Oral evidence: Assessing quality in Higher Education HC 572-iTuesday 17 November 2015

Oral evidence, 17 November 2015.

Witnesses

Katie Akerman, Director of Quality and Standards, University of Chichester, Professor Neil Ward, Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic), University of East Anglia, Professor Colin Riordan, Vice Chancellor, Cardiff University, Professor Graham Virgo, Pro Vice Chancellor (Education), Cambridge University, and Professor Belinda Tynan, Pro Vice Chancellor (Learning Innovation), Open University, gave evidence.

Chair

Colleagues, thank you very much. Thank you for attending the Select Committee. For the purposes of the record, could I ask you to introduce yourselves and tell us the institution that you are from?

Katie Akerman

I am Katie Akerman. I am the Director of Quality and Standards at the University of Chichester.

Professor Riordan

I am Colin Riordan, Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University.

Professor Tynan

I am Belinda Tynan, Pro Vice Chancellor of Learning Innovation at the Open University.

Professor Virgo

I am Graham Virgo, Pro Vice Chancellor for Education at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Ward

I am Neil Ward. I am Pro Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of East Anglia.

Chair

Thank you for attending. I am going to put words in the Minister’s mouth, but I am not exaggerating too much. The reason there is a need for a new TEF is because the HE sector and universities have not prioritised teaching as something that the students need to appreciate. Is that a fair criticism? Do you not prioritise teaching as much as you should? Is research given higher priority?

Katie Akerman

I do not know that I would necessarily agree with that. Generalising across the sector, we tend to refer to research‑led institutions and teaching‑led institutions, which is perhaps something of a misnomer: we are all learning‑led institutions. I was struck by the point you were making earlier about a focus on learning. Chichester is known as a teaching‑led institution, and we work very hard to ensure that the quality of teaching is appropriate, fit for purpose, benefits our students, supports our students, enables them to grow. Chichester has a particular strength, in that we punch above our weight in terms of taking students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, students with disabilities, students from state schools, and we put a lot of mechanisms in place to support those students, because I am not sure that teaching quality is just that which happens in the classroom. It is about all of the things that happen outside of the classroom. It is about developing the curriculum so that it is appropriate. It is about the mechanisms we put in place to support our students—disability support, for example. So I am not sure that is necessarily an applicable comment. We work very hard to ensure that we have high quality teaching.

Professor Riordan

I do not agree with the premise either. From my experience, we expend a huge amount of effort focusing on teaching, learning, the quality of the student experience, making sure that, when students answer the National Student Survey, what we get back we respond to. We have a great relationship with our students’ union. I would say, certainly from my point of view as Vice Chancellor, I expend at least as much of my effort focusing on teaching and student experience as on research. If you look across the university, every academic and every member of the professional services will have different focuses, but I would say that, on the whole, there is at least a balance there. Having said that, there is a caveat. It is quite clear that there is a culture in research‑intensive universities, and perhaps in all universities, that does value research more highly than teaching, but it is a cultural matter. Many people come into the profession mainly because of the research, so you are slightly swimming against the tide in terms of the cultural value or the validation that is applied to research, as compared with teaching and learning. But teaching and learning has a huge number of champions, and increasingly influential champions, among the academic staff. I would not say that that culture is to be found among the professional services and support staff in the same way. There, the culture is much more that they are both important. There is a reality that research is valued more highly among academics in research‑intensive universities, but I would not say that the institution therefore follows that route, certainly in our case, and I think I can speak for a number of universities on that.

Professor Tynan

I would echo what my colleagues are saying here and probably add that the diversity of missions will reflect the kind of emphasis an organisation or university would hold in terms of the learner experience and the research frameworks that are within those organisations. At a place like the Open University, which is well known for its part‑time cohort and very diverse demographic, the learning experience for us has been reflected very kindly, in fact, in the NSS. For the last 10 years, we have been above 90%. Our emphasis on that learning experience and the teaching and learning process is incredibly important for the demographic we are bringing through the system. I will not give a direct answer that there is more emphasis or less emphasis, because I believe it relates to the kind of diversity that we want within the sector about what universities are providing, for not only the economy but the social fabric of the country.

Professor Virgo

I do not agree with the premise either, although it is fair to say, coming from a research‑intensive university, the profile of teaching is probably not as high as the profile of research. That may be in part because of the focus through REF and the desire of academics to make their mark in research, but the vast majority of them are fully engaged in teaching as well. There is a very high profile for teaching within the institution, but, in terms of the external awareness of what is going on, perhaps that is not as obvious as research.

Professor Ward

There is no doubt that there is increasing emphasis on managing and improving the quality of teaching in universities, as a result of £9,000 fees and liberalised recruitment, where we are competing for students with no caps. However, with successive research assessment exercises, there is no doubt that there is a much more sophisticated repertoire around measuring and monitoring research quality. At the level of the individual academic, but also sometimes academic departments, it is easier to see the emphasis on research or research quality. On the teaching side, the metrics are much newer and it is a much more recent development. It is research assessment exercises for over 30 years, which are of increasing sophistication, that has led to quite a lot of effort on managing and supporting research quality.

Chair

Given that I am hearing there is not really an issue, is TEF necessary?

Professor Riordan

I would not say it is necessary. I would like to see more evidence of the problem to which TEF is going to be the solution. However, just because it is not absolutely necessary, it does not mean to say we should not do it, if you see what I mean. I can see the point of it; I can see the idea behind it. We have a research excellence framework, and perhaps that is what gives research the profile that it has. If we had a teaching excellence framework, perhaps, as my colleague Graham said, externally there would be more recognition of what we would regard as the undoubted profile and quality of teaching and learning internally. If it can have that effect, that would be great. The question is, practically, whether it can be done, because we have been around this buoy before and, so far, it has been pretty difficult to come up with ways of assessing teaching. There is a very simple reason for that. In terms of research, the whole scientific method of peer review is just how it works. You automatically have a way of assessing quality and excellence, because, basically, somebody puts something out there; everybody else has a look and says, “Is this reproducible? Do we think this is good quality or not?” You come to a collective view on it and, in certain cases, you can almost prove something to be the case. It is just a very different process with teaching. How you, through the expert panels that we hear about in the Green Paper, adapt that process to teaching, which I think is the idea, is as yet not clear.

Professor Virgo

I agree with that. I would just add, whether or not TEF is necessary, we do not know yet what TEF is. We are lacking an awful lot of detail. If it could be an acceptable measure of teaching excellence, we can argue about whether it is necessary but it would undoubtedly be very useful in raising the profile of teaching and helping us to say, “This is proof of our teaching excellence”, rather than us just simply saying, “We know our teaching is excellent.” The question will be in the detail as to whether TEF can actually achieve that, which is as yet unclear.

