HC Deb 22 May 1986 vol 98 cc272-4W
Mr. Freud

asked the Secretary of State for Education and Science whether he will list the number of lecturers and the number of full-time equivalent students in public sector higher education in 1981 and 1986, stating the ratio in each year; and what analysis has been carried out of the productivity of this sector in these two years.

Mr. Walden

Information is not available in precisely the form requested. However the Department's monitoring survey of student-staff ratios in further education gives the following information:

Advance level work in further education establishments covered by the survey
Academic year
1980–81 1984–85
Full-time equivalent student number* (000) 174.9 265.9
Full-time equivalent staff number* (000) 20.2 24.7
Student-staff ratio† 8.7 10.8
Number of colleges covered by the survey 143 292
Total number of colleges in England 500 469
* Student and staff numbers do not represent total figures for England. The figures relate to number in the colleges covered by the survey.
† Student-staff ratios for 1980–81 and 1984–85 are not strictly comparable because of changes in the size of sample of colleges surveyed.

The Green Paper, "The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s", published in May 1985, referred to the need to develop and use measures of performance in higher education, including the public sector, and gave an outline of the then present state of work on how reliable performance measures might be established. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State invited the National Advisory Body for Public Sector Higher Education, also in May 1985, to undertake a review of good management practice in the public sector, including of the application of performance measures. The NAB is currently engaged on that review, which it is intended should yield advice in time to assist decisions on the NAB's 1987–88 planning exercise.