HIGHER EDUCATION

§ Mrs. Eirene White (Flint, East)

I beg to move, to leave out "£2,679,000" and to insert "£2,678,000" Instead thereof.

This little formality is a preliminary to a debate upon higher education. I think that we have chosen a most apposite day for it, perhaps not in one senseof the word, because a number of our colleagues are engaged on a social occasion, but in another sense, because it is during this week that the representatives of the universities of the Commonwealth are meeting in London, Men and women of the greatest distinction in academic life are amongst us, and I think that it would be the general wish of the House to extend our warmest good wishes to them in their deliberations. I wish that I had sufficient time today to discuss some of the problems of Commonwealth co-operation, but that will have to be left for another occasion.

We are discussing this matter with some difficulty in another context. We are, and have been for a long time, waiting for the Robbins report. One consolation is that, unlike Go dot, Robbins is likely to appear. I hope that the report will appear not later than October next, which, I understand, is the proposed date for the publication of this extremely important document. I say that advisedly, because a great many decisions have 545 already been taken, and many more ought to be taken speedily, with which the Robbing Committee must concern itself.

We on this side considered that an inquiry of this nature was long overdue. It was, I believe, first in 1954 and certainly again in 1956, that our colleague Lord Longford, in another place, asked for this kind of inquiry. However, better late than never. As I say, we are most eagerly awaiting this report. It will be a classic document in British education.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party has not been idle. We have produced our own Report, the Taylor Report. Lord Taylor was the chairman of our working party. We have called it, advisedly, "The Years of Crisis", because we believe that the country is facing a very serious crisis in higher education. Of course, this Report is no more than a sketch. It is not intended to be more than that. We recognise that we have not at our disposal the full panoply of sociologists, demographers and the rest which the Robbins Committee can command, but it has already served a very useful purpose in stimulating discussion and preparing people's minds for whatever recommendations the Robbins Committee may make.

I propose to say a few words about the Taylor Report, but I think that we should, first, pay tribute to the late Hugh Gaitskell in this context, because it was he who felt so passionately about the situation in higher education that he asked Lord Taylor and some other of his colleagues to study the matter and to make the earliest possible report.

I have little doubt that today, as is usual on these occasions, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Minister of Education will attempt to blind us with favourable statistics. We have had this exercise a number of times before. For instance, the Chief Secretary, no doubt, will remind us that the Government have accepted a target of 150,000 university places by 1966–67; that the colleges of advanced technology are to be doubled in numbers from 10,500 to 21,000 in some unspecified period; that the teacher training collegeshave provided many more places; that the local education authority grants for university and other advanced students now number more than 100,000 a year, and so on, and so forth.

546 We would not dream of denying any of it. All of it, as far as it goes, is to be commended What the Ministers may be more reluctant to tell us is that the Government target for university places is considerably lower than that put forward to the Robbins Committee by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors. Whereas the Government say that we should have 170,000 places by 1973–74, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors was of the opinion that we could reach 175,000 places by 1970 without lowering standards.

The Chief Secretary and the Minister of Education are also less likely to emphasise the fact that thousands of students last year, this year, next year and the year after will not be able to find places in universities or in teacher training colleges, although qualified to do so and although the community needs their talents and skill. They are not likely to say that, owing to the action of the Treasury in the past couple of years, universities and university departments have run into deficit, that expansion plans have been thwarted, and that the administrative and academic staff were completely demoralised last year by the really myopic clumsiness of Treasury action.

I believe that 1962 was one of the most shameful years in the relationship between Government and university that one can find. The bludgeoning of the former Chief Secretary, "Honest Henry"—I refer, of course, to the present Home Secretary—is something from which university morale will take some little while to recover. It is true that the present Chief Secretary has been able to pour just a little balm on the wounds. He was, first, able to announce that an additional £5 million would be provided in order to catch up with the commitment into which many universities had already entered. On 19th March this year he made announcements about building programmes for universities. Then, in May, he announced that there would be an increase of £16 million in recurrent grant over the remaining four years of the quinquennium, which, it was hoped, would meet the increase in costs which were recognised to have arisen since the estimates were first prepared in 1961.