Chair

I want to push you on that, with regards to Colin’s point about practicality. You were deliberately chosen, if I may, to come and give us evidence because you are incredibly diverse. You reflect that huge diversity in the higher education sector. If I am considering doing a particular subject, English, at Cambridge, Open University, Cardiff, or wherever, how on earth will I be able to compare and contrast? Is it possible that, given that huge diversity in the HE sector and in your institutions, I will be able to have single rating to say I should go to this particular university? How can you capture that diversity without having the risk of just becoming a homogenous lump?

Katie Akerman

The only way you could manage that at the moment would be through the league tables, because the league tables will be subject‑focused, but league tables are far from perfect. One of the things the Quality Assurance Agency has always sought to do is make sure that its judgments on the reviews it undertakes are not something that can easily be translated into a league table, because it does not want to contribute to the development of those. Our concern with the teaching excellence framework is that it is potentially reductionist, in that it is reducing the student experience of university to their experience of teaching only. If you look at something like the KIS data for traditional subjects, like history for example, a student may spend only 20% or 25% of their time being taught in the classroom. The rest of their time is spent researching, in the library, hanging out with their friends and everything that a university experience is about. It would be a sad loss to the sector and to students were their experience to be reduced to that of their teaching.

Professor Tynan

There are potentially some other challenges I can see that sit around learning gain, which is also quite disputed, even in our field. What we are looking for is what distance a learner travels in their journey: whatever university they are going to, what do they come in with, where are they going out to and what with, and what have they gained in that period of time? That is also another measure. For me, it is probably difficult to say, “Let us compare directly English here and English there.” What you are really looking at is the performance or the learning outcomes that the students have achieved. That is a real challenge for us. I know that there are some projects going on at the moment to look at that, to see how we can measure learning gain. If we could crack that one, we could have something quite interesting that would frame or support a TEF.

Professor Ward

On learning gain, there is not a strong consensus, but it is something that is very common in education, before you get to higher education, looking at the value added and looking at how students progress through different stages of their education. It is not particularly well developed in a higher education context, but I would anticipate, in two or three years’ time, with the work that is going on, led by HEFCE, we might well have something a bit more robust and consensual than we have now.

Professor Riordan

Just on how you measure this and whether you can measure it, one of the ways is metrics. We know that that really does not work for researchers. That is why, so far, we have always stuck with peer review for REF, or RAE as was. Research metrics are just not very reliable, whether it is citations, field ratings, citation indices, that sort of thing. I think we will have similar problems with teaching and learning. The question then is: how do you reproduce something like peer review? That is the question we just do not know the answer to. I do not know yet how you do peer review, or something equivalent to peer review, for teaching.

Professor Virgo

Specifically on your question, it is really important for us to emphasise that we are a very diverse sector, and so, when students are making their choices about where they wish to study, there are all sorts of factors that will be taken into account. If it is just boiled down to one particular issue through TEF, that will lose the subtleties of the diversity of the sector.

Paul Blomfield

Following on from that point of diversity, at the moment it has been boiled down to three crude issues, has it not? Employment, retention and NSS are the metrics that are in the Green Paper. How adequate do you think those are to measure teaching excellence across such a wide‑ranging sector?

Professor Tynan

I might speak first on this one, if you do not mind. I might speak to the issue of progression and retaining students. One of the complexities in this particular area is that not all organisations are graduating students on degrees. For the Open University, for example, more than 38% of our students are graduating with sub‑degrees, and so their aspirations and also employers’ aspirations sit with short courses, diplomas, certificates, less than that degree. It goes back to that point about learning gain. If we are thinking about what we are measuring here, the types of students that are coming through these diverse missions are exiting our universities with different kinds of qualifications that meet their aspirations and the employer’s aspirations too. A single measure that is just using current data around progression and retention may not serve the missions of universities that are serving the most disadvantaged students.

Professor Virgo

Of those three metrics, from the University of Cambridge perspective, we would be content that retention we do very well in; we have statistics that we have good employability with good salaries; and we do well in NSS, but that is not a good reason to adopt those metrics across the sectors, because what will work in one particular institution and may be some evidence of teaching excellence will be inappropriate and unfair in other institutions. With some of them, particularly employability, there is no real sign that that is a metric of teaching excellence.

Professor Riordan

I do not think that a good NSS result necessarily equates to teaching excellence. It equates to students who are very happy with what they are being taught. It does not tell you anything about the standards, in other words how good their achievement is in terms of academic progress. Similarly, retention, obviously, is great for Cambridge and it is fine for Cardiff. It might be more difficult for universities that take a far more diverse range of students for whom it is more difficult to finish their studies. It might still not tell you whether the teaching is excellent or not. There are lots of reasons why people have to give up their studies and do not progress. It may not relate to the teaching. You could make a similar argument on employment, that, just because you have high employability, it might be the mix of subjects, that you have a lot of vocationally orientated subjects. It will favour those that have law, medicine, dentistry, I would imagine, over those that do not.

Professor Ward

I am particularly concerned about the Green Paper mentioning the ambition to move to earnings. That could have all sorts of difficult unanticipated consequences around the rise and fall of different academic disciplines, on the basis of how much people earn when they graduate in that discipline.

Katie Akerman

The point about diversity in the sector is an interesting one. We have a number of collaborative partners we work with, including a number of further education colleges, and the number of students they take is too small for them to be reported in the National Student Survey. Whatever data sets we might use if we go ahead with the idea of a TEF, it would have to be something that everybody can take advantage of rather than a select number of institutions simply because they have the correct number of students. There are also issues, for example, around nesting of data, so, where a university might be running a combined programme like English and history, it is then which data set that particular programme is absorbed into. The metrics that are being proposed are far from perfect.

Paul Blomfield

Can I come back particularly on the employment metric? Graham, you made a very strong statement on a metric that your university would do very well out of. The Prime Minister has outlined an admirable objective of ambitious targets for improving widening participation in the sector. How do you think that metric would assist that objective in terms of widening participation? One of the things we are interested in exploring is perverse and unintended consequences of measurement, so how do you think universities might react, to up their employability scores?

Professor Virgo

If the issue is encouraging people to come to university and get the benefits of study at university to improve their life chances, in terms of better chance of getting graduate jobs, it will be possible to use employability to assist in widening participation discussions. But it is not a test of teaching excellence. It is a very different metric.

