WEDNESDAY 19 MARCH 2003

RT HON MR CHARLES CLARKE

  800. You are introducing a two-year degree. That is the truth of it, is it not?
  (Mr Clarke) A two-year degree, yes.

  801. That has been a thought amongst many governments for many years: to get a two-year degree that is less expensive, that is done faster. There is a profession out there which says that you need the three years because students actually become interesting and mature and develop in that third year and that is where you get the real benefit of a university education.
  (Mr Clarke) Up to a point, I would say. I think there is a danger of the iconisation (if that word exists) of the three-year honours degree, saying the three year honours degree, as it has always been known, based on—

  802. It is four years in Scotland.
  (Mr Clarke) Yes, well in Scotland they are so much better educated than we are in England.

  803. Some of us would reject that.
  (Mr Clarke) Ourselves excluded!—some of us have to do what we can to contest that state of affairs. But I do genuinely think—and this is the more serious point—there is a model of what university education is, which is held very, very widely, which is simply not an accurate description of what university is today and I am not sure how helpful a model it is for the future in looking as to how we go.

  804. Why was your colleague Margaret Hodge so adamant that the two-year foundation degree should no longer be a springboard into another year, into a full honours degree?
  (Mr Clarke) I read the text of what she said to you and I think what she is arguing is that the argument for the foundation degree must stand on its own terms, academically, in terms of quality and everything else, for reasons we have been discussing earlier. If one simply tries to say it is a stepping stone to an honours degree, that is not the right way to look at it. Of course, for reasons I stated to Mr Chaytor, we need to get the relationships right so that education progression is correct. If I ask the question, and if Margaret Hodge has asked the question: Is the main motive for doing this, as it were, to do the first two years of an honours degree course, then enabling people to come out or drop out after two years rather than finishing three years? the answer is no. The answer is to get a degree which stands in its own right with its own merit as a high quality degree which appeals to a particular section of the population.

  805. And given your arguments earlier about diversity why can HNCs and HNDs not be offered because they are familiar to employers and employers tend to like them? Why can they not keep them in parallel?
  (Mr Clarke) We are not saying they cannot be. I there again come back to Mr Chaytor's point that in terms of having some rational structure where people understand where they are, there is a very strong case for all of this being done in a coherent framework. I do not rule out what you said but I hope myself that the foundation degree framework will provide a better way of looking at it right across the range.

  Chairman: We move on to our last area of focus and Paul Holmes.

  806. On the question of fair access into universities, first of all to make an observation on an earlier comment about supply and demand graphs and whether they might tell us if some policies are working or not. I understand there is some recent evidence that 13% in the lowest socio-economic classes were going to university and that has fallen to 7% since fees were introduced so perhaps the supply and demand graphs might give us some interesting evidence. But that is not what I wanted to ask you. How exactly is the access regulator going to work? One of our previous witnesses described the access regulator as a "nightmare, mish-mash and a political fig leaf". I am sure you will not agree with that. How will the access regulator work?
  (Mr Clarke) One of the problems about this is some of the commentators—maybe the person who gave the previous evidence—like to comment and use flowery language of this kind without seeing what we are proposing. Whether it is a nightmare should depend on the judgment of what we publish that we are intending to do. We are going to publish that in the next two or three weeks. I will be as full as I can in answering the questions you are going to ask me but I have to qualify all of it by saying the full proposals will be published in two or three weeks so people can see exactly what it is we have in mind then.