I beg hon. Members not to accept these figures with any complacency whatsoever, and I would call in aid someone 547 of considerable knowledge and responsibility. I speak of the Principal of the University of London, Sir Douglas Logan, who, in his annual report, very recently published, said that the building allocation for 1964–65, £33½ million, as announced by the Chief Secretary, "was a great disappointment". He explains that, owing to increases in costs, if the universities were to be allowed even to continue the rate of expansion which had been agreed, they should have had a minimum of £36 million allowed them, and he goes on to state the particular difficulties in which London University would be placed if this were not forthcoming.

As for the increase in recurrent grants, welcome as it is, I think that hon. Members should know the state in which the universities found themselves before this slight alleviation was announced. They were literally running into debt because the Government had not adequately taken into account the increases in costs of various kinds. Sir Douglas said that in those circumstances resort had to be had to all the devices with which the financially embarrassed are only too familiar. Vacant posts are being left unfilled, stocks are being run down, maintenance work and repairs are being postponed and, in some cases, even newly erected buildings are not being brought fully into use. What a way to start on a quinquennium in which universities are supposed to increase their student numbers from 111,000 to 150,000. I therefore repeat that there is no room whatsoever for complacency. The universities were asked to expand—some of us think not fast enough—and to prepare their programmes. Owing to the stop-start nature of financial policies under the Tory Government, they have had all the anxiety and wear and tear of trying to adjust and readjust themselves according to the whims of the Treasury at the time.

I would point out the people who have to do these jobs are running universities, and ought not to have to endure the worry, stress and strain and the waste of time in organising committees, deputations, and pressure groups. Their work is far too serious for that. It is a very serious thing that our universities should be made the playthings of the Treasury in this way. I shall be saying later that I hope that the Treasury will be removed from direct control over university 548 finance, but, whatever intermediary one may have, this attitude towards higher education is what really perturbs and distresses me.

I have said that the Government have set a particular target for university expansion, and this, of course, is a matter on which there is considerable disagreement between the two sides of the House. In the Taylor Report we hesitated to give precise figures because in the time at our disposal it was not easy for us to make the sort of calculations which may be necessary. However, my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Crossman) has had a little longer, and has had the benefit of being able to take further advice on this matter. In his very exhilarating and stimulating speech on Monday he indicated the degree of expansion which we in the Labour Party believe is both possible and desirable.

My hon. Friend has put it in the most challenging form, that from 1965 to 1975 we should be able to double the number of places—to double them in the decade. This, of course, is a very challenging aim, but we have every reason to think, having studied this matter carefully, that this degree of expansion could be achieved.

It means, in average figures, a 7 per cent. increase per annum; not all of it, of course, going to one subject and another equally; there would be a larger increase, we would assume, in science and technology and a somewhat smaller one in the arts side; but overall, 7 per cent. per annum. The actual increase between 1955 and 1960 was 4.6 per cent. per annum. In 1962–66, if the target is reached in 1966, it will be 6.2 per cent. per annum; but then the Government's target following that implies a rate of only 2 per cent. per annum, and this, we think, it utterly defeatist. We believe that if proper steps are taken there is no reason whatever why this country should not achieve and sustain a very much larger increase.

The United States of America and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, starting from very much wider bases in numbers, are working to a rate of increase of between 5 per cent. and 6 per cent. per annum. Because our numbers are smaller, our base is narrower, we believe 549 ours should be round about 7 per cent. in the United Kingdom.

I was much interested to read that in France their Equipment Commission, which is in charge of planning in this sphere, says, with usual French logic, that the doubling of the number of pupils in the classical, modern and technical lycées between 1956 and 1963 ought to be followed by doubling the student places at establishments of higher education between 1963 and 1969. They regard it as perfectly logical, if one is double, to double the other.

