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Higher Education

I welcome what the noble Lord has said and take this opportunity to wish him a happy birthday. It is very important to stress this point: if we are going to ask students to make greater individual payments and to take out loans, which they pay back subsequently, they have to be treated like quality paying customers of these institutions. Therefore, they have to know which institutions, universities and courses they are choosing between and among. They need more information to choose from. That information must include the quality of teaching, the number of teaching hours and the amount of face-to-face contact between themselves and university teachers. The QAA has a particular responsibility to make a great and proactive effort to elicit, categorise and tabularise that information and make it available to students. I can assure the noble Lord that, in the discussions that I will have with the Chancellor, I will emphasise the great need, for the vitality of our society and for our economic strength and growth, to continue to invest in universities and higher education programmes as much in the future as we have in the past 10 years.