably leads to more centralised control, increased bureaucracy, and additional costs, to the point where we are surely justified in asking, 'When do such operations become subject to the law of diminishing returns? When will the degree of dirigisme become not merely Napoleonic but Soviet in its intensity?'". There is deep concern in Oxford about the additional burden imposed both by audit and quality assessment and the overlap between them and in certain subjects between quality assessment by the HEFCE on the one hand and on the other the reviews of these subjects by professional institutions and similar bodies.

Perhaps I may give some examples. Let us take the first round of quality assessment, the assessment of the quality of teaching. In Oxford that has been carried out for three subjects; modern history, chemistry and law. The cost of preparation for this exercise in terms of staff hours spent (both academic and administrative) is estimated at £30,500 —the salary of one university lecturer for one year. There are between 51 and 62 subjects in which the quality assessment will be required, so Oxford alone can expect to spend more than £500.000 on the exercise. I leave it to your Lordships to do the national sum. It is an exercise due to be repeated at intervals in future years.

The cost of preparation for the Higher Education Quality Council's audit in February 1993, designed to check whether proper procedures were in place to check quality in teaching, has been £45,000 including overheads. But this exercise covers all subjects and is a one-off exercise. Even so, the national sum cannot be small. And again, one-and-a-half university lectureships could have been funded for a year for that money. I am confining my remarks chiefly to money, but there are many more important intangibles to which I wish to refer in a moment.

Then there is the cost in terms of the time of both academics and the all too few administrators of the research assessment exercise. That exercise takes place every four years arid includes the listing of all publications. It must be done by Nobel Prize winners, members of the British Academy and members of the Royal Society. There is then the ranking by independent panels. In Oxford alone the cost of this research assessment exercise in 1992 was £150,000. That includes £30,000 simply for the printing of the extensive internal circulars, questionnaires and so forth and photocopying. It required the university, whose core administration is minute and permanently overworked, to take on staff especially for the six months that the exercise lasted. That exercise at least has the merit of determining the level of money received for research. As Oxford ranks high in virtually all subjects, it at least justifies the expense to some extent. But again, similar expenditure has been incurred by all our universities all over the country. Of course we must be sure that good research is being done, but there have for years been equally effective and infinitely less bureaucratically cumbersome ways of establishing which are the institutions that most deserve support.

Reverting, however, to the demonstrably time-wasting bureaucratic procedures of, for instance, the assessment of the quality of teaching, it must never be forgotten that every hour spent on such exercises by academics who enjoy virtually no administrative infrastructure in their faculty means an hour less spent on research, and the whole sorry business is likely to prove completely self-defeating. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the spate of legislation and central regulation, with all the bureaucratic processes that are spawned, can lead only to a greater expansion of administration, at the expense of academic creative scholarship, simply to deal with the flood of consultative documents, usually with a deadline of three weeks for reply, which I well remember we were beginning to suffer when I sat on a Hebdomedal Council in the late 1980s.

While the academics involved would be the first to admit that there is always something to be learned from any new look at existing practices, that is a deeply wasteful way of doing it. It cannot be right that, for instance, the chairman of the board of one of the faculties involved in the first round of the quality assessment exercise and the chairman of that faculty did no academic work whatever other than basic lecturing and teaching for nearly four weeks, during which time they worked through all weekends and late every night. They had and have virtually no secretarial infrastructure other than some basic typing. In the past two years in particular there has been an enormous increase in the purely administrative work that the faculties are called upon to do, and that is all reactive—driven by the sheer pressure of central government bureaucracy.

The budget cuts in fees can only make it yet more impossible to take steps to increase administrative support, however minimal, and less and less time will be available for the academic work which the universities exist to do. I can only beg my noble friend the Minister, who is herself a mover and a shaker, to use all her influence on her colleagues, and not least the Secretary of State, to cut away the bureaucratic undergrowth which threatens both to stifle the exciting innovations which should be emerging from universities and to clog the steady mainstream of valuable and serious academic work.