It therefore does appear to me that we ought to set our sights higher than the Government apparently are preparedto do. We owe this to present and succeeding generations, and it is extremely depressing to find that even with the Government's modest target—not inconsiderable, but relatively modest in relation to our needs—we have not been keeping up.

The Committee of Vice-Chancellors, earlier this year, noted that British universities failed to maintain their rate of expansion during 1962, the black year to which I have already referred. The number of students admitted to full-time, first-degree coursesin October, 1962, showed an increase of only 3.3 per cent. over the previous year, and, clearly, that rate of progress is just not good enough. Professor Sir William Mansfield Cooper, Chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors, has put his comment on record: what I really regret about this is that if we had the university places now we could be training people for the real university expansion which is to come. We are losing an opportunity when we let the bulge go by like this. We know from the clearing house that last October about 50,000 students applied for 27,000 university places. We do not know as yet how many of those 50,000 were fully qualified, but in any case a gap of that magnitude is something with which nobody, it seems to me, couldpossibly be satisfied. One of the things which I find incomprehensible is that we had to wait so long before we had a clearing house and before we had any kind of reliable figures of university entrants. Even now the clearing house does not include all universities, Oxbridge keeps apart, and it does not include colleges of advanced technology or other 550 establishments offering degree courses, which, again, makes the whole thing much less effective than it should be and much less informative than it should be for those who wish to know the true position in our university expansion programme.

Having put forward what I believe is a realistic target, which is, in our view in the Labour Party, the least at which we in the United Kingdom should be aiming, I should like to say a little about the form expansion might well take. It is not a matter only of the total number of students but of the establishments to which they will be going for study. We do not wish in any way to be dogmatic about this, because we think that there should be considerable variety in universities and in other establishments of higher education, but we would say that there is a strong case to be made out for larger rather than smaller establishments.

At present, apart from London, which is a conglomeration of university establishments of different kinds and sizes, we have Oxford and Cambridge with, roughly, 9,000 places each; Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leeds at about the 6,000 mark; five others with between 3,000 and 5,000; and then we have 20 universities below 3,000. This seems to us a thoroughly uneconomic use of resources.

I should like to quote a very interesting comment, from two members of the staff of the London School of Economics, which appeared recently in New Society, stressing the advantages of the larger establishments. This is how they put it: One of the major disadvantages of the small university is that the small…department both forces the teacher to spread his teaching effort over a wide range of subjects and fails to provide him with the stimulus of a large number of colleagues in his own and neighbouring fields. The optimum size of a department from the staff point of view is nearer to 25 than it is to two or three. The student also benefits by being a member of a large department…and by being exposed to a wide range of teachers and a wide variety of options inside his main subject. I do not want to elaborate this point, but simply to say that there appears to us to be a fairly strong case for enlarging the existing universities as well as establishing certain new ones.

551 We ought also to be considering what type of university there should be. There has been a great deal of discussion in academic circles about whether we want more cathedral universities, another Balliol by the sea, and so on, and what it is that we really want for the 1970s. It seems to me that there is a place for that kind of university but that we should also more seriously consider the large-scale urban university where a fairly large proportion of the students live in their own homes. These can be only in the larger conurbations, but we should be planning for a large university north of London and another large university south of London to which students would be able to travel. A project of this kind is not only interesting in itself academically, but is essential if we are to provide sufficient places for the students concerned.

Every kind of discussion is taking place in university circles about the physical expansion. A great deal of money is going to building, and, here again, we are rather worried lest people fail to realise that flexibility has a great deal to commend it. I quote a sentence from Noel Annan's most inspiring article on universities in a recent Encounter, in which he said: We plan for eternity even though by now we ought to know that buildings with flexible arrangements that create a minimum of vested interests should be our transient goal. It seems to me that this should be most carefully considered by those who are responsible for handing out enormous sums of public money for new university buildings.

What we also lack at the moment is adequate research into the use of buildings. A great deal of emotive discussion is going on about this. Some places know that their buildings are being over-used and others are being accused of having buildings which are under-used—of laboratories used only twice a week and lecture rooms used only 30 weeks in a year.