  807. For example, if the access regulator is going to be looking at universities who want to charge differential fees and saying, "You can or you cannot depending on your past success or future plans for getting students from lower socio-economic backgrounds into university", is that not contrary to some of the recent events whereby on 3 March, for example, Margaret Hodge suggested that the Government set a target to increase the proportion of young people from the bottom three social classes who go to university. You told her off and by the end of day she had to retract that statement and say an "overall target would be inappropriate". Recently we have had a similar thing with HEFCE which was going to issue targets for universities for getting people from lower socio-economic classes into higher education but they have been told that would be inappropriate as well. If we are not going to have such targets what is the point of an access regulator?
  (Mr Clarke) The reason why we have had the exchanges you describe is this: what is the goal of the Government? The goal of the Government is to say that everybody, whatever their background, whatever their circumstances, ought to be able to go to the best university in the country based on their merit and potential. That is the starting point of where we go from which a number of issues flow. How do we ensure enough applications are available for all universities to deal with it? How do we ensure universities are positively seeking out people? A whole set of issues flow from that. I think a consequence of that is to narrow the gap that you are talking about between the various groups of people, but I think the way to attack it is from enabling the individual to be able to get to the university they want to go to equally, rather than to tackle it from the back end, as I see it, of setting certain targets of narrowing the class differential. That is the reason I take the view that I have and which you describe, and the exact way in which we deal with it will be dealt with in the document that we publish on the access regulator, but I do have the ambition to narrow the class divide in moving it forward. Do I think in terms of the Government and driving policy forward that the best way to do it is to set an arithmetic target to make that happen? No, I do not, I think the best way to do is to ensure that the system responds to individual needs much more effectively. That is why we have had the exchanges that we have had. In the case of HEFCE it was rather different because HEFCE was working on the basis of benchmarks that have been there before and published in the document that was a draft, as they said, and I think they would be first to acknowledge when we finally publish what we are going to do on the access regulator they should develop their policies in the light of what we say there. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for us to say. All I said is if it is interpreted that that approach is going to be what is in the access regulator document then I do not think it will be and I think the document should have been seen as a draft because that is what it was.

  808. My final question on access—although I think you are going to get another question on this from a different perspective—we have had the furore over Bristol University as to whether they are discriminating against students from independent schools. If you analyse the figures it seems to be quite the reverse. For example, 15% of sixth-formers doing A-levels do them at independent schools but 40% of the students at Bristol are from independent schools and 47% at Oxford are from independent schools. Certainly as someone who was a Head of a Sixth Form in a comprehensive for 12 years, I could give you chapter and verse of a number of my students who had glowing references—I know because I wrote them—and a prediction of four grade As at A-level and they got four grade As but who were turned down by these various elite universities. There is a lot of evidence that state school students with three grade As at A-level are not getting the places in elite universities that they should be getting. How are you going to redress that balance if, on the other hand, you are shying away from setting targets?
  (Mr Clarke) There are two points to make. Point one is I think a lot of the discussion about Bristol has been a complete nonsense. I speak with some trepidation in front of Ms Davey because she knows the situation at Bristol much better than I do but I think there has been a massive theatre around this with not much substance. Bristol University is one of the most successful universities in the country, it has the kind of statistics you describe, and many private schools encourage their children to go to Bristol. I have quoted the head of Millfield in relation to this because it a high-quality university. They have a tough issue to address which is they are significantly over-applied to for many of their courses and they therefore have to decide what to do. They decided to try and look for potential as well as merit. I think that is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to try and do. The fears that have been run by some organisations are simply wrong headed. They have done it in the wrong approach. So I think there is a lot of noise around this which is not borne out by the facts. Secondly, I think that there is a key issue which the Bristol illustration identifies which is the question of where people apply to university, and it is quite striking if you look at the applications for particular courses at different universities how they vary in different areas, and that pattern of applications depends very much on people's presumptions about the nature of universities and what they are like. A central goal of our access regulator is to try and ensure that people do apply to the best university, to the elite universities as well as all the other universities, on the basis of understanding they have prospects of going there. Thus children from the school you were at would genuinely feel they had the right to go to every university in the country rather than feeling, as some have felt, that there are universities which are more difficult to get into than it is, if I can put it like that. One of the roles of the access regulator would be to say to all universities you have to really work to be sure that students of all backgrounds and the same level of merit believe that their university is one to which they can reasonably apply. I think that requires some universities to really take this on in a way which is not happening at the moment. That is what I would say. My final point on this is there is a canard around which I think needs to be addressed. There is a theory argued by some that every student at school who gets a certain level of education has a right to go to the university of their choice. That has never been the system in this country. I can see why that would be attractive but it is not workable because each university has to have its own admissions procedure and unless you have a massive national grading system in terms of gradations between As and so on, which is much more sophisticated and deep than the A-level steam, you cannot get into that state of affairs. I personally think it would be undesirable. Bristol, which has 500 applicants for courses with 45 people on them has to decide by some process what to do. Somebody who is in the 455 rather than the 45 who got the places and who is on broadly the same academic qualifications does not, in my opinion at any rate, have the right to say, "I had a right to that place." Some of the argument has gone down a false view that the university is not responsible for deciding who it admits, but it is the university's responsibility to decide its admissions policy, not mine. They have to do it and decide what they do. This argument that if you have got a certain level of education you have a right to go to whatever university you specify is another falsehood which has entered into the discussion recently and it is not true.

