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Higher Education

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. She is right. We support the broad thrust of the Bill because it will help people from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to university, as long as we make sure that the FE and HE sectors are properly interlocked and not in pointless competition. We support the measure not because we want to aim at pointless targets of 50 per cent. participation in higher education, but because we believe that universities have enormous power to change society and to change people’s lives. That is why widening participation is a vital objective, provided we remember that we cannot ask universities to remedy the divisions and injustices that have already appeared in British education. Any serious attempt to widen participation must address the serious and growing gulf in performance between our schools.