Paul Blomfield

You are all agreeing in that; I see your heads nodding. Can I come to the issue, then, of learning gain, which a number of you have mentioned and which I guess, to us from the outside, would seem an obvious way of measuring teaching excellence? Do you think any of the metrics that are there at the moment, those three we talked about, effectively measure learning gain? If not, what new metrics do you think we might look towards?

Professor Tynan

From my perspective, I do not think they are quite there yet. It is a very difficult area to understand and to measure, and there is nothing easy that you can pick off the shelf. What you are doing is assessing, basically, what somebody comes into the organisation with and what they end up leaving with. If someone comes in with three A‑levels and leaves with a first class honours degree, what kind of learning gain is that compared to someone who comes in with one A‑level and leaves with a first class degree? What are we measuring? What do we see as being important here? The work HEFCE is funding currently across the sector has a range of projects that are looking at both statistical and qualitative modelling, which will help us ascertain what kind of measure we could pick up and look at. There are probably lessons to be learned from what is happening in the school sector in this space and how that is measured there. That could also hold some clues for us.

Professor Riordan

We used to call this added value, so you compare the UCAS tariff or similar when they arrived and then what they left with. The danger with that and the league tables is grade inflation, which is mentioned in the TEF. We have to do something about that. The problem is that, if you do start measuring that sort of thing, then people start gaming it. We have not got the learning gain programme in Wales. It is a HEFCE thing, so I am not personally involved with it. The immediate issue I think we will encounter is, if there is some sort of test at the start and a test at the end that are not directly to do with their studies, to avoid the grade inflation problem, universities would potentially start teaching to those tests or at least teaching to the second test. That is the problem. It is how you come up with a metric you cannot then game, in a sense.

Professor Ward

We have one of the HEFCE projects. I think there are 12 being funded in different universities or groups of universities. We are experimenting with three different techniques. At the most basic level, it is the relationship between the qualifications and the level of skills that a student has coming in to the degree programme and then what they have at the end. Some of that can be done by looking at the grade point averages, or the scores as they pass through the different stages of study, and the educational qualifications on entry. That is the most basic level. In some disciplines, there are quite well developed tests of students’ grasps of concepts, and so they can do a test at the start and a test at the end. It is going to take some time for that work to be pushed through and for the sector to come to a settled view, because it is very new stuff.

Professor Virgo

If learning gain is simply an issue of distance travelled, then, from a university where we have a very high entry level, it is going to be more difficult to prove distance travelled in comparison with other institutions. Therefore, we would be happier with retention and employability. That would fit what we do best in.

Professor Tynan

It speaks to the diversity of the sector in what the different missions of organisations are and what they are trying to achieve with their learners.

Paul Blomfield

You are painting a picture of complexity, and there is the work going in HEFCE and a need for thought to get this right. When we had the Secretary of State in front of the Committee, he was very clear that he wanted to develop this in partnership with the sector. There was a desire to have TEF implemented for 2017, but he acknowledged that, if the sector were uncomfortable that it could be achieved effectively within that timeframe, then there was some flex there. Do you think that we can effectively introduce TEF as you would want it to be, as an effective tool in measuring teaching excellence, by 2017?

Professor Riordan

I am slightly out of it because it is Wales, although we do want to be involved, because we cannot have something happening in England that we have nothing to do with. That is very, very difficult. If you think back to when REF was started—was that 1984 or 1982?—it took years before REF became reasonably defensible. It was RAE. The early iterations of RAE would be difficult to defend now, I think. I would imagine that you could have something in place but certainly not, as you put it, as we would like to see it. You could make a start, but I think you would be looking at iterations over maybe a decade or something—it could be as long as that—before you really worked out how to do this and whether it could be done in a sensible way, particularly as we do not see a clear path forward at the moment, because of some of the issues that we have already outlined.

Professor Virgo

We would certainly want to see significant pilots for all of those reasons before TEF proper could be rolled out because, as I said earlier on, we just do not have the details yet to really assess what is on the table.

Chair

Can I just push you on that, because I think that is very important? Do you think it is impractical to have a target implementation date of April 2017? Is that not achievable?

Professor Virgo

TEF with a rigorous framework I do not think is achievable. The Green Paper identifies the most basic framework, which is QAA‑related, and that is clearly achievable, because that is a very easy threshold to cross.

Professor Tynan

In pushing forward too quickly, I think there will be too many unintended consequences that could occur. We have not even touched on here any issues around brand for the UK and its nations, and the unintended consequences to that, the unintended consequences potentially for widening participation of students, diversity of missions. There is a lot to think through to get that right.

Professor Ward

It is interesting to compare with the introduction of impact and impact case studies in the REF. That was just a change to one part of the REF, and there was a full pilot across different disciplines and across a range of institutions, a very thorough pilot, to test that out. Here, we are looking at something that is going to gauge teaching excellence, which is quite nebulous, very, very complex. It needs a level of piloting at least comparable to the impact agenda within the REF, if not something far more extensive.

Professor Tynan

We have seen that the OECD has just said AHELO, which was measuring employability‑type measures, is not going to be pursued. There has been huge investment in that. It is deemed to be unsuitable, so the OECD itself is now taking a step back from that and trying to develop something extra too. There are probably lessons for us to learn from that.

Professor Riordan

It is an excellent example from Neil there, and that took about five years, I think, to go from “let’s pilot”—or maybe even longer; we can easily check—to it actually happening in 2014. That was a long process for one bit, 20%.

Paul Blomfield

What other lessons do you think we might learn from the REF? I know it has taken time to get it right. I think people feel that it is now broadly successful. One you have touched on, which is more emphasis on narrative reporting. Would you agree with that? What other lessons might there be from the REF?

Professor Riordan

That it takes a long time; that you really have to think it through; that you have to build these things up slowly; that you do need to have pilots and you have to monitor and evaluate. Thinking of it in those terms, if somebody said, “Let us invent REF now and it will be in place for April 2017”, can that be done? No, very, very straightforwardly. If there are any parallels, that is one lesson we can learn: that it does take time and it does need thinking through.

Professor Virgo

I do not think we should regard REF as a perfect model. The Green Paper identifies the significant amount of time, the bureaucracy and the expense involved in REF. One of my concerns is, if we visited that upon TEF and had that level of bureaucracy and expense, it would undermine an awful lot of what it is being sought to achieve.