  809. Bristol argue, for example, that their research has shown quite clearly that in taking a student from an inner city state school with two As and a B rather than another student who had got three or even four grade As, that the state grade student would get (the figures show) a better degree at the end of it than the one from an independent school.
  (Mr Clarke) There has been substantial research from Warwick University. There is also research—and the example I give is mature students admitted on the basis of an essay and interview—that they do at least as well as other people despite the fact they have not got A-levels. You do not have this discussion if you admit a mature student with an essay and an interview, does that mean you are keeping someone else out? It is a ridiculous discussion that proceeds in this way. I was in Newcastle the other day, as I mentioned, as part of the roadshow and the vice-chancellor told me of a very successful system there to encourage people from inner city schools to aspire to a place at Newcastle University. He made precisely the point you just made, Mr Holmes. Their evidence at Newcastle was people admitted through these routes do at least as well as those admitted by other routes. Why? I think there are issues about motivation involved and so on. Can we establish a national admissions system? No, we cannot. Can we say that the Secretary of State should decide what a particular university's admissions policy is? No, I do not think so. What we can do through the access regulator is try and ensure that every university opens itself to applications from the widest range of people and does not send messages saying "not wanted here" to any particular section of the population. That is the right way to proceed.

  810. When the Prime Minister said in Question Time that universities should admit students on merit, you seem to be saying that merit cannot be just measured by saying you have got three straight As?
  (Mr Clarke) What he actually said—and I have not got his question in front of me—was irrespective of class or background and that was interpreted as operating in one direction. That operates in another direction, too, coming from the beginning of where that question was. I think the Prime Minister's formulation, as you would expect me to say, was spot on in every respect. It should be on merit and irrespective of class and background but that merit has to look at the potential people have and there is not some simple arithmetical approach. That is that truth. The University of Bristol has about 100 admissions tutors of various kinds and across the system as a whole there are thousands of admissions tutors who have to take difficult decisions about what they do and they take their decisions on the basis of the interests of the university and the interests of the student. For us to say each one of those will operate according to some chip that we implant in their brain as to what they do is a completely ludicrous way of proceeding. We could not operate in that way.

  811. I do think we ought to get our special advisers to do a little note for us on this famous research about the lack of correlation between A-level performance and degree performance because I suspect too much is being made of it. The implication of that research would be that there is no point in A-levels and I am not sure we want to draw that conclusion. I want to ask two questions of the Secretary of State. First of all, does he have available to him figures for the proportion of those people who get three As at A-level, since that is the point made by Mr Holmes, who come from independent schools?
  (Mr Clarke) I do not have them available to me but we could probably dig them out and I am happy to do that.[6]

	Number achieving 3 or more A grades	As a percentage of total
Maintained schools	9,714	45.8
Independent schools	7,646	36.1
FE Sector Colleges	3,833	18.1
Total	21,193

Students aged 16 to 18 at the start of the academic year, that attempted at least one GCE/VCE A level or Double award in 2002 in England.