6.31 p.m.

Lord Peston

My Lords, we are all indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Annan, for introducing the debate. I hope that he will forgive me if I do not follow him up the garden path of student unions on this occasion. My noble friend Lady Blackstone will demolish him on that subject when we deal with the Bill in due course.

I shall stick to the main theme. It is difficult not to take part in the debate and be an old fogey, but I shall risk that. In preparing for the debate, I thought back to the time when I started off as an assistant lecturer at this country's greatest university—the University of London. I asked myself what we did then. We certainly did not have meetings. Occasionally we went to the academic board but as junior staff, we only went there to annoy the professors. It never occurred to us that that played any role. Papers were not circulated. One reason for that, for which I cannot blame the Government, was that "Xerography" had not yet been invented. In this case, technological advance has been the cause of a great deal of our trouble. Therefore, one could not do at all what happens now.

Essentially we thought that we were there to study our subject and to do either scholarship or research. And I believe that I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Dainton—and I shall indicate how much I agreed with everything that he said—when I say that we believed we were there to encourage learning rather than to teach. Indeed, there was a sense in which I would claim that we did not teach anything at all. If we had a lecture outline, it never occurred to us that we had to complete it or anything like that. I say that because I have discovered recently that I continue not to end the whole lecture course that I am allegedly giving. Therefore, I am told that I am in breach of contract and can be in serious trouble. If I do what I have always done—that is, to teach whatever I fancy under the rubric of the course that I am giving—that is "a betrayal of the students". I find it astounding that we have come to that pass.

In particular, we should not have been able to answer the question as to how many hours we worked for the simple reason that we thought we had a job at which we worked all the time. I have pointed this out occasionally to one or two noble Lords who have intervened ignorantly on the subject of higher education—happily, they are not with us today—that while our friends were out on the golf course during the week and on Saturdays and Sundays, we worked at our subject. Had we been given a questionnaire asking how many hours we worked, it would have been meaningless.

That was the nature of academic life then. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Annan, and others, that we did a rather good job. Whatever else we did, we did our job.

It has now all changed. In part I blame myself for that because over the years, I have written articles saying that universities should look at efficiency and costs and should find out what is required. However, I did not realise that I was in the process of creating a Frankenstein's monster; in other words, one puts forward what seems to be a sensible idea and it grows completely out of control.

At present, everything is structured. Students want to know exactly what they have to read. I gather that there are members of the academic community who tell students which page they must read which implies, "Please do not turn over the page as that is the not the page you have to read". Everything is structured. Students are told "Do these exercises", and so on.

Whatever are the consequences of that, as the noble Lord, Lord Dainton, said, it must be that the educational experience for students diminishes. Whatever else happens, they do not receive an education in the sense in which I believe they used to and they should.

There is less research and less scholarship. I must say to noble Lords—and I believe that this is what the noble Lord, Lord Dainton, was saying but if he did not, then I shall say it—that I believe there has been a fall in standards. Typically, the vice-chancellors make remarks like, "If this goes on, there will be a fall in standards". They have been saying that for some time; but my view is that there has already been a fall in standards. I am asked how I can say that because the ratio of firsts and upper seconds is the same. My response is to say that that is precisely why I am saying that there has been a fall in standards. I am happy to be on record as saying that. I am not weaseling in any way. That is the consequence of the deteriorating staff to student ratios.

In other words, in pursuing something which seemed good, we have produced something bad. That is a puzzle; and to those of us who are students of government, it is a particular puzzle because I believe that this Government have said honestly that they favour freedom and deregulation. I do not believe that they have ever not meant what they said in that regard. The problem is the use of the word "trust", to which the noble Lord, Lord Annan, and others, referred. The Government provide freedom and deregulation, but then do not trust us to do anything with it so that they then add not merely the original bureaucratic control but a great deal of extra bureaucratic control to offset the deregulation.