It seems to me time that we moved out of the realm of prejudice and conjecture and had some serious study into the use of our buildings, plant and equipment in the universities and other establishments of higher education. Although we do not wish to equate university education with industry, there is some- 552 thing to be said for looking at organisation and methods, throughput and the like, in respect of the sheer physical use of buildings and plant.

More important still, shall we be able to provide sufficient staff for this scale of university expansion? This raises a point which I find difficult to understand, and something deeply depressing in the attitude of the present Government. If we are in earnest about university expansion, even on the scale which the Government propose, and still more on the scale which we should support, steps to secure a new generation of university teachers ought to have been taken several years ago. By now it is almost too late for 1966–67.

The Association of University Teachers has recently circulated hon. Members with its calculation that 10,000 more university teachers are needed in the next four years. That is double the number which has been recruited in the last four years. As expansion snowballs, more and more will be needed. It takes time to educate and train someone of the standard of a university teacher. He has to do post-graduate work. He has to be trained, first, in research. Then he has to do a proper research project. It seems to me that we are woefully lacking in the sort of provision which is needed.

I expect that hon. Members saw a reference to this in an interesting article in The Times recently which was particularly concerned with those in the arts and social science subjects. It reads: At the moment many people with good qualifications, especially in the social sciences and the arts, have difficulty in obtaining any grant at all to support themselves while doing research. And those who do get grants are obliged to give at a standard far lower than they could obtain by going straight into a job outside the universities. The lack of incentives for post-graduate study thus constitutes a serious bottleneck in the supply of potential teachers. This has certainly been the position in the past, and I cannot understand why action has been so long delayed. The grants themselves have been somewhat increased. D.S.I.R., the Medical Research Council and the Agricultural Research Council make grants on their side and the Ministry of Education makes grants in arts subjects. They have increased the amount per student and one gets £450 a year if one is away from 553 home. In certain very restricted circumstances one can obtain a grant for wife and child. But in order to do that one must be over 25 years of age or must have married during a period of not less than 12 months in which one was self-supporting.

In those circumstances one is graciously permitted not only to be married, but also to have some money with which to support one's wife and children. That is ridiculous. It is time that the Government recognised, with the lower age of marriage, that if we do not provide for the changing social conditions we shall not attract people into the profession. This kind of restriction on post-graduate students, whatever we may say about undergraduate students, is quite absurd in this day and age.

Why should one enter the fairly long road of academic research, with the intention of becoming a university teacher, when one might do just as well for oneself simply by walking straight out of the university without having to bother about all these circumstances under which one may be graciously permitted to marry? No one can go direct from undergraduate to post-graduate work and get a grant for wife or child. He must wait until he is 25 or work for twelve months somewhere else.

The number of art studentships is much lower than those in science. Only 323 were awarded in 1962 compared with 1,600 for D.S.I.R. and 100 for the other two research councils. The time must surely come when, in addition to the three research councils already in existence, we should establish a research council for the social science and one for education. These councils are responsible not only for making awards to individual post-graduate workers, or fellowships at the higher level, but have responsibility for considering at which point research is to be encouraged and sponsored. It seems to me that by now we ought to make sure that social science and education itself are properly served.

We have heard a good deal about the brain drain across the Atlantic among scientists and our dependence upon American beneficence for research work in science and technology. But I can assure hon. Members that this is equally true in other fields. A friend of mine said that he would have to go across the Atlantic to get some money to sup- 554 port his researches in sociology. I think that it is time that this was taken much more seriously.

Having got the post-graduate at work, one has also to consider his career prospects. There are other reasons why we might have difficulty in obtaining adequate university staff, apart from the level of salaries. Although I could say a good deal about salaries I do not propose to say much today, for, as I have said on previous occasions, I do not think that the House of Commons is the place to discuss detailed salary arrangements. I believe that we ought to be looking at the career prospects for universities. There is a strong feeling that there are too few senior posts in relation to junior posts—in other words, that one's chances of promotion are not as good as they ought to be.

