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Higher Education

That is not a picture that I recognise. What I do recognise is the fact that the previous Government put a cap on the number of places in universities. Since that time, of course, Conservative Front and Back Benchers have continued to argue that there are too many students of the wrong type going to university. Throughout this whole period, I have asked a number of Conservative MPs which of their children they are prepared to tell that they are the wrong kind of kid to go to university—and not one of them has been able to answer that question. Until we see some sort of conversion halfway along the road to Damascus, which is where the Opposition currently are, and until we see them adopting and supporting the sort of sensible policies that this Government have put in place, we cannot accept that their position has much credibility. Indeed, during the whole 35 minutes of the opening speech by the Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson)—he was actually winding us up the whole time, which I thought was a subtle achievement—only one new policy was put forward. That was a tweaking of the arrangements for performance tables—a weighting of achievements in science subjects—which as far as I could see would simply increase the differential between schools that already had a large number of students pursuing and achieving in pure science subjects and schools that did not. That would have been a regressive step. I support the various measures that the Government have taken and I pay tribute to the universities that have taken this matter seriously. In the opening speech from the official Opposition, I was struck by the way in which the hon. Member for Henley praised Bristol university in one breath and, in the next, condemned the measures that it had used to improve its rates of participation. I also want to pay tribute to the work of the many Aimhigher partnerships operating throughout England and Wales. Although it is sometimes difficult to assess the direct effect of much of this work, I hope that the Aimhigher project will still continue after the forthcoming comprehensive spending review, because it involves long-term investment for long-term achievements. I particularly want to pay tribute to the active work of the Aimhigher partnerships in Greater Manchester, which covers my constituency. We need to get away from a total obsession with getting a wider group of students into our elite universities. Widening the social base of those universities is crucial—my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), the Chairman of the Select Committee, outlined the nature of this problem, and some of the solutions, extremely effectively—but widening participation is not only about Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Durham and one or two of the London universities. It is about the whole range of universities, and we need to look at the whole of the British university system rather than focusing on the elite research universities. If we want to make progress with our leading research universities, we have to move to the post-qualification admissions system. That crucial measure will help us to implement a fairer system. We must also do more work on making more information on students’ backgrounds available to admissions tutors. In the various discussions that I have had on this subject with Opposition Members in the past 10 years, I cannot remember a single occasion on which they did not introduce the concept of social engineering. That is an important concept, because we have had a thousand years of social engineering that has led to the kind of class-based inequalities of access to university that we now suffer from. The job of the university admissions tutor is to identify potential. To pretend that that can be done without judging the achievement of the student in the context of the school that they went to and the family that they came from is naive and dishonest. I therefore fully support moves to make such information available to admissions tutors. I want to make a point that I hope will elicit a degree of consensus among all three parties here today. However important the Government’s measures to improve the admissions arrangements to universities and to widen the social base of the students attending universities, the problem is not at the point of entry to the university. As speakers from all parties have said, the problem is to be found earlier in the education system. In my view, it arises at the age of transfer from primary school to secondary school. What distinguishes the British education system from many others in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is the significance that parents attach to the choice of school for their child. Until we can move fairly and quickly to a secondary education system that is more equal, and in which the choice of school has less effect on a child’s eventual achievement, we will never have a fully developed, successful widening participation policy in our universities.