I have heard from at least one head of what was a polytechnic who has told me that the reason that they wanted to be free was that they wanted to be free of the local authorities. Again, we are back to the Frankenstein's monster analogy. However, they did not realise that the new bodies would be infinitely more bureaucratic and stultifying than ever the local authorities were. I believe that one or two of them might be willing to go back to local authority control if they had the opportunity to do so.

I was very taken with what the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, said about audit, and so on; and in particular his remark about the auditors being so much less qualified in every way than those whom they are auditing, assessing and judging. I heard of a case of a lawyer who has no published work in that field of law whatever but he is pronouncing on the activities of people who are major contributors to the subject.

I have seen a document on teaching. I am told that posture is of enormous importance, as is facial expression when judging teachers; and that stability at the lecture platform is fundamental. One must not show any sign of restlessness. In other words, Socrates would clearly be a totally unacceptable teacher because he walked up and down. I am told that one should be extremely careful about eye contact. Certainly one must never be dismissive of students. One must never be sarcastic and one must never put them down. In other words, Sam Johnson could never have been recruited as a member of staff. I am told that you must use every minute of the 55 minutes so that Wittgenstein, who we know would often stand there for a quarter of an hour saying nothing, add a cryptic remark and then walk out of the room, would be fired on the spot or least get a D or an E grade. In other words, via the audit and assessment, we are moving towards a desire for teachers without character. That is my anxiety.

Equally, we are moving towards universities as businesses. Despite my economics hat, I must say that I just do not believe that the analogy is correct. I have heard of an example of a student on one course who asked specifically to do a foreign language in addition because he had more time available and thought it would be a good thing. He was told, "Foreign languages are not a part of your course. However, if you care to pay extra, you can do a foreign language". The fact that what is called a university in this country is coming to such a state of affairs and has to say such things because it has been set financial targets—or, so it would claim—is, in my view, appalling.

As regards mission statements, I have never found out what they are. Being an emeritus professor now and only on a part-time basis, when I receive such documents I always write down for a mission statement, "I propose to go on teaching economics and trying (albeit now rather pathetically) to do a bit of research". I gather that that is riot acceptable; but at my time of life no one can do anything about it.

My worry is precisely that which was expressed by other speakers; namely, that all of it is counterproductive. As an economist, I want our universities to be efficient and effective. I want staff to use their time properly. But the real point is that all the external interferences—and, indeed, I believe that all speakers mentioned the point —actually occupy time which might be more usefully spent.

In conclusion, the reason behind it all is precisely that the bureaucrats do not trust us; in other words, they are not willing to judge us, if you like, by results. They simply want to ensure that we are shackled in every possible way. That does enormous harm to the forests of this world, and it certainly harms the education of our country. I hope that the noble Baroness can find a way of at least guiding some of those interfering bureaucrats to do other things: if they did nothing, they would be achieving more than they currently achieve.

6.41 p.m.

The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Blatch)

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Annan, for initiating tonight's debate on a very important subject for our universities.

The Government are committed to maintaining and strengthening the autonomy of our universities and colleges, and to freeing them as far as possible—as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Dainton, who reminded us of words that were used in 1988—from bureaucratic constraints. We have no interest in imposing unnecessary rules and regulations on institutions. Far from it: what we want is to free them to concentrate on what they do best—the teaching and research for which our universities and colleges are rightly world renowned.

The framework that has been established for higher education reflects that fact. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 enshrines an arm's length relationship between the Government and individual institutions—one which noble Lords have rightly defended. Under that framework, funding for individual universities and colleges is a matter for independent funding councils. The Government do not intervene in their day-to-day affairs. That is essential for the maintenance of academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

But the principle of academic autonomy does not remove the need for accountability for the substantial public funds provided for higher education for both teaching and research. We owe it to the taxpayer to ensure that value for money is secured for the £5 billion of public money which will be invested in higher education over the coming year. We have a responsibility too for ensuring that public funds are used for the purposes for which they were granted. That inevitably means that there must be effective systems for monitoring the spending of public money.