See also Ev. p279

  812. Does the Secretary of State have some general knowledge on this question?
  (Mr Clarke) Funnily enough, no. For us the key issue is not independent school or state school. I know that is the issue that has been taken up and it is relatively easy issue to measure because you can identify the school from which people come. I know the independent schools have been trying to make an argument about this but I do not think that is the most important thing. I think the most important thing is the social background and these types of issues rather than the school you go to. There is data, you are quite right, Mr Johnson, because it is easier to collect because on every application form there is the school you come from so you can do it. What it tells you is rather more doubtful because, as many parties have argued, if you end up in an independent school at sixth form it is a different spread than may happen in other ways.

  813. Let us take independent schools as a proxy, particularly since the abolition of the assisted places scheme, where the social class representation has been skewed. I do not know the figures either but I think it would be useful to see them. Let us take a hypothesis. If it were the case that 50% of three As at A-level were coming from independent schools, would it not be perfectly natural to expect that 50% of student, roughly speaking, at our best universities who select the students with three As at A-level would come from independent schools?
  (Mr Clarke) There are three points. In terms of what I said earlier, I do not think there is no point in A-levels, I absolutely do not, and I think there is probably a correlation between A-level and degree performance. The point that is being made is different, that if you go down different routes you also do well. I do not accept the suggestion in any way that independents are a proxy for people on higher incomes. I know large numbers of people on higher incomes who do not send their children to private schools. One of the arguments that I have most resented in this whole, as I say, ridiculous discussion is the suggestion that the middle class is the same as those people who send their children to private schools. About 7% of children go to private school. 21% are defined as ABC1 on the classic managerial levels of employment, about 55-56% are white collar jobs. Which of these you define as "the middle classes", I do not know but I believe the overwhelming majority of the "middle classes" send their children to maintained schools, they want the maintained schools to do well and get their children to university. I positively resent the description that what "middle class" people do is send their children to private schools. I do not think that is true and therefore I do not think it is a proxy.

  814. Secretary of State, if that were the case (and of course it is the case) you would expect the performance of the state sector in terms of producing 3As at A-level combinations to be higher than I believe it actually is. I would invite the Secretary of State—and I think the Committee should look at this because I think it would be a sobering perspective on our discussion on access, and bearing in mind all the perfectly reasonable caveats that have been made—to look at this question of what proportion of kids getting three As at A-level come from independent schools. I think it would be found to be a very substantial proportion.

  Chairman: The Committee has looked at this area, Secretary of State, before Robert Jackson was a member of the Committee. We do have the statistics and indeed we trawled over them when we did our access inquiry. We have been updated by you but we know the figures broadly and what we did find when we took the Select Committee to the United States and what was encouraging was they had a much better ability, in our view, to evaluate the potential of students because they were not depending just on one club in terms of that evaluation as we had with A-levels. Many of us came away thinking the real problem for evaluating potential is when you have that one club of three A-levels plus interview. Many of the people that we talked to through the access inquiry said, "If you wanted more people like us we would interview." We came back thinking the broader criteria for evaluating the potential of students is much more preferable to the institutions in our country, whether independent or public sector, who are good at glossing up three A-levels.

  815. That was my second question
  (Mr Clarke) My difficulty with the point is I agree with you and a number of vice-chancellors have made the point to me about the necessity for breadth. In saying that, it is easy for me to be portrayed as somebody who does not think the A-level is an important standard. On the contrary, I do think A-level is an important standard. I think getting three As at A-level is an important achievement and ought to be a major maybe even the determining factor in whether you get a university place. I am happy to look at the comparisons that Mr Jackson suggests that I do. All I would say to the body politick is do not conduct the debate in terms of private schools and state schools, conduct it in terms of educational achievement and social class, background, those type of issues, rather than making the question of private schools a proxy for that debate because I do not think it is.