Professor Tynan

In contrast, I would say, by doing nothing, we risk not highlighting very excellent teaching practices here in the UK in particular. As you were saying when you opened up, the focus on learning and teaching has not been as much in some institutions as in others, and why would we not want to be looking at benchmarking, seeing where that sits on a world stage and understanding how we can improve that?

Amanda Solloway

Belinda, it was a couple of your comments that made me think about this. Looking at teaching and then looking at learning, you clearly indicated that learning was a great success within the Open University. I wonder if that is dictated by attitude of people who apply, as an example. I wonder if there is some difference.

Professor Tynan

In the distance learning field, we quite often say that the students are very motivated to come and study with us, to take on seven years’ worth of study part time. If you are working and you have children, to undertake that, you have to come highly motivated. It is our job then to keep them, to keep them motivated so that they can complete. That is part of the demographic that we attract, but I think people are always in a bit of shock. They first come to us and they think, “I am motivated; I am ready to go”, but they do not really understand fully the commitment that is required.

Chair

What would your retention rate be? The model of distance learning could be problematic. You are not going to see your tutor face to face, are you?

Professor Tynan

It depends what the students are enrolled in and where their exit points are, because it is a staircase. Students come to us in entry qualifications and they might go into foundation qualifications, and so it is difficult for me to say, “In this part it is this, and in this part it is that”. 38% of our students, as I said before, are in that sub‑degree level and are doing extremely well. Completion rates on a modular basis rather than just on a degree basis are far easier for us to give you accountability for. Does that make sense?

Professor Riordan

One issue with retention rates is that, as learning becomes more flexible these days and into the 21st century, you are going to get people who will want to do 30 credits or 60 credits, then park that and go and work for a couple of years, and then build a degree up. It could give you a really wrong impression. If they go to Cambridge, they are pretty well likely to do a three‑year degree but, if they go to other universities, it could look very different. Retention might not give you an idea of the quality of what is happening there in terms of learning and teaching.

Professor Tynan

It really rests on the aspiration of the student and quite often the employer.

Amanda Solloway

That is quite a key point. I wondered again, and probably to everybody, whether there is something more that we should be addressing prior to either further or higher education in terms of equipping students to learn more. Maybe, Katie, you could think about that first.

Katie Akerman

That is a really interesting question and one that is quite difficult to answer. It comes back to the point about the diversity of the sector and the diversity of the students we take in. For example, changes to disabled students allowance are going to quite badly impact upon institutions that have a high proportion of disabled students and how we are able to support those. Similarly, there is a question in my mind about the linking of fees to institutions that are high on the teaching excellence framework. The Green Paper is talking about social mobility, and obviously there are targets around increasing student recruitment from disadvantaged backgrounds and so on. A student coming from a disadvantaged background might be put off by an institution that is charging £9,000, plus whatever inflation is, versus another provider, a private provider or an FE college, that is able to charge considerably lower fees. What we might end up with is that the very institutions that need help with their teaching excellence are not the ones that are able to access the additional funding. The students that we are trying to encourage might end up going to the potentially weaker institutions, in terms of a TEF, than we might otherwise want or want to promote.

Professor Ward

This issue of how students learn how to learn is a really interesting one. I see it from looking at my children, who are 15 and 12. Learning how to learn is a very prominent part of their education. Historically, universities have perhaps not engaged with the way that learning and teaching is changing in primary schools and secondary schools. I would say that an element of teaching excellence for an institution is the extent to which it does engage upstream. There is no mention of that sort of thing in the Green Paper.

Professor Virgo

I agree. Of course it is incredibly important to be aware of what is going on in schools, but universities do have a responsibility to really engage with the learning experience. At my institution, we spend a lot of time investigating the transition from school to university, to make sure that, when the students arrive, they have the learning skills to be able to cope with the independent study and the demands of a university education. If we feel they are lacking, then we spend a significant amount of time assisting them at the start to make sure they know what is expected of them and how to learn.

Amanda Solloway

Just going back to Katie’s point, do you notice that there are certain different entry levels in terms of learning from different types of social backgrounds?

Professor Virgo

To some extent, but, in my experience at my institution, almost regardless of school background, there is a need to assist with learning at the university level.

Chris White

To start with, the Chairman might have led the witness a little bit in his previous question about whether we could achieve this by 2017. Graham, you said no, this would not be possible, but I think we would be disadvantaged perhaps by missing yet another cohort out, because that would be another three years. I suppose my question really is about going back to the past and thinking that there would have been a Select Committee talking about Ofsted. Bearing in mind some of your reservations about TEF, Katie, and how you manage to encompass all the different schools, the diversity and all the different things an HE organisation could provide, we have found that Ofsted, however irritating it can be, improves standards. It recognises quality of teaching. I suppose, whatever we do here, whatever legislation is passed, you will still see it in The Times every year. I am sure you all grab the copy of the paper to see where you feature on that particular list, which does include some of the issues you talk about. My question is: do you think that, maybe in 2020, we will be sitting here again with the same panel saying, “Yes, it was a difficult thing to put in place, but it has recognised the quality of teaching. It has improved standards where standards needed to be improved”? Do you not also think that it will be improving transparency and accountability for young people who are looking for a different, alternative provision for their higher education? Sorry, that is a bit of a ramble, but does anybody want to respond to that?

Katie Akerman

This might be where I get to mention Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig is talking about the metaphysics of quality, and, to boil it down to a summary, what he is saying is that quality is in the eye of the beholder. That means, for universities, it is around transparency; it is around managing expectations. If I promise you Waitrose and deliver Lidl, you are not going to be particularly impressed. On the other hand, if I say what we are giving you is Tesco and then you arrive and it is more like Waitrose or M&S, you are going to be perfectly happy with your experience.

Chair

Other supermarkets are available.

Chris White

Can I come straight back to you on that point? If you are judging a supermarket by its service, its cleanliness, the quality of its staff, how quickly you get through or the cost of its food, it does not matter if you go to Lidl or wherever. There are measures by which you could directly compare Aldi and wherever, without depressing either one, or in fact making a customer think it was worth more or less. That is another example, perhaps.

Katie Akerman

It is very much around managing expectations and transparency. The Competition and Markets Authority guidance is encouraging the sector further. I think we are doing a good job, but that is moving us forwards. There is also the Private Member’s Bill going through and we will see where that gets to. Again, that will be something that moves us forward, if it does go through completely. Because it is about managing expectation, while universities and other institutions can do as much as is humanly possible in terms of the information we put out on websites, what we say at open days and so forth, what we cannot manage is media expectations, what career advisers tell prospective students, what parents think about universities. If people have got what might be classed as a traditional idea of a university, perhaps somewhere like Cambridge for example, they will be disappointed if they come to somewhere like Chichester. This why things like open days are absolutely crucial, because students know what it is that they are signing up for.

