---

London Metropolitan University

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. A great many of my constituents attend the LMU, and I have had hundreds of letters about its financial crisis over many months. As we have heard, a disproportionate number of the students at the LMU are older students, women students and black and minority ethnic students. Far from having family support as they go through university, they often have to support families, and are the single head of their households. My concern is not the staff, although any redundancy is extremely regrettable, but those students. LMU is one of a range of higher education offers for people who are older, or who have jobs and families: Birkbeck, a London university college that offers excellent degrees based on evening classes, the Open university and others are adapted to the needs of non-traditional students. However, let me say this: when we talk glibly about access to higher education, my view, as someone who spends a lot of time working on and paying attention to what happens in the black community in relation to education, is that it is not only about access to higher education, but about access to higher-quality education. I draw the House's attention to the unspoken apartheid in higher education in London. The Russell group, including Imperial and the LSE, is largely white, and some of the former polytechnics are largely black and minority ethnic. The LMU has many unique courses and excellent members of staff, and features in the top 10 of any league table one cares to mention. I strongly believe that schools should not use the class background or race of their students as an excuse for underperformance, and the same is true of higher education institutions. It is precisely because I am concerned about the life chances of older students—black women and people of all nationalities—who have struggled and beaten all their expectations and those of people around them to go to university that I am concerned about standards at the LMU going forward. I understand that the funding problems stem partly from the much-higher-than-average drop-out rate and partly from the fact that the majority of students at the LMU complete their course in four years rather than the standard three. I also understand—people have talked about bad management and the funding council—that there was a degree of collusion between the funding council and the university in misreporting for years before the former finally decided to pull the plug. That may be the responsibility of management, but it is also the responsibility of the funding council, which could and should have addressed the issue in a much more measured way, much earlier, to avoid this crisis for students. My concern is, first and foremost, that the students should not suffer in this time of financial crisis.