  816. My second question is really about potential and this has been invoked by the Chairman. Potential, I would say, could be described as a combination of IQ plus knowledge. I think I have a problem with the idea that people should be taken into any universities, but particularly elite universities, simply on the basis of IQ rather than knowledge. Let's take the extreme case of the Cambridge Mathematics Faculty. Cambridge is a world centre and has been for centuries for mathematics. There are only X100 places at that university. Does the Secretary of State think it is a worthwhile use of a very, very scarce facility, a place at Cambridge to read mathematics, for a substantial proportion of its students to have to undergo remedial courses and training courses to bring them up to speed to enable them to participate at that level? Is there not a real question about whether we may be over-investing in potential measured by IQ rather than paying regard to a degree of knowledge that should have been acquired at school?
  (Mr Clarke) Firstly, I do not think potential is just about IQ and knowledge. There is a third word which is at least as important and that is motivation. Secondly, I think the IQ point is interesting when you look at the American SATs tests and how that operates. They are not IQ tests but they are not a million miles away in content. Some say we should be looking at a SATs system here to try and supplement the A-level system in the direction you indicate to give more weight to the IQ-type factor, if I can put it like that, in measuring potential. That is an interesting discussion although I do not have a strong opinion myself. If you do not mind I will not entertain the Committee with discussions on the admissions procedure through which I was admitted to the Faculty of Mathematics and the various questions which I was asked because if I put them on the record it will set a number of hares running which I do not wish to set running.

  817. I am not suggesting you were wrongly admitted!
  (Mr Clarke) Of course not. In fact, I think it was one of the more inspired choices of that university at that time! The fact is that of course I agree with what Mr Jackson is saying about remedial courses and so on. When you look at MIT and their eight-week course they have for people before going to MIT—and nobody is seriously suggesting that MIT is not a serious academic institution, coming from a variety of different backgrounds they believe that they find through that people who maybe have not refined their skills to the level of doing the entrance exams to Oxford or Cambridge but nevertheless have massive potential and simply going through a crash course in those aspects takes you to where you should be. If I may say so, the danger of Mr Jackson's argument, and I genuinely respect his views on this very much is, if you get to a point of saying only A-levels or only the three As at A-level test tells universities what they need to know, I think that takes away an important discretion from universities and how they admit which is quite important when you are trying to look at the motivational factor. I would most seriously say if you are looking at potential, you must definitely look at IQ-type related issues, knowledge type related issues, but please do not ignore the motivational issues because I think they are also very important.

  818. Pursuing this line of questioning a bit further, Minister. Paul mentioned Newcastle, for example and the other day when we had two vice-chancellors in I asked them about the widening access mechanisms the Government were already pursuing in reintroducing maintenance grants, et cetera, were there any mechanisms that we had not really looked at and we should do and both of them came back with what this type of what I describe as "first footing" projects in terms of getting kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds to go to the universities and sample their wares, as it were. One of them mentioned specifically the Inspire project with his particular university establishment. Should we not be providing seed corn funding to universities to set up this type of first footing scheme to try and get wider access?
  (Mr Clarke) The short answer to that question is, yes, HEFCE does have resources available and is funding some things and probably should be doing more. The reason I made the comment on the HEFCE annual report is I know they are wanting to look at what we say about the access regulator, which will address precisely the kind of questions you have just raised in terms of having to go to a review of where we go and what kind of resource would make a difference to make it happen. What you call first footing is precisely the type of project which I think could make a significant difference.

  819. I just wanted to reflect back the experience of another overseas visit which some of us went on to Moscow where they are desperate for a standard national exam as part of their entrance system because there the whole entry requires individual universities setting their own exams and their own standards, which is of course completely open to abuse. That is the other end of the spectrum and we need to be aware of that.
  (Mr Clarke) As I say, I agree very much indeed. However, there is a massive ideological/philosophical question which you raise in this, Ms Davey, which is the relationship between the freedom and autonomy of universities and a national system of some kind or other. I should just say to the Committee I am pretty chary about going down the route of a national system of assessment or points according to which there is a relatively automatic right to go to certain universities in a highly hierarchical system. I am slightly worried about getting to that. I hope the proposals that we put forward on the Access Regulator enable us to bridge the gap to which you rightly refer between the autonomy of universities and what they have to do, and the national interest and in funding this to get this the right way. That is what we are trying to achieve.

  Chairman: Secretary of State, it has been a good session and very useful for our inquiry. Thank you for your attendance.