Education Bill

I beg to move Amendment 146 and speak to Amendment 147A. My objective is to nudge the Government gently in the direction of common sense and fairness in these two amendments. One of the effects of the Government’s policies over the last year or two, particularly with regard to the Office for Fair Access, which looks set to reduce the number of students going from high-performing English schools to Oxford and Cambridge by about 500 a year, and as an effect of the fees increase, has been a very considerable rise in interest in the prospect of going to university overseas. At the cheaper level, it costs about a couple of thousand pounds plus living expenses to get a very decent university education in the Netherlands. That is becoming an increasingly popular destination, notably for the leafier end of the state school system. I thoroughly recommend Maastricht as a university, begging the pardon of my more sensitive colleagues on these Benches. It is actually a very fine and innovative university, and for those parents who would intend anyway to repay their children’s debt, and not leave them with that hanging over them, it represents a very considerable saving. To have our children going abroad anyway is probably quite a good thing for this country, and over the long term it should increase our understanding of the world outside our shores, and bring us added understanding, if not prosperity. At the higher end, principally affected by the changes being made in OFFA, we are seeing very substantial increases in numbers of students interested in going to the United States. The rate of application is up by about 30 per cent this year. Fees in the US are extremely substantial. There are some good scholarships available. Some of the brighter state comprehensives have been picking up one or two of them, and long may that continue. However, a lot of this outflow will be children who have gone to independent schools, whose parents see that they have the qualifications that would formerly have taken them to top universities, but who have now been squeezed out—so they are off to America, Canada, Australia or, indeed, China. You can get to some very high-ranking universities in Hong Kong for not much more than the cost of a British degree. Indeed, one of them is a subsidiary of Nottingham University. So you can pay to go to a British university overseas. It seems a bit daft to me that our own universities, which are strapped for cash enough as it is, should see this flow of students going out to pay high fees overseas and not be able to bring them back and have those fees for themselves. Why should we deny our universities that benefit? Why should our students find that the only universities in the world that they cannot pay a fee for are our own universities and why should our universities find that a natural flow of students is denied to them? So I hope, while not expecting any immediate comfort today, that the Government will think along those lines. I would like to see some progress today on Amendment 147A. It has long been the practice of universities, when students were largely funded by the Government, to rob Peter to pay Paul—to take money that was notionally allocated to students studying humanities degrees and use it to fund courses being pursued by those studying science degrees, in particular. That is all very well when it is just reallocating government money, but when you are taking money that a student has invested themselves and transferring it away from that student to some other student’s course, I think that that becomes morally indefensible. I would very much like to see any such activity done openly and with a proper disclosure of what a student is receiving in return for their fees and where the money is being spent by the university. Then a student who is looking to go on what has been traditionally a rather underprovided course with few contact hours can see whether or not they are being offered a reasonable bargain in return for their £9,000 a year. I beg to move.