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Higher Education

My Lords, I am very grateful for the relevance and precision of all the questions put to me. I shall respond first to the noble Baroness. As I said in my original Statement, it is important that we reduce the inequity—as she calls it—between full-time and part-time students. In the next 10 years, we will face a falling number of teenagers, and we will therefore want to attract older people into higher education. In doing so, we must vary patterns, lifestyles and backgrounds—those in work and not—to maximise our recruitment to higher education. Therefore we will look at how those who want, or are available for, part-time as opposed to full-time study may be attracted into higher education, and how we can make that more possible. I have been in this House on occasions during debates on the Bill. Indeed, I have heard the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, speak about careers teaching in our schools. I am very glad that the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has recently proposed to make available much better information, advice and guidance, and we will work closely with his department to promote that. The noble Baroness asked about the priority given to STEM subjects. My view of this and whether we should extend the finance available from contestable funding is that it depends on the relevance of other subjects, some of which she mentioned, to the economy’s skills needs. She mentioned languages. Employers do look to languages—they are an increasingly important skill need, despite the preponderance of English speaking in the world—so when we consult HEFCE and others on how contestable funding will operate, we will certainly take her observation into account. I see the noble Baroness’s point about research groups and research concentration. None the less, there are now many examples across the country of where concentrating funds on a greater critical mass of researchers has given dividends. This year, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has established 45 multidisciplinary centres for doctoral training that are building links between different teams and universities and with industry on the basis of previous experience and a track record. We need to experiment with models of that sort to see whether research concentration will give us even greater benefits and dividends in the future. The noble Baroness also talked about the fees review. If she does not mind, I would prefer to describe that review and its remit and terms of reference when I have consulted on them, when they have been agreed and when I am ready to announce them to this House. That will be before too long. The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, asked about the Student Loans Company. I am very sorry, as I have said before, that the company’s service has fallen well short of the expectations of students and their families. More students than ever before have applied to universities, so the workload has been huge. None the less, there is no excuse for the service which the company has provided. We are inquiring into what went wrong to ensure that it does not happen again. The noble Lord asked whether the fees review will include the financing of part-time students. I think that I have answered that. It will. Similarly, Sir Martin Harris looked at access to the more selective universities. Where they are relevant, there will be plenty of time for his findings, which I expect next spring, to be fed into the work of the fees review, which we expect in the next nine to 12 months. The noble Lord asked about wider participation and hoped that there would be more success with that in the future. We are at 43 per cent and rising, which is not a bad record given our target of 50 per cent. It just shows that we have more to do in, among other ways, the approaches that I have described in the Statement. Overall, I have to thank the noble Lord for what he has said. It must have something to do with the clarity, relevance and coherence of our proposals that I do not think that he has been able to find a thing I have said this afternoon with which to disagree, which I welcome. In following our approach, I hope that the noble Lord will check his homework and his figures with his colleague the shadow Chancellor, from whom it seems that education is not very high on his priority list. I can only take at face value what Mr Osborne says. When we hear from Conservative Party spokesmen, we just have to bear in mind their record when they were in government. It is very serious. I am slightly torn, but I feel that I have to quote the chancellor of Oxford University, Chris Patten, the former Conservative Party chairman, in this context. Last year, the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, said: ""What is true is we"—" talking about the Tories in the 1990s— ""expanded higher education hugely by reducing the investment in each student. In just over a decade we doubled the number of students and halved the investment in each. The Treasury calls that higher productivity"." That, he said, is, ""a euphemism for poorer pay, degraded facilities, less money to support the teaching of each student"." We do not have to look into the crystal ball to know what might be offered by the Conservatives. We just have to look at what happened last time.