My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 68 in this group. I support very much what my noble friend the Duke of Wellington has said. I think he has an elegant approach in his amendment. Mine is different but we have the same concern. I am sure there are exceptions, but by and large this House wants the TEF to succeed. We want students to have more and better information on the quality and style of teaching than they have at the moment. We want universities and other higher education institutions to be motivated to improve the quality of their teaching.
We have some severe worries about the present quality of information, but let us set out and see what we can do over the next few years to improve it. After all, universities are supposed to be good at that sort of thing and, as we said, we have Chris Husbands in charge of the process. That gives me a good deal of hope and confidence. However, we cannot, on the basis of an unreformed, much criticised, hardly understood set of measures, leap into giving universities gold, silver and bronze metrics. If we give a university a bronze measure, the likelihood is that it will be struck off the list in those countries where students are centrally funded, such as the Gulf states. We will cause severe problems to students in countries where face is important, such as those in the Far East, who will have to say to their friends, “I am going to a bronze-rated university”. Bronze will be seen as failing because these universities will be marked out as the bottom 20%.
This is just not necessary. We have succeeded, in our research rankings, in producing a measure of sufficient detail and sophistication for people to read it in detail. It produces quite marked differences between institutions, but nobody reads it as a mark of a failing institution. It is information, not ranking, which is why I come back to my noble friend’s amendment as being a useful way of approaching this.
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However much we may allow the Government or a Minister to learn by making mistakes, we cannot allow them to make this mistake, because it will do so much damage to universities in their international recruitment. I suggest that we allow the Minister to rank universities as gold, give them praise where praise
is due and leave the other 80% unmarked. I think that that would go down okay: to give praise to a relatively limited number—just because an actor has an Oscar does not mean that you do not think any other actor is good. It sort of works. Let us do it like that until we get to the point where we really know that those in the bottom 20% deserve to be there.
To come back to something said by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, if we are doing this on benchmarking scheme, a lot of those who will be awarded bronze do not deserve to be. They are good, but they are just not quite as good as their peers. It appears weird to set out a national system of quality and to say to the world at large, “These are rubbish universities” just because they are not quite as good as their peers. I hope the Government will step back from this.