My Lords, for the convenience of the House, I will attend to Amendment 119 and Amendment 120 together. If it is then possible for the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to follow me on that, that would be helpful.
These are probing amendments, the background to which is that the Bill contains aspirations—and may be amended to contain even more aspirations—to see the current rather rigid structure for undergraduate curriculum and courses in this country changed so that there are, for example, more two-year degrees and more flexibility towards taking part courses, or “credits” as they are sometimes called, to build up an entitlement to the award of a degree. This is common in many other higher education systems and has been much talked about on all sides of the political spectrum in recent years, though progress has been quite slow. The amendments seek to probe the idea that part of the delay on this is because of the way in which the financial regulations for higher education are structured. The finance works in sessions—there is an academic year, as defined in Clause 11, to which we are coming—but the funding for courses is done in relation to the whole course rather than any part of a course. That is the way we have done it historically and there is no particular reason why that is wrong or right. However, it will not be flexible and if a student attempts to do half a course, with a view perhaps to stopping after a bit and then coming back and doing the rest at some later date, or if a new institution was attempting to provide a different type of course, they would have to do it in years; they could not do it in part years.
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That seems to me to speak to a discourse of inflexibility and difficulty. It is no surprise that those who currently occupy the position of challenger institutions, or are from smaller independent institutions, have been vigorous
in arguing that the current arrangements for the provision of funding for courses do not allow them to do the sort of work that they would like to do. They would be interested in seeing a way of getting a more flexible approach, whereby perhaps, as set out in Amendment 119, a student could get an honours degree in two years, because that was the way it was taught and examined, and that was appropriate for the subject and agreed with by all the regulators and everybody else involved—all the people the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, does not like. Yet it would still not be possible to do it, because the fee limit would be for a four-year course and not for a two-year course, or a three-year course and not a two-year course. The student would get money for only two years, not for the third year.
Alternatively, might it be possible to do it more flexibly with credits? An element of a course could account for perhaps four credits in a year, and the student would have to pay for a full year’s course, within which they might only take two or three credits. These things do not stack up to a more flexible system. There is no particular model in mind, but I hope the amendments give the Minister the opportunity to respond in a way that might open this up in future. I beg to move.