The other is that the general conditions in which, at any rate, junior university staff have to work, and the facilities provided for them, not only in science, but in other subjects, are such that there is no encouragement to an intelligent young man or woman to go into this career. Perhaps I might quote a few sentences from a leter from a member of the staff at one of the medium-sized provincial universities. The writer says: …we have doubled our numbers in the past five years Our buildings were started years too late; until the last couple of years the Library was hopelessly inadequate and its annual grant pitiful; there is no such thing as sabbatical leave; aids for research, of all kinds, have been almost wholly absent; the most elementary administrative help such as access to a typing pool, is still denied to most of the academic staff below the level of professor. He goes on to say that another thing which is worrying the medium and smaller sized universities is that if there should be university expansion of the kind we are contemplating, the higher quality research work will more and more be concentrated in Oxbridge and London and they will be left out in the cold.

I return now to the kind of ancillary help which I think is essential if we are to make the best of the trained people that we have, or that we are hoping to recruit. Since the Taylor Report was published I have been to a number of universities in this country and have had an opportunity of discussing it with the members of the staff. I must, in fairness, say that the position varies considerably 555 from one establishment to another. Here again, if the University Grants Committee was doing its stuff, why do we not have adequate consideration of this whole question of ancillary aids? This applies to technicians in laboratories, but it also applies on the arts side to the simplest kind of secretarial and typing help.

The position varies enormously. In some places it is not too bad, while in others there is one secretary for a department of 20, and normally the head of the department, and possibly the deputy, consider that they have prior claim, and the junior staff, if they are very lucky, may get one letter typed per fortnight. This situation is ridiculous. Scarce staff should be supported by the sort of ancillary help which any reasonable businessman would give. I am aware that Members of Parliament are similarly treated, but that is by the way.

Another matter which I found varies considerably, but which has a considerable psychological effect on the younger staff in universities, is the fact that in many universities, though not all, they have no voice whatever in the university government or even in the ordering of the affairs of their own departments. Some possibly carry democracy to extremes and are overburdened with Committee work and consultation, but this is exceptional. This whole question of ancillary help and of making conditions tolerable for staff is something which has to be looked at seriously, otherwise the urge to go to other countries which treat their university staffs better will undoubtedly increase.

I have been speaking mostly of universities, but higher education embraces a variety of other establishments, about some of which my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, North (Mr. Willey) will be speaking later. First and foremost, there are the colleges of advanced technology. Everyone is assuming, I trust rightly, that the Robbins Committee will recommend that these establishments should have university status. I find that there is considerable anxiety in many of them that this should be expedited as quickly as possible, because they feel strongly about their standing and independence. It may be that it is only a matter of a name, but it is 556 curious how potent a name can be. When Battersea wanted to go to a site in Guildford, it was told by the local authority that if it became a university it would be welcomed, but if it remained a college of technology it would not. Such is our social stratification in this country.

In addition, colleges of advanced technology at the moment suffer from a serious disability, in that they do not have the same freedom of deciding their own courses, as universities do. I have been told of examples where they have had to have internal diplomas because of the difficulty of getting consent in a reasonable time for a new course.

Those that have come under the Ministry from local authorities tell me that the London County Council had a triennial budget and they could do some planning, but under the Ministry, they say, it is not planning; it is a gamble. I have a letter which says: This year we were told what our grants would be two weeks after the start of the financial year. I shall not labour these points, but there is considerable feeling among the colleges of advanced technology that the sooner they are allowed to be independent, fully-fledged universities, the better they will be pleased.

The teacher training colleges are also full of ideas as to what their future ought to be, but I do not propose to go into the whole question of teacher supply because we have discussed this on other occasions. I think it is a most interesting development that teacher training colleges and departments of education are working very hard indeed to evolve a degree course which will be suitable for them. Frankly, I think that it will be a great challenge to take on a degree course when we have just gone into three-year training courses, but it is a challenge that we shall have to meet, possibly by sandwich courses, which seems the sensible way of doing it.