It does not just mean financial controls. There must be effective quality assessment of both teaching and research if we are to achieve meaningful accountability for the use of public funds. Potential students, employers and research funders need information about the quality of what is provided. That is consistent with the principle of greater openness underpinning the charter for higher education which we launched last September.

Assessment is not new. The Universities Funding Council operated a research assessment exercise to assess the quality of research in 1986. It was repeated in 1989 and, again, in 1992. Both the need tor such an exercise and its results have been widely accepted by universities. There is no reason why the same principles should not apply to teaching.

I have no doubt that universities and colleges recognise the importance of those principles. Equally, all those involved in financial accountabihty, quality assurance and the assessment of teaching and research are well aware of the administrative burdens that can result and are seeking ways of minimising them.

The funding council's recent research assessment exercise has been an impressive example of quality assessment. For such a massive exercise, it is remarkable how widely accepted the results have been. I do not believe that a less comprehensive exercise would have been so readily accepted by the universities themselves.

The results have been linked directly to funding: 95 per cent. of the research grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England is related to assessments of quality. Better and more effective use will be made of taxpayers' money for research if more of it goes to the universities and colleges doing the best research. The assessment exercise is essential for that selective funding.

The funding council is presently consulting on the arrangements for the next research assessment exercise. It will seek to keep the administrative burdens on institutions to the lowest level possible consistent with the maintenance of a robust and credible system of assessment.

Universities have expressed particular concern about the arrangements for quality assurance for teaching. It is important to set that in context.

All students are entitled to a high quality education wherever they are and whatever course they are taking. If the high standards and reputation of British higher education are to be maintained, the allocation of public funds must take account of the quality of teaching and learning in universities. That will help ensure that excellence in teaching is valued as much as excellence in research. We also owe it to potential students and employers to do that in a way which informs their own choices within higher education—a message at the heart of the higher education charter.

But we do not want a quality assurance system which involves examination by an external agency of every course at every institution in every year. The assurances that we seek can be met in large part by ensuring that proper quality control arrangements are in place at all institutions. The costs of those procedures are relatively small. As with the research assessment exercise, the cost appears to be 0.5 per cent. or less of the average public funding for the activity. That compares with total annual spending on higher education of more than £5 billion.

The Higher Education Quality Council is responsible for auditing quality assurance arrangements in higher education. It has been established by the universities and colleges themselves. It is they who determine its mode of operation and the frequency of audit visits. Therefore, to a significant extent, the scale of the administrative demands placed upon institutions is indeed in their own hands.

Much of the information required for audit will be readily available from responsible institutions concerned with the quality of provision. At least one vice-chancellor has said that no new information should be required for audit visits to his institution. When that becomes the norm, the burdens which are currently perceived will be very much reduced.

The assessment of the quality of education provided is the responsibility of the higher education funding councils. The assessment of teaching quality by the Higher Education Funding Council for England is designed to keep to a minimum the administrative burdens on institutions. A large role is accorded to self-assessment. External assessments of individual subjects are likely to take place on a four to five-year cycle. In many cases, there will be no visit from assessors, and nothing more onerous than self-assessment will be needed.

Both Ministers and the funding council recognise universities' concerns about the administrative burdens of audit and assessment, and about possible duplication between them. We have encouraged the funding council and the quality council to review the extent to which there is any duplication, and to co-operate in minimising the burdens of their procedures.

The two councils are drawing up a joint document on their procedures. That should help to minimise duplication and bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can also be reduced by combining professional accreditation and assessment; for example, discussions are under way with the major engineering bodies and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors to examine whether accreditation and assessment can be completely combined.

Grant to the Higher Education Funding Council for England for recurrent and capital spending will amount to nearly £3.5 billion in 1994–95. Universities and colleges will receive another £1 billion in publicly funded tuition fees. That is a very large sum of money by any standards. It is only right that the funding council should be required to establish a management and financial framework which has sufficient rigour to account for and protect the use of public funds, without unduly tying the hands of higher education institutions in their day-to-day operation.

