---

Higher Education

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for injecting some common sense from the Liberal Democrat Benches—on this occasion, at least. I hope that the Minister will take account of what he is being told because his position on the matter under discussion is mistaken. The imbalance in respect of the uptake of difficult subjects is producing perverse incentives. Let me give an example. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) talked about the need to encourage people to study science subjects, and we are all keen to keep our science departments open, but there is a paradox involved in that. If a university admits a good science candidate, the chances are—statistically, this is very likely—that they will come from a relatively well-off background and from a relatively successful school. Therefore, the university might achieve the objectives of admitting a good science candidate and of expanding science education in this country, but it will not achieve the objective of widening participation. As I—and the Minister, too—never tire of saying, in terms of science, success is followed by success. Let me give a statistic that the Minister should have used when addressing the Liberal Democrats: engineering graduates enjoy an earnings increase of £243,730 as opposed to an increase of only £34,494 for those, like the Minister and me, who were so unwise as to study an arts degree. That point is a great advertisement for science, and it should be used more widely by all Members to evangelise on the benefits of the study of science at university. However—to return to my core point—the tragedy is that we deprive our children of a realistic choice of what to study much too early in the system; that happens not at university, but much earlier. As well as taking steps such as recruiting more science teachers and making science more interesting, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) that we should take a harder look at the effects of the league table system, and particularly the extent to which the tables build in disincentives to study what I call the crunchy subjects. As my hon. Friend suggested, it would be a sensible reform if we were to give a special weighting in school performance assessment and league tables to such difficult subjects—which are the subjects that universities look at in particular in deciding on admissions. That is the key to what I, the Minister and everybody else wants to achieve, which is to expand the classic route to university.