I am anxious that this should be accepted, because, to refer again to the Taylor Report, one of our strongest arguments is that these establishments of higher education should not be differentiated from one another in the way that they have been in the past. As concerns their students we think that wherever it is physically convenient their residential, social and sports facilities should 557 be in common, although they may study at different establishments. In the organisation of higher education they should all be brought under one university umbrella.

If one considers Brighton, there one had an opportunity of doing something great if only someone had thought about this in imaginative terms ten years ago. There is the University of Sussex. Down the road there is a new building for a college of technology. The teacher training college is to move to a new building not far away. There is a well-established school of art. There was a marvellous opportunity of setting up a cité universitaire which, unfortunately, we missed.

At Coventry, there is the Lanchester College of Technology. There is an excellent teacher training college, in an inadequate building, and now there is the University of Warwick, which is to be stuck out in the country. There was a wonderful opportunity for a university complex in Coventry, but, unfortunately, we did not take advantage of it.

I hope very much that this segregation of establishments of higher education will rapidly be brought to an end. It seems to us to make little sense. As the Minister of Education will be aware, there are other establishments for special training. There are colleges of art, about which many Members have had correspondence and interviews and received deputations.

I do not propose to go over this ground in detail, but I must use this opportunity for saying how disappointed I have felt with what seemed to me the feeble administration of the Ministry of Educationin this matter. The Minister has written to me saying that there was no lack of forethought. All I can say is that if forethought brought about the present conditions, what would it have been like without it? I cannot conceive how anyone could have allowed 3,000 or more students to take preliminary courses before knowing how many places there would be for the diploma to which this was a preliminary course, where the courses were to be, and in what subjects, with the result that more than 50 per cent. of the students who started out hopefully are bound to be disappointed, and many of them will 558 have to change their colleges to pursue other courses.

I hope that, at the very least, the Minister will say that he intends to ask the local authorities, where students' grants are involved, to take a very sympathetic line towards any student who may have to change as a result of the confusion of the interim period.

I make one other point about the colleges of art. While one supports the higher standard envisaged for the diploma in art and design, which will be very desirable for those who are to become teachers, I hope that it will not be forgotten that in art colleges one wants artists as well as teachers and that, if one tries to tidy everything up too much, one is likely to lose the artists even though one may train several hundred teachers.

I turn now to the general organisation of our university and higher education. We in the Labour Party believe that the whole of higher education in the sense in which we are discussing it today ought to be under one aegis. We had a little discussion on Monday about whose aegis it should come under at Ministerial level. We have suggested that, below Ministerial level, there should be something following the general principle of the University Grants Committee but changed it form. We consider that there should be a National University Development Council, which should be responsible for the strategy of higher education. If we had had this ten years ago, we might have made far greater and much sounder progress in many directions. The time is long overdue for the establishment of a body of this kind.

It is clear that the burden of surveying the whole field of higher education, with the additions we have suggested, bringing in the colleges of advanced technology, the teacher training colleges, the various special colleges, adult education in the residential colleges, and so on, is immense. Even in its present restricted form related to the universities alone, it is far too great a burden for the U.G.C. as at present constituted. The gentlemen who work on it are most distinguished people in their fields, but they are really amateur oligarchs when it comes to the national planning of education. There is also the Committee of Vice-Chancellors, the mandarins, and everything goes on behind closed 559 doors. The time has come for a National University Development Council which should prepare, as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, East said on Monday, a 10-year plan, to be published and revised annually. We consider, too, that the sacred quinquennium requires consideration; it is too long for some purposes and too short for others.

Below this national body, there should be university grants commissions, one for Scotland, one for Wales, and probably about half a dozen for England. We considered whether this should be done on a functional basis, taking the universities, the technical colleges, the teacher training colleges separately, each group having its own commission, but we felt that it would be far healthier and would not continue the division which we deplore if they were territorially based. We believe that only in some such way shall we have, in the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, the kind of higher education which we deserve.

