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Higher Education

I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this debate. We all agree that, as the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) has outlined, the issue that we are discussing this afternoon is very important. To be fair, the Government have committed enormous resources and effort to trying to widen participation and improve fair access to higher education; they have spent some £350 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash on that in recent times. I criticise them not for their commitment but for their use of outdated dogma, and to some extent for their incompetence. The Government suffer from the same problems that afflict many in the education establishment. I have looked at a number of briefings for this debate from organisations ranging from the National Union of Students to the Association of Colleges, many of which make the same basic error. They seem to believe that the Government can do everything—that the Government can intervene and change the world to create a perfect model of society. I suggest that the lesson of the past 10 years is the opposite of that: we need less interference in order to achieve more success. The old saying ““Less is more”” is relevant in this particular case. Part of the problem is that the Government have approached increasing participation from the bottom socio-economic groups from the wrong end. As my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) has said, much of the problem in getting a wider section of social groups into higher education lies in primary and secondary schools and the social problems in the areas surrounding those schools. As several hon. Members have said, there is a poverty of aspiration in many parts of the country today, and far too many parents have a poverty of aspiration for their children. We can set as many artificial and socially engineered targets as we like, but if we do not tackle that poverty of aspiration, improvements will be difficult to achieve and maintain. Our schools, both primary and secondary, do not currently provide a significant ladder of opportunity for social classes 4 to 7 as measured by UCAS. Despite all the initiatives and money spent, the overall additional participation of the bottom social classes is only 1.8 per cent. since 2002, and just over 3 per cent. since 1997, according to the Library. That is not a significant return on the huge investment that has been made, and it is despite the bigger numbers going into higher education since the mid-1990s. From 1994 to 2005, the number of home students accepted at universities through UCAS rose from 251,000 to 360,000—an increase of about 30 per cent. I congratulate the Government on making funds available for that and on making further funds available for an increase of another 50,000 over the next couple of years. The good news is that more young people go into higher education and will continue to do so, but the bad news is that they do not come from an increasingly wide socio-economic group, despite all the Government’s top-down schemes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Henley said, the latest wheeze is to record whether applicants’ parents went to university so that admissions tutors can make judgments as to which candidates deserve to go to their universities. Our great academic institutions are being encouraged to pick students not on merit but on the basis of what their father did decades before. After last week’s debate, some will appreciate the irony of this Government’s establishing a new hereditary principle. Universities are being penalised for not hitting arbitrary targets for the number of poor students they should be taking; several have had funds cut as a result. That kind of social engineering attacks the problem from completely the wrong end, and does nothing to resolve the issues. One thing that the Government may have got right, although it is still too early to tell for certain, is top-up fees. The figures suggest that after last year’s dip, this year’s applications have climbed by about 7 per cent. That is good, but as we have heard, the NUS and others, including the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams), suggest that it may be related to the demographic bulge.