The council provides financial memoranda to each institution which specify the conditions on which its grant has been made. The council has taken steps to keep the volume of information it sends to and seeks from institutions to a minimum. Much of its framework for the operation of financial controls has been put together in consultation with the institutions. Those safeguards are no more than one would expect for any organisation managing a large budget, whether private or public. They are doubly important where large sums of public money are involved.

Finally, I am aware that the vice-chancellors have expressed some anxiety about the impact on them of health and safety and other statutory regulations. The new Deregulation Bill which the Government have brought forward will reduce the burden of unnecessary regulations throughout the economy. In addition, officials in my department are considering with the funding council the impact of specific regulations on higher education.

The noble Lord, Lord Annan, raised the issue of the amount of documentation and information which is required of institutions. I take the point, and I hope that the Higher Education Funding Council itself and the Higher Education Quality Council are as interested in this debate as I am. The noble Lord failed to point out that much of the documentation for HEFCE assessment is required only when there is an assessment visit, and an assessment visit takes place only when there is a possibility of an excellent report on the one hand or an unsatisfactory report on the other. In other words, if in the self-assessment process an institution says that it is the best in the kingdom it is important that there is some validation of that claim. Equally, assessors are sent in to check when a worrying report is produced.

My noble friend Lord Beloff said that parents should be assured about the quality of what they and others are paying for. That is true. Public accountability for the spending of £5 billion is important. I hope that we are not divided on the principle of accountability. We are really talking about a means to an end. I have taken that point on board and shall make sure that it is properly reported.

My noble friend was also concerned about the administration of the student loans system. It is my understanding that from the next financial year—1994–95—the Student Loan Company is planning to introduce a simplified form for repeat applications which should require only a couple of minutes of time on the part of the institutions. We shall make sure that that happens.

My noble friend Lord Beloff suggested that the qualifications of some of those undertaking the assessment and review are suspect. I regard that as a very serious statement. Again, the Higher Education Funding Council officers select the assessors and arrange training for them. They have included some extremely distinguished people, for example, on history, Professor Alderman, Pro Vice-Chancellor of London University. The Higher Education Funding Council for England seeks nominations for assessorship from the vice-chancellors themselves. Therefore it is the vice-chancellors who put forward names for consideration.

I have already made the point about funding. Some fairly discourteous comments have been made about the Government's view of the higher education sector. Having witnessed at first hand two years running the debates which take place prior to the public expenditure round, I can say that my department has fought the corner for higher education fairly vigorously. The results have been fruitful. It is true to say that this year higher education received more favourable treatment than other departments in Whitehall in what has generally been recognised as a difficult year economically.

It is for the Higher Education Quality Council and the higher education funding councils to decide what information they need to request for quality audits and assessments. The quality council requests existing documentation such as regulations, codes of practice and validation documents, together with a descriptive overview of systems and how they work. The provision of documentation is therefore largely at the discretion of the institutions themselves, as I said. The assessment process adopted by the Higher Education Funding Council relies to a large extent on self assessment by institutions. The council's quality assessment division has issued guidance to institutions on the type of information required for an assessment visit.

This debate has dealt with an important subject. The Government are wholly committed to the principle of academic autonomy and to freeing universities from bureaucratic constraints as far as possible. The substantial funds provided for higher education in the latest plans are evidence of our commitment to invest in higher education. However, as I have said, academic autonomy does not remove the need for accountability. The framework which we have put in place is designed to secure the minimum effort and cost to universities.

The message I take from this debate is that there should be the minimum amount of bureaucracy at the least possible cost necessary to address the principle of accountability. I shall, as I hope noble Lords have come to depend on me to do, report the debate to my right honourable friend faithfully. I shall communicate all of this to the key agents responsible for the systems which have been criticised so eloquently this evening and which have caused such anxieties—namely, the Higher Education Funding Council and the Higher Education Quality Council. No doubt the institutions themselves, which also have a part to play, will heed all that has been said tonight.

House adjourned at four minutes before seven o'clock.