In a most interesting and admirable speech just delivered to the Commonwealth Universities Conference in London, Sir Eric Ashby said that higher education could be looked upon from three points of view. We could regard it as a national investment. We couldregard it as a prestige or status symbol. We could regard it as a civil right. We in the Labour Party would regard it as both a national investment and a civic right. But Sir Eric Ashby pointed out that, no matter by what criterion we are judged, we are well behind other countries of the Commonwealth in the amplitude of our provision. A child in Toronto, he said, has one chance in six of going to a university, a child in Australia has one chance in nine, and a child in London has one chance in 20.

We can have endless discussion about admissions policy. A powerful committee has been set up to consider the 18-plus, the membership list of which reads like the educational "Debrett". Indeed, it seems that it is now a gambit in educational lifemanship to ask, "Do you belong to the committee on the 18-plus?"

But no amount of discussion on examination procedures, selection procedures, and so forth, will by itself pro- 560 vide one single extra place. University freedom to seek the truth and to publish and teach it must at all times be defended. But the universities are part of a changing society, in a changing Britain, in a changing world. This, they must and, I am sure, will recognise. We believe that they have been inadequately sustained by the present Government. The Labour Party would encourage them to give of their best to future generations.

§ The Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Paymaster-General (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter)

The hon. Lady the Member for Flint, East (Mrs. White) began her very agreeable speech with an observation with which I wholly agree. She said that there is a certain appropriateness that the House should be discussing this subject at the very time when the Congress of the Association of Commonwealth Universities is meeting in London. I qualify my agreement with that sentiment only on the purely personal ground that the fact that we are having this debate which requires my attendance on the House tonight will prevent me from attending one of the many functions in connection with that congress. Subject to that purely personal difficulty, I agree that this is a very appropriate occasion, and I fully endorse what the hon. Lady said about the good wishes which all of us in the House extend to the very distinguished academic figures from all over the world who are conferring in London at this time. Notwithstanding the sacrifices imposed upon me today, I have had the opportunity of meeting a great many of them, and it has been a truly impressive experience.

I think that I can best serve the House in this debate by confining my contribution substantially to the subject of the universities, in respect of which I have certain responsibilities, leaving such matters as relate to other parts of our education system to my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education, who will seek to catch Mr. Speaker's eye towards the close of the debate. I add, for completeness, that my noble Friend the Under-secretary of State for Scotland is here in case any specifically Scottish points are raised. The House will have noted, also, that the Parliamentary Secretary for Science is in attendance in case matters of scientific importance are raised.

561 I begin by taking up one of the comments of the hon. Lady about Governmental support for the universities. Although it is widely known in the House, it is not very widely understood outside, I think, that the universities in England and Scotland are served by the University Grants Committee, which works with a Treasury Minister, and that we work a system in this respect wholly distinct from that which applies throughout the rest of education. As a matter of history, the system has undoubtedly been developed over the years because of the strongly-felt desire to maintain in full degree the independence of our universites from even the possibility of political interference. It has been carried to such an extent that despite the now large sums of money involved, the universities' accounts do not go before the Comptroller and Auditor General.

Whether, with the massive growth of the cost of the universities to public funds and the growing appreciation of the importance of their work in the national interest, a system on those lines can be indefinitely continued is an open question and one on which most thoughtful people would prefer to await the findings of the Robbins Committee. I should, however, be doing less than my duty if I did not express, on my own behalf and, I am sure, on behalf of my predecessors and the House generally, our immense admiration of the work which the University Grants Committee has done and, in particular, to its chairman, Sir Keith Murray, who will shortly conclude his 10-year term of office in that key post. Speaking for myself and, I know, for my predecessor, Sir Keith's advice, wise counsel and deep knowledge of our universities has served the country very well indeed.

As to the Robbins Committee, as the hon. Lady rightly said the House is anxiously awaiting its report and would like to hