An overview of Government HE Policy by Dr Nick Sanders Director for HE DfES.

1. I want first to talk a bit about Ministers and the Department and how we are trying to work with our partners and do things a bit differently from what I fear you might expect us to be like. 2. I want secondly to talk, going beyond my official title and indeed beyond my own role, about some of the other education policies we are promoting, because they are directly relevant to higher education and because there are things you can do to help us get those policies right. 3. And then I want to talk, as our Ministers have done and as is the official title of this section, about our policies on HE, divided into the four strands of increasing and widening participation; teaching; research; and lastly the impact which universities and colleges can have on the economy and their local communities. 4. I think the central point to make about our current Ministers and the Department, now importantly called the Department for Education and Skills, is that we are determined to make a difference.  Sometimes in the long-gone past there was a tendency for the Department for Education under its various names to stand back and do very little.  We once had a Secretary of State who lamented that his only direct power was to order the demolition of air-raid shelters in school playgrounds. 5. And all of you who are parents or school governors, which I hope many of you are, will be well aware that things have changed from that view of the world and that current Ministers have ambitious plans, not least for the schools.  There is a real sense driving us on many of our policies that we should no longer be constrained by the belief that the best we can hope for is disappointingly slow incremental change, and that we can and should be more radical. 6. In doing all of that, Ministers take the lead.  And is not an accident, given the priority the government gives to education, that we have a set of very committed Ministers now.  Estelle Morris was herself a teacher in Coventry for many years and brings a depth of professional experience to the task which really shows.  Margaret Hodge, whom some of you may well have met, is Minister for Lifelong Learning and Higher Education.  She has spent a good deal of time visiting institutions of all sorts, and takes a very keen interest indeed not just in what we do but in what is going on on the ground, and not least from the student’s perspective. 7. In all of this we do of course recognise that the government’s relationships with individual universities and colleges are a careful, and important, balance between achieving the government’s strategic aims and spending the taxpayer’s money well on one hand and respecting institutional autonomy on the other.  The Funding Council is the body which makes that balance work; and personally I do see one reason for the success of our universities and colleges in international terms as precisely due to the way in which the Funding Council not only exists but also works. 8. It follows that the Department’s team on higher education is quite small – most of my own staff deal not with HE policy or funding but with student finance – and we work hard at building an effective partnership with others. 9.  I said I would say a bit more about our working methods.  I recommend our latest strategy framework document, called (and not accidentally) Delivering Results if you would like to understand what we are trying to do. 10.  In doing our job we are committed to working hard to understand our customers and work in effective partnership.  This means, for example, much more contact with institutions than we have been used to:  I expect all of my staff to pay visits and to meet students in particular.  And it means investing in strong internal management to deliver measurable targets.  All of that is a big change of culture for us. 11. The second topic is a word or two about policies other than HE.  Obviously I could take up the whole of this talk and much more on that, simply because so much is happening; but I just want after noting progress on primary education to pick out two of the next big ones for debate:  transforming secondary education and our 14/19 proposals. 12. The story on primary education is very remarkable.  A combination of investing in effective teaching methods – notably the literacy and numeracy hours – setting stretching national and local targets and engaging the commitment of heads and teachers on an enormous scale, really has brought about an increase in standards of achievement at 11 which, as I said earlier, goes beyond settling for incremental change and putting up with disappointment. 13. And among many other gains the pressure on numeracy lays the foundation for tackling performance in maths at later stages which I am well aware is one of the concerns many of you feel. 14. The next stage on primary education will be to set further and more demanding targets for future years, breaking once and for all the cycle of low expectations and low achievement by too many pupils which has been a particular characteristic of English school education for a hundred years and more. 15. On secondary education, Estelle Morris set out some of our plans for raising standards for 11/14 year olds last week, in a speech called (once again, not accidentally) “transforming secondary education”.  There will be sustained effort to raise standards through better quality teaching, a determined drive to tackle the real and serious issues of poor behaviour and discipline and a programme to encourage innovation, diversity and collaboration between schools.  It is clear to me that Ministers and my colleagues are determined to bring about an improvement in achievement at the 11/14 stage just as significant as the agenda for primary schools. 16. The next stage chronologically and in policy development is from 14/19.  I want today to appeal to you, as partners, to help us with where this stage is going. 17. But actually the one departmental document I very much hope you will get hold of and think about is the consultation document on our policies for 14/19 year olds.  We want comments by the end of May, and there are a whole lot of strands I the document which are pretty relevant to where the next generations of engineering students will come from and to the balance of skills in the nation as a whole. 18. I won’t try to summarise the whole thing, but just as examples we want views on: putting right the traditional neglect of vocational education; the nature and content of the 14/16 curriculum, recognising that maths, science, ICT and English would remain as statutory requirements; extension to the grade range at A level to provide greater differentiation between more able candidates; a new overarching award to recognise achievement by 19;  opportunities for some learners to proceed more quickly or more slowly than the conventional current pattern; greater involvement of employers and much, much more. 19. All universities and colleges have been asked to comment.  If in particular we are to develop a range of pathways which includes revaluing vocational experience then there are direct implications for the range of learning your potential students will have.  I want to urge you all to take an interest, and to comment direct, individually, collectively and as much as you can. 20. Turning to HE itself, if you want a thoughtful and wide-ranging source for some of the intellectual basis for current policies than I recommend looking again at David Blunkett’s speech at Greenwich University two years ago.  It addresses the impact of globalisation; the economic and social role of higher education and set out an agenda for action based on the twin goals of excellence and diversity.  It stressed the case for early action on, among other themes, wider participation; opening up new markets in lifelong learning; developing better links with employers; better management and staff development within institutions; and tackling the situation on equal opportunities among staff, which David Blunkett described as deplorable. 