When Norman St-John Stevas MP set up the current Select Committee system in 1979 with the approval of the then PM Baroness Thatcher, the principle that government policy should be open to vigorous public scrutiny was firmly established. The system has served parliament and the public well – though it is ironic that, at a time when public clamour for even greater scrutiny of parliament and especially MP’s is at an all time high, the government itself has become more difficult to challenge. All too often legislation, even sensitive legislation like the recent ‘Embryo and Tissue Act’ is subjected to strict programming by Government whips which curtail debate and scrutiny of large parts of the legislation.

The same frustration is not yet felt by Select Committees which still retain a powerful role in seeking to shine the torch of scrutiny on government policy and its execution. Nowhere is this scrutiny more necessary than where government allocates policy making and resources to independent organisations such as the Research Councils and HEFCE and their main beneficiaries, the universities. Yet as the Innovation Universities, Science and Skills Select Committee is finding during its current inquiry into ‘The Student Experience’, scrutiny is met with suspicion, some hostility and the defensive cries of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘institutional autonomy’ are regularly heard.

We launched our current Inquiry at a time when a barrage of potentially damaging allegations about the UK higher education system were being aired in the media including plagiarism, grade manipulation, misuse of external examiners, pressure on academics to alter student grades, and significant grade inflation.

On first examination there did appear to be some conflicting evidence that needed closer examination. A near doubling of the number of 1st Class degrees since the early 1990s and a 44% rise in Upper Seconds (2:1) suggested a huge rise in academic performance – yet this hardly married with a 2008 survey of academics in the THES. According to their poll, 77% of academic staff felt pressure to increase marks, 82% felt that financial pressures were affecting student experience and 69% felt that the rise in 1st Class degrees was not evidence of improved standards. The UCU, which represents academics at all stages of their careers, said in its evidence to the Select Committee that "Our members have raised concerns about perceived ‘grade inflation’, though they believe that it is caused mainly by pressures on examiners from above (managers and funders) as well as from students. Changing the metric, therefore, is unlikely to have an impact on ‘grade inflation’." And with the boss of the Quality Assurance Agency, Peter Williams, claiming the degree classification system in UK universities to be ‘rotten’ and ‘arbitrary and unreliable’, we expected a barrage of evidence to support these claims.
Not so – the university establishment across the whole sector closed ranks. Every institution was near perfect and the very organisations which put such store by ‘evidence’ appeared reluctant to examine what evidence appeared. The HEPI study which compared the amount of taught and private study time undertaken to gain a higher level degree from different universities was dismissed as having a flawed methodology. Yet few could see the irony of clinging to a system where individual institutions were in fact the arbiter of their own standards including degree classification.

What was more disappointing was the lack of evidence coming forward for or against the premise of ‘dumbing down’ by academic staff themselves. Where it did arrive from academics claiming that they had been pressurised into raising grades, re-marking papers, or lowering standards it was usually from mid-to-late career academics. It seems that academics towards the start of their careers appear reluctant to submit evidence. We can only speculate that younger academics do not want to get a reputation for rocking the boat and risking their career prospects. Equally it may be they are perfectly satisfied with the system – in which case it would be useful to hear their evidence.

If as custodians of the scrutiny process, a Select Committee cannot penetrate our multi billion pound, self regulating university system then just who will be able to offer the public and indeed the wider community an assurance that all is well?

End.

Phil Willis MP
Chair of IUSS Select Committee House of Commons