My Lords, I am afraid the Committee will get tired of hearing from me on this. This is all about information and Amendment 101, which would give the OfS the power to specify after consultation additional matters in which it thinks should require information, is perhaps the key amendment. It would give the OfS and the Government plenty of time for consultation and consideration before going down any of the routes I advocate in other amendments.
Amendment 94 picks up “of a prescribed description”. My experience in this area is that if you have differential requirements for information, anyone required to provide less information has an immediate commercial advantage and the people being asked for more information raise their hands and say, “We’re being asked to put ourselves at a commercial disadvantage”. This creates great problems. Everybody should be asked for the same information and then there is a level playing field.
Amendments 95 to 98 pick up the first of several areas in which the current practice of UCAS and universities greatly advantages well-off schools. There are a number of bits of knowledge that are not publicly released and not easily available but which schools with sufficient funds to research and preserve knowledge efficiently from one year to the next can use to advantage their students. One area is the month in which it is best to apply to a particular university course. It is supposed to be all the same but it is not. There are particular courses where applying early can raise an advantage; that should be known by everybody, not just by a few.
Amendment 99 is one of a number that ask for information from providers to allow the rest of us to understand what they are doing and to enter into an informed conversation with them about whether we might like things to be different. My particular interest in this area is with sexual harassment. I want to know what universities are doing to improve the situation they find themselves with—making sure that freshers’ week is civilised and that the relationship between the genders in university is properly respectful and understood to be so; and that all those who come to university with bad attitudes learned from schools that are not well organised and well set-up in terms of relationships between the genders have an opportunity to learn a proper way of going about things. The evidence on this is mostly from the United States, where it appears that about 40% of male students arrive at university with exceptionally disrespectful ideas of how to treat female students. I do not know the figures here but I imagine that they are not wildly different.
The recent work very courageously done by Imperial College on sexual harassment and gender relationships reveals that there is a lot of work to be done. There is scope for great improvement here. This amendment would apply also to such matters as anti-Semitism and homophobia and other aspects of the relationship between the members of the university community. The purpose of this amendment is to make sure that we get to a position where higher education providers regularly release information that is of use to prospective students but also to others concerned that we should see improving practice over time. Amendment 100 reflects that in the case of mental health.
Amendment 102 reflects it in the case of freedom of speech and academic freedom—not to give the OfS or anybody else the power to intervene but to make sure that we know what is going on so that we can be part of a conversation with academia about what should be done.
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Amendment 103 opens the very thorny issue of the continued practice of some universities of taking money away from humanities students and giving it to science students. A student charged £9,000 a year for a history degree, for instance, may find that £3,000 of that is spent on physics students. I know why this practice grew up. It grew up in the old funding days when students did not pay for, or paid markedly less than, the cost of their course. However, I do not think that the current position in which a student is put into debt not for value that they are receiving but for value that some other student is receiving, without being told about it, should be allowed to continue. It will take a gentle hand to manage the transition but this practice should not continue.
Amendment 104 picks up the question of the interaction between students and staff, and the seniority of the staff on each course. The pattern of teaching provision in a course matters a lot. It is a question not just of teaching hours but of who teaches you and when in the course you are taught by particular kinds of people. Some universities are now experimenting with having their best teachers—the most experienced and highly qualified—teach in the first year. They get people really revved up with an understanding of the subject, and those students are then the PhD students who take it on from there. However, there are universities that do it the other way round. The amendment would be part of telling a prospective student what the deal is and what they will get in exchange. We ought to improve on what we do at the moment and the OfS ought to have the power to drive that improvement.
Amendment 105 goes back to Amendment 99. This is another area where the behaviour of schools can advantage students if they really understand the rules—the ways in which predictions work, the ways in which the outcomes of offer predictions work, and how to make the best approach to a course that you want to end up on. Amendments 106 and 107 also reflect that.
Looking at the data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, it is really noticeable how some groups of schools put their students on courses that, for those students, are easy to get on to. They noticeably shoot below the target that they could have aimed for. On average, given their qualifications, they can get on to courses that are much more difficult to get on to, but they do not—they shoot low. Why is that happening? It happens because the output from UCAS is what the university says the course admission requirements are, which can be substantially different from what the course requirements actually are. They admit at a much lower level than they say they do, let alone what they might choose to admit in clearing, and they let people with offers undershoot by a couple of grades. However, that is not known—there is nothing out there that says that that is the case, but of course the good independent schools and others that put time
into this know these things. They know that, although a university may say that a course requires three As, a student will actually get in with two Bs and an A and so should have a go at it. It is entirely unacceptable that disadvantaged people in disadvantaged schools should be further disadvantaged by a deliberate lack of information from those in the admissions system who provide information to students. I want to see the OfS have the power to drive that up.
Amendment 108 takes a further look at the financial arrangements for students. Amendment 109 is another way of looking at the provision for student in terms of hours. Amendment 114 turns to the other end of this clause and looks at other important aspects of all this information, such as types of qualifications. What type of qualification does it really take to get on to a course? You look at what a university requires and it does not list BTEC, but you talk to the university and it accepts BTEC. How do you know that? You know it only if the school has time for someone to do the necessary work.
Amendment 116 is about giving the OfS the power to ensure that, whatever information an applicant to a university course should have, they have it as part of the process of applying to the university. The information should be sensibly available in UCAS. It should not belong in a little secret garden to which only some people have the key but should be routinely available to all students.
Amendment 116A says that UCAS does not know everything. There are some good sources of information out there—a lot of information is calculated by Unifrog, Which?, SACU and other such sources. They complement what is provided by UCAS and that information ought to be made available to help students make good decisions. If we are to allow there to be a monopoly provider of university admission services—which is effectively what UCAS is—we should make sure that it provides all the information that is available.
Lastly, noble Lords will be glad to hear, Amendment 434A picks up on Clause 73, which concerns the power to require application-to-acceptance information for the purposes of research. If we are to understand the pattern of applications by the segments of society that we wish to help, such as white working-class boys or girls who might take an interest in STEM subjects, particularly engineering and physics-based subjects, we do not just want to know what they ended up applying for; we want to know how they behaved on the university application website. We want to know the track of their interest. Did they ever look? If they did, where did they look? What was the last point they looked at? What put them off? We do not want to know for the purposes of making that information public but as a matter of research so that we can really understand people’s behaviour and start to experiment, asking ourselves, “If we worded that page differently, would more of them continue beyond that point?”. That would enable us to get a real understanding of behaviour on a large scale.
The only people who have that information are those in UCAS and, so far as I can discover, currently they do not release it. The Bill specifies what the Government wish UCAS to make available for research
and, to my mind, that should absolutely include every detail of the way that students use the site so that researchers can really get their teeth into how to do better for the segments of society that we do not think we are doing well enough for at present. I beg to move.