21. Estelle Morris developed some of these themes in her first major speech on higher education, last October at London Guildhall University. 22. She said then that there were four goals: widening participation and moving ahead to reach the government’s target of 50 per cent of 18/30 year olds entering higher education in 2010; continuing to produce world class research; ensuring that universities work better with industry and with the wider community; and supporting excellent teaching in HE institutions. 23. Those goals are set out in very similar words in our strategy document; and this formulation is the current set of DfES targets for HE, on which our own performance will be judged.  We are committed to the following; to increase participation towards 50% of those aged 18/30 by the end of the decade, while maintaining standards; to make significant year-on-year progress towards fair access, as measured by the Funding Council benchmarks (which, I remind you, are based on social class, geographical area and balance between maintained and independent schools); to bear down on rates of non-completion, which have remained pretty constant during the last phase of expansion; and to strengthen research and teaching excellence. 24. I said at the beginning that I would talk first about widening participation.  I was very struck at London Guildhall and on several occasions since by the passion which the Secretary of State brings to this subject.  That is the other message I leave with you.  For her it is simply unacceptable that young people from the highest social classes have five times the entry rate to HE of young people from the lowest social classes in the conventional classification.  That, of course, reflects the socio-economic gap in performance at all ages and stages before 18 or 19.  And that is why the government’s policies for primary and secondary education and for the 14/19 age group are designed to raise standards across the whole range of performance and to raise expectations. 25. Estelle Morris appealed directly in her London Guildhall speech to universities and colleges, as she put it, to put roots down into schools so that every young person in school or college regularly encounters staff or students from the HE world.  All of us recognise, and are trying to build on, the work of this sort which has been going on for many years:  we do not suppose for a moment that we have invented something noone has ever thought of.  But the message from the Secretary of State is that there is a long way to go for it to be a matter of routine that every secondary school and every college has regular and repeated links. 26. We are working extensively with the Funding Council and the Learning and Skills Council to coordinate our policies to get from the current 41 per cent or so of 18/30 participation to 50 per cent and at the same time to improve the success at all stages of young people from poorer backgrounds.  That drive is at the heart of the government’s policy. 26. We are working extensively with the Funding Council and the Learning and Skills Council to coordinate our policies to get from the current 41 per cent or so of 18/30 participation to 50 per cent and at the same time to improve the success at all stages of young people from poorer backgrounds.  That drive is at the heart of the government’s policy. 27. It is accompanied by pressure to value and to encourage teaching quality.  All of us welcome the conclusion of the long discussions on teaching quality assurance, and I pay tribute to the patient work done by many people to bring that conclusion about.  Ministers are clear that they expect there to be a workable balance between accountability; good information for students and parents; and institutional autonomy.  Those principles have underlain the work which has gone on. 28. But the Secretary of State has posed some additional questions too.  Should we put incentives in place to encourage excellent teaching?  How do you identify what is excellent?  How can we best think about the relationship between teaching and research?  She has asked us all to consider how best to enable people to specialise in excellent teaching:  what does that mean for encouraging the twin themes of excellence and diversity? 29. Some of these are questions which have been addressed before, but perhaps not as directly as they might have been.  I look forward to a round of debate on them.  What sort of funding incentives should we put in place to encourage teaching and research excellence, widening participation and the economic and community role of institutions? 30. On research, the DfES and the Office for Science and Technology and the DTI work closely together.  One of the important features of the way in which public expenditure decisions are made is the existence, within the overall Spending Review which now happens every two years, of so-called cross-cutting reviews.  In the current spending review, as in its predecessors, there is a cross-cutting review of science and research, which will play an important part in the decisions which Ministers reach between now and the Summer on their spending priorities. 31. Some of you may well be among the many institutions the cross-cutting review team has visited:  thank you for your help if you were.  I’m not going to speculate about the outcomes, if only because I would certainly be very bad at it, but it is clear that there are critical issues about how best to build on the very substantial investments which have been made in the past two spending rounds through JIF and SRIF and about how to invest in research funding which will be sustainable for the future. 32. Then of course there is the question of the future development of the RAE – that is a proper issue for the Funding Council to take the lead on, and in due course it will. 33. In the long term we have to ask ourselves searching questions about how best to lever in support to sustain genuinely world-class research in British institutions, and how to ensure that the brightest and the best want to use their talents in the UK; and how institutions can best collaborate with other world leaders, as many already do on an increasing scale. 34. Widening  participation and sponsoring teaching and research excellence make a demanding enough agenda.  But we want there to be another debate too.  The fourth strand is about embedding universities and colleges in industries and their communities.  Of course, of course this is not a new idea.  Some tremendous work has been done, for many years in many institutions.  But it is striking that both David Blunkett and Estelle Morris have drawn attention to the thought that globalisation does not just mean the breaking down of national boundaries:  it can also emphasise even more strongly the importance of local and regional areas and the importance of HE institutions as contributors at the local and regional level as well as the national and frequently the international one. 35.  The funding incentives for greater activity in this area have tended to be smaller in scale – and often more fragmentary – then in the areas of increasing participation and research.  We are clear that there is much more work to be done in encouraging effective activity in this general area, not least including the full range of contacts with employers in sponsoring lifelong learning. 36. I’ve chosen to put all of this at the level of national policy and not to focus it on the engineering interest.  But I have been delighted to visit a wide range of engineering and science departments so far, and I hope to come to some more if you will invite me.  Those visits have shown a huge range of examples of initiatives across pretty well all of the fields I have described, as well of course as a variety of anxieties and pressures.  We will do our best to understand those pressures and build on those successes.