Professor Virgo

Can I pick you up on the 2017 and whether we were led or not, and also, in 2020, where we will be looking back at it? That starts to raise the really big issues as to exactly what the point of TEF is, and I think there are two. One is reputational; the other is fee level. Certainly, TEF could be introduced in 2017 with most institutions being level 1 on the basis of already published quality assurance decisions. In reputational terms, we are already there; we can say to our students we have been quality assured. Therefore, the only benefit is going to be one of raising fees, and, if that is the assessment of TEF, then that raises all sorts of other issues as to whether that is really what is behind it. Your question was premised on providing information for students. In 2017, there will not be any additional information provided to students about teaching excellence or the quality of the learning experience. As to whether that will be available in 2020, again, we go back to where we started. We do not really know what the metrics are going to be and whether they are going to be sufficient to be able to really say, “Yes, we accept that is a sign of teaching excellence.”

Professor Riordan

You mentioned Ofsted. Schools are in a very, very different position. At least in England, there is a national curriculum, which schools follow. You can make comparisons. There is a defined and relatively small number of subjects that are being taught. Earlier on, we talked about comparability and whether English at Cardiff can compare with English at Chichester, if it is taught, or English at Cambridge. It might be very different but you might nevertheless be able to compare. What about a subject that is multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary: digital journalism or biomechanics? There are all sorts of things you cannot really compare because we do not just fall down into a nice defined set of history, geography, English, maths, physics, chemistry. It just does not work like that anymore. That is without even taking into account what we have already discussed, the very different missions of different universities and different expectations. You come to a university like mine for a particular reason, which might not at all be the same as the university down the road. You might prefer that university because it is doing something quite different from what Cardiff is doing. That is what makes it extremely difficult to say, “Let us have an inspection body that is going to go and inspect and check that standards, i.e. the academic achievement, the quality, the management of the learning and teaching, are comparable from one university or even one discipline area to another.” It is extremely difficult at university level.

Richard Fuller

Let me tell you some of the impressions I have got from what you have said so far: “Getting it right is going to take a long time”; “Evaluation is so nebulous”; “They tried these statistics on employability but they did not work”; and “You have to remember”—this is what we always hear—“the diversity of the sector”. I am going to ask Professor Tynan, because she is the only one who is a bit more gung‑ho about it, why is everyone else so grumpy?

Professor Tynan

That will be my colonial past. We have mentioned some things here today around diversity of mission and what universities are trying to do, and no university is trying to give a bad learning experience. Everyone is trying really hard to give students the best possible learning experience, the best possible outcomes, so they can get jobs. There is no one actively not doing that. I think how we organise ourselves will limit where we put our emphasis and what we see as being important in that journey. That is where protecting that diversity of mission is incredibly important. You get some universities that are really into employability, and their whole curriculum is focused on that and it is driven through the curriculum. In other organisations, the focus could be completely different. It could be on learning how to learn, producing critical thinkers or problem‑solvers. When you ask us as a sector to say, “We all want to be measured on the same measure”, we want to throw it back to you and say, “We have really relished our diversity.” You have encouraged us to be diverse and to have this market where we can all play differently, and now you want to measure us on the same thing. If you measure us all on the same thing, what could that create for us? It will drive behaviours for sure, because we will all then try to get these measures the best we possibly can, so we do not miss out on being seen as excellent. It could also force a mediocracy in the sector, where you have something that is actually very vibrant.

Richard Fuller

I really do not find that that compelling, if I may say so. If what was being proposed was the measure, it was a straitjacketed measure and that was the way in which people made their assessment, then I would absolutely agree with you, but this is a measure. It is something about teaching. There are many other things that people will look at: do they like the campus, is it near to home, are there the sports facilities that they want? That decision about diversity remains with the individual. Your responsibility is to provide that piece of information. You are among the brightest minds; why have you not done this already?

Professor Tynan

Do you not think we are already doing that? If I was now to take a more defensive response to that, I would say that I think we are doing that. When you look at the national fellows, you see the excellence in teaching promoted by our excellent teachers. When you look in the Times Higher Ed every week, you see excellent examples of what our teachers are doing. You look at the international brand and you see that international students want to come to this country and to study here. We are already displaying areas where we are excellent, and we have great examples of that. On a daily basis, you could go to any organisation and say, “Tell me what you are doing that is innovative here. What has improved the students’ learning experience here? What are you doing this year?” The QAA has also helped us do that, so there is a whole range of mechanisms that already exist within our organisations.

Richard Fuller

But a whole range of mechanisms does not mean, “I have got five minutes; let me just check something. Where is the authority?” As Mr White was saying, for schools—his point about the comparison with Ofsted is very useful here—parents can now quickly go and see this. What you are suggesting back, Professor Tynan, is that the information is there. Yes, it is, but it is disaggregated information. It is not on an easy, comparable basis. Would it be fair to say that set of information in that format does not currently exist?

Professor Tynan

I do not think that exists here in the UK in the way that is being described to us and as is being articulated in the Green Paper, which seems to be desirable. I do not think anyone here is saying we would not want to open our doors or be transparent. I should be careful not to speak on behalf of my colleagues, but certainly at the Open University we have a very open door. We are an open university. We are very transparent. Anyone can come in and look and see what we are doing. Trying to get that into a format that others can readily understand is, I think, part of the challenge of TEF. I feel quite positive about the TEF and what it could achieve for us, but taking the time to understand how we are going to display that in a way that others can understand it readily is part of the challenge that we have ahead of us.

Richard Fuller

Can I just one other broader question, for clarification? What other international examples can we draw on to help guide us? I have been going through the document trying to find some. I was just wondering if you might have some better insights. It is back to you, Professor Tynan.

Professor Tynan

I have been out of Australia now for nearly three years, so the higher education climate there is quite different, but I have seen various iterations of things that are not dissimilar here. Quite often, our countries compare and adopt and then de‑adopt, etc, so there is a lot that we can learn from each other. The way Australia has approached this is through a quality agency approach, so the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. It has moved away from a process‑oriented quality assessment. It is more around outcomes as well. Some of the published things you are talking about here form a framework which then is agreed with institutions, in terms of a compact or an agreement about what an organisation wants to be measured on. You could look to Canada. Canada does something very similar where they agree with their organisations, “What are you prepared to make public and be measured on?” alongside a set of standard pieces of data, like the HESA data we collect here, for example. Sweden has very good examples of this as well. You could go to almost any country in the world, do some kind of benchmarking and say “How are they approaching this and what mechanisms go with it?” What is missing here from what we are hearing in this paper for me has been around the incentivisation. Currently, the incentivisation is sitting very much around raising fees, but what if your organisation did not want to or did not see financial gain as being the reward for making quality learning and teaching experiences transparent and open? There is something about getting down to the academic and teaching staff themselves, saying, “How do we incentivise those people to be even better than they currently are?” There are many examples you could draw upon. It is a matter of sitting down and saying, “Let us look to the countries whose education systems are performing in the ways we would like to perform. How are they measuring teaching excellence?”

Professor Virgo

Could I just come back and revisit your first point, which is that many of us were rather down on TEF? That is certainly not my position as a matter of principle. If TEF works as a kitemark of excellence across the whole sector, that will be very beneficial, because then we can say we have satisfied the kitemark. Maybe we can say that to a large extent already with quality assurance, though it is not specifically teaching excellence, but there are elements of that within quality assurance. The reason I am concerned about TEF is when we start getting into the details and having the confidence, and making sure the sector and all the stakeholders, particularly the students, have the confidence, that the measures being used, the metrics being identified, are the appropriate ones. That is where the discussion has to be.

Richard Fuller

Just so I can be clear, you are very proactively involved, in your submission, in trying to solve that problem, and other universities, saying, “We have to get this right. We want to have buy‑in, so let us make sure we are using this consultation to collectively say, ‘We can do it, but here is the way that we need to do it.’”

Professor Virgo

Absolutely right, and so we are talking among ourselves, within institutions, between institutions, in responding to the Green Paper. There is a lot of discussion going on.

Richard Fuller

Just to be clear again, does that mean that there will be a collective response? You said you have to get buy‑in or at least a very clear similarity in the number of responses about the things that can be done and need to be done. Do you think it will be, “We think this” and “We think that”, and actually therefore they cannot do it?

Professor Riordan

This is a very complex set of issues and there is not going to be any simple, straightforward solution that has no problems with it. To come to your question, there will be collective responses. There will be more than one. There will be one from Universities UK, which will try to embrace the diversity of views through the whole sector. Then there will be one from the mission groups, the Russell Group, million+ and so on and so forth, and certainly from individual universities as well. The fact is that, whatever system we end up with, it is going to be very, very difficult to have something where some bits of the sector do not feel, “That is not very good for us” or “This element of it is not very good for us.” That is going to be inevitable, because the diversity is real. Like it or not, it is just there and it does create a set of issues that we then have to cope with. We are being asked, “What do you think about TEF? Are there problems with it?”, and so we are answering, “Yes, there are some, and we need to know more detail.” There will definitely be, as Graham has said, a collective will to engage with it. We in Wales could just simply say, “TEF is nothing to do with us.” I really do not think that is going to happen. We are going to want to be part of it, although there will not be a link to fees, because it is very important that we have a UK‑wide system that is a kitemark, that does illustrate the quality and excellence of our teaching. We would love to make that happen. It is just it is not easy. It is very, very difficult, and we must not try to pretend that there is some simple solution.

Professor Ward

I am looking through the written submissions to this Committee, and I read through most of them over the weekend. There is talk about diversity of the sector, but I was quite struck by the commonality across different mission groups. You have about 30 individual institutions all feeding in. There is a set of issues that are very, very common across the submissions: concerns about the timescale, about the unsophisticated use of metrics and the risk of some of the unanticipated consequences.

Katie Akerman

If I am being grumpy, it is not about the TEF.

Richard Fuller

I wish I had not used that word now.

Katie Akerman

Ultimately, the TEF is perhaps something that would benefit an institution like Chichester. My concern, given my particular position in the university as a director of quality and standards, is about the HEFCE proposals for the future of quality assessment. The idea of trying to manage two potentially complex, burdensome processes for what is a very small university and a very small quality assurance team could be quite problematic, so my concern is about the two things taken together, rather than the TEF itself.

Chair

For my own clarification, Professor Tynan, you mentioned Sweden, Australia, Canada and others.

Professor Tynan

There are probably many more.

Chair

My question is this: are we behind the pack when it comes to having in place a good, sophisticated teaching excellence framework?

Professor Tynan

No, we are not. In fact, I think it is an issue that is grappled with within every country in terms of how you measure this, and then how you reward it, how you incentivise it and how you improve it. If you look at any higher education policy in any of those jurisdictions, you will see a litany of things that people have tried. It is similar if you look here and see what has been tried over the last 10 or 15 years.

Chair

So we should not beat ourselves up as a country with regards to this. Is that fair?

Professor Tynan

No. I have said in other public forums, as a relatively new entrant to the UK, that UK higher education is widely respected around the world. That is proven by the kind of international student pickups that you have coming here. This country should certainly not be beating itself up unnecessarily about trying to measure itself.

Professor Ward

I am not sure it is widely understood how robust and rigorous the quality assurance framework currently is. We have just been QAA’d at the University of East Anglia. A team of very experienced reviewers come in for a week. They speak to a whole range of different groups, including student groups, and really mine very deeply how the teaching is delivered and how quality is managed and assured in the institution. It is a very, very thorough process.

Jo Stevens

I will ask a question that Colin may have partially answered already. Thinking about the future, promoting the sector, strengthening the sector, is the potential to have different quality assurance mechanisms in Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland problematic for marketing universities?

Professor Riordan

Certainly from our point of view, and I think from a UK point of view. In terms of the QAA quality assurance system, I think we are leading the pack. We have very often had people come to us and look at what we do. We play a leading role in Europe as well, in the European quality assurance system, and always have. One of the great strengths has been that it is consistent across the piece. From a Wales point of view--I am sure it would be similar for Northern Ireland; I cannot speak for Scotland because they very much speak for themselves—there is a general sense that a UK‑wide consistent system is going to be much more use to students. In Cardiff, 65% of our home undergraduates are English anyway. If they are thinking “Bristol or Cardiff?”, they will want to be able to compare those two, so I hope it is going to be possible to do that. I do not think it matters whether the fees and funding system is connected to it or not. That, in a sense, should not really matter. What matters is that quality assurance and whatever measures we can have for excellence in teaching are consistent.

Jo Stevens

That is quite interesting, because we heard in the earlier session about the link between fees and the measuring. I am struggling to see how that is going to be disaggregated under what is in the current proposals from the Government.

Professor Riordan

With REF, the assessment is done and that is just done on a free and fair basis. It does not matter what university you are at. HEFCE then decides how it is going to distribute the QR on the basis of that. HEFCW, the Welsh funding council, decides how it is going to distribute funding, and it does not have to be the same. It could be completely different. It is quite similar, because the principles are widely accepted, but it could be quite different. The assessment is one thing and then how you fund on the basis of that is a separate thing. That has always been a major principle of REF, and it should be one of TEF as well.

Amanda Milling

This might be a bit of a woolly question. You talked a lot about diversity and also in terms of diversity of outcomes as universities. I cannot help thinking there must be a common mission somewhere. I would like you to articulate what you believe the common mission is for the sector.

Professor Riordan

Do you mean in terms of the education of students?

Amanda Milling

Yes. You talked a lot about the diversity, so I am trying to pin down what the similarities are. What are we trying to achieve?

Professor Riordan

There are two aspects to this. A university degree is giving people the ability to think for themselves and take off from a higher intellectual platform. It is not just about learning outcomes. It is not just about learning things. It is learning how to learn and to really be able to develop not just yourself personally but your career, the organisations you work in and the business that you create. It might sound a bit nebulous, but it is really about giving people the capacity to continue to learn throughout their lives and to understand that that is a way of proceeding in life. The other question you have to look at, behind your question in a sense, is: are degrees from Chichester and Cambridge pretty much the same in terms of outcome? There might be different missions there. It might be that the trajectory from one university is different to the trajectory from another, but what we would always want is a threshold, a standard that everybody reaches. That is what the quality framework tries to achieve in terms of standards: that, in each case, the standards reach a threshold level so that you can be as sure as you can ever be that a degree is worth a degree.

Professor Virgo

The answer to your question, and it is a woolly answer, is an educational experience, which clearly has elements of teaching and learning as well that together form the educational experience. Immediately you start to go beyond that, we then start to see the diversity of the sector. I could say, in Cambridge, it is a residential educational experience, which is strongly affected by the research, so it is research‑led teaching, etc. The Open University, for example, is going to be different. It is set up in a very different way, but we still have the common objective of education.

Professor Ward

British higher education takes students to the frontiers of knowledge really, even at the undergraduate level, particularly in research‑intensives, where you are being taught by people who are actively doing research and pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge, whether it be in science and technology or in arts and humanities subjects. There is that sense in higher education of giving students a taste of knowledge production and what it is to be producing new knowledge, new ideas and new technologies.

Professor Tynan

You have asked a really hard question, because it goes to the heart of the philosophical basis of what higher education is for and what education is for. When I think about that in relation to the Open University, I am thinking about the kinds of graduates we are trying to produce, graduates who can operate in a really complex world, who can be adaptive, who can manage three different careers in their lifetime. You are trying to develop people who can contribute to solving the world’s greatest challenges that face us, poverty and producing food and the digital economy, all that sort of stuff. We need a man who recently passed away, who was very famous actually, called David Watson. He was at Oxford. It would be worth reading his book. It is called The Question of Conscience: Higher education and personal responsibility. It is a fantastic journey of higher education in this country. It is quite a thin little book, but it gives a really interesting overview of how the missions of universities have changed, largely to do with policy and how Governments have shaped what higher education aims to achieve. But it is a really hard question.

Chris White

I am going to follow straight on the back of Amanda’s question. The three of you have not mentioned, as part of your shared mission vision, employability. I was just going to see whether you would like to add that or what your view on your role in employability would be.

Katie Akerman

That is a really interesting question, because my immediate response to your colleague’s initial question was Plato and The Republic, and his ideas around philosopher kings. In some senses, I very much personally treasure the idea of education for the sake of education. That is why I did a history degree, because I loved history, and I still love history. As Belinda was saying, universities have shifted incrementally over decades and decades and decades, mainly through the impact of Government policy. Although, in a sense, universities are resisting becoming what they see as training organisations, there is obviously a definite sense from Government policy that what we are trying to do should be about employability. Universities are responding very much to that. For example, one of the things we ask our external examiners to comment on in their reports is the extent to which employability is embedded in the curriculum. Again, for example, we use external advisers from industry in terms of programme approval. One of the slight concerns we have around the HEFCE proposals for the external examining arrangements is that, if there is a central register, we may lose some of those people from the professions, from the industry, whom we currently use, because they may not be willing to sign up to a centralised register.

Professor Riordan

Employability is extremely important for all universities. The fact that we did not mention it then is because we were thinking about it in a slightly different way: what is the purpose of a degree? The purpose is not just to get somebody a job. You can get a job without a degree. It is a question of what kind of a job and what the needs of the economy are. I do not think there is a university in this country that is not extremely committed to employability, that does not put an awful lot of effort into it and that does not have people employed specifically to help make that happen. Academics in all departments, including philosophy, English, if I go round the place, will assure me of their commitment to that because they care about their students getting a job. They realise they have to earn a living, they have gone through a very, very lean time over the past five or six years and now things are picking up. You should not be in any doubt at all about the real commitment to employability, a word that did not even exist 10 years ago, by the way, in universities in this country.

Chair

I just want to touch upon what I think is a very important part of the TEF, which is the link between a TEF rating and the ability to increase tuition fees. Do you welcome that link? Would you like to see more freedoms and flexibilities other than allowing it to rise by the rate of inflation? Graham, I am going to come to you first. Would you want to see a large amount of freedom, so that, if Cambridge as a whole gets a level 4, you can raise your tuition fees to £20,000? There would be a market for that. Is that something that you would agree with?

Professor Virgo

We would not want to do that. We are very concerned about the effect of raising tuition fees on widening participation. We spend an awful lot of time engaging with students, seeking to widen participation, and we keep getting the message of concern about fees and the level of fees, despite the fact that we offer very generous bursaries to support those students. Any link between TEF and raising the fees is a cause for concern.

Chair

Should it be taken out?

Professor Virgo

I would not go that far, because it is quite clear that, across the sector, there is concern that fees are not keeping up with inflation. Cambridge University’s position is that we have no desire to increase fees dramatically. If we were allowed to increase them up to the level of inflation, we would be content with that, but we would not want to go beyond.

Chair

Is that a consensus across relevant institutions?

Katie Akerman

I would certainly agree for Chichester that we would have some concern about raising fees, for the reasons already outlined. Right at the very beginning, we were talking about perhaps potential inequalities between perceptions around research and around teaching. One thing that I would imagine strikes a number of people, including myself, is that, in effect, the sector is paying for the REF but, with the TEF, we are expecting students to pay for teaching excellence. That strikes me as a real inequality in the proposals.

Professor Riordan

We in Wales want to take part in TEF, but I am sure that we are relieved that there will not be a connection to the raising of fees and that we are going to be looking for different ways to finance and fund the higher education system. One of the most obvious reasons is the potential for perverse incentives. If employability is going to be a key metric, are you going to be inclined to put on programmes that do not necessarily have high employment rates, but might be a very, very good thing to be doing and ought to be something that, in a properly cultured country, you should be doing? On retention, are you going to be inclined to take more widening‑participation students who might be less inclined to continue the whole programme? On NSS, if students believe or know that you can put up fees if they are highly satisfied, are they going to be highly satisfied when they fill in the survey? I put it to you that perhaps not.

Professor Tynan

Similar to Katie, from our perspective, there is something ironic about this. In comparison to REF, with TEF, our widening participation schemes are going to be the ones footing the bill for it. That is an unfortunate outcome.

Professor Ward

I thought this was an issue where there was a strong commonality in the submissions that you have received. There is a lot of concern about the link with fees. We are in a cost/price squeeze, though, in that staff costs are going up and the general level of inflation in the sector is higher than in the rest of the economy, so the fees are capped and yet our costs are going up. I think we would very much like to be able to raise fees. The unfortunate thing is that it is linked to the teaching excellence framework, which is a problematic link, really.

Chair

The final question is from Paul.

Paul Blomfield

I will also just strike a final note. I think we are all conscious, as Jo Johnson says in the introduction to the Green Paper, that our universities are one of the great success stories of this country and we have some of the finest universities in the world. The points you have made about the work that is already going on on teaching quality, in relation to HEFCE’s research, and the strength of the QAA are issues that we will explore with both HEFCE and the QAA subsequently. I wanted to ask two questions, if I could. One question is whether measuring teaching excellence by institution, as Colin touched on much earlier in the discussion, is the best way of recognising the huge variety. I represent two universities in Sheffield. Both are excellent but both are stronger in some departments than others. The question is whether institutional measures are right or whether we should be focusing on departments more? What impact will that have on the fees issue, in that some departments that may not be strong will get higher fees, presumably, under a one‑size‑fits‑all approach? The second question is just to leave us with thoughts as we meet with subsequent witnesses. Everybody here is committed to improving teaching quality. What are the unintended consequences you worry about that we might need to explore with subsequent witnesses?

Professor Riordan

I will start on the institution or department. It is problematic. The bit that causes the problem is the peer review part, so the independent panels of experts. There are issues with that. I do not know who these experts are out there who will know how to assess teaching, on what basis or how you define excellence in teaching. There are an awful lot of unanswered questions about that. That is very difficult to do for a whole institution. If you are going to have a peer review element to it, with independent panels of experts, that almost has to be on a departmental, disciplinary level. That is unless somebody can come up with another way of doing it, but I cannot think of it. Then the question is how you compare between universities, because we are not always organised in that way anymore. The programmes are so different. It is back to the diversity issues. There are a lot of issues with that, which is why we have a quality assurance system that looks at the whole institution and does not attempt to make comparisons any more—we used to do this—between departments and does not really profess to assess teaching excellence. It is more the whole circumstance and what you have in place to ensure that teaching is going to be excellent. Then the external examiners are the ones who look at the outcomes and come to a view as to whether the outcomes show high standards being achieved. You can derive from that probably that teaching is good or excellent if the outcomes are and the whole environment is good. That is the way we do it at the moment. Moving to more of a peer review process is going to be difficult. The second one is unintended consequences. I think there will be far fewer of them if the money is not linked to teaching. I sat in front of a committee like this, six years ago or so, chaired by the now Lord Willis of Knaresborough. I chaired an inquiry for HEFCE into exactly this issue, and we did not have the answers then. We were asked that question: why not have financial incentives for good teaching? One obvious one is that, where the teaching is rated as excellent, there will be more money available, so you can make it better and better. If you have not got the money and it is not rated as excellent, there might be a downward spiral, so there is a danger there. Also, there are the unintended consequences of perverse incentives that I just mentioned a moment ago, so I will not go through them again, but there are plenty of examples where you might find people playing games, such as, with the learning gain part, teaching to a test at the end rather than focusing on getting a good degree in terms of their education.

Professor Virgo

The answer to the first question about focusing on disciplines rather than institutions in terms of the teaching excellence, from a student perspective, and particularly giving information to the student, makes an awful lot of sense. Students are more concerned with the quality of the teaching they will get in their particular discipline, perhaps, than the nature of the whole institution. In terms of linking that then to fees, having differential fees based on discipline, involving allocation of resources within universities, that will create a great deal of bureaucratic complexity. On the second point about issues to be aware of as to potential downsides, frankly, I think it is simply damaging the brand. As you have just said, higher education institutions in this country are very well respected nationally and internationally. If a TEF is created that has the effect of identifying a significant number of those institutions as not satisfying whatever metrics are chosen and being used to determine excellence, I am concerned about the impact on the brand.

Professor Ward

I am very concerned about the potential introduction of the graduate earnings indicator in the basket of metrics. That opens up a whole load of risks around incentivising universities to change their shape. We know that women earn less than men in the graduate employment market. You could see universities potentially changing the profile of their offer so that they are just recruiting students to particular disciplines that earn more. We know that there are differences according to ethnic category as well. These are problems in society, but to start to reward universities on the basis of how much their graduates earn three, four or five years down the line is a recipe for disaster.

Professor Tynan

I would just add to what my colleagues have said here that it is important we remember part‑time and flexible study and that the aspirations of learners and employers can be quite different. If a degree is the only form of measure, there are other qualifications there. I still have another question, which is unanswered, around the kind of red tape that will occur and how it is going to fit carefully with the QA processes that exist. As my colleague was saying here, the costs attached to rolling something like this out do need to be taken into account.

Katie Akerman

As we outlined in our submission, again, we would be happy with a departmental or discipline‑level approach. To add, in terms of unintended consequences, it is very much for us around fragmentation and the brand, UK HE plc. We need to take care that, with the TEF and with the HEFCE QA proposals, those are managed.

Chair

We have kept you longer than anticipated and I apologise for that, but that is a reflection of the excellence of your evidence. I know I speak for all the Committee in thanking you. We have got an awful lot out of that. There is an awful lot to think about. Thank you again for your time. We really appreciate it. Oral evidence: Assessing quality in Higher Education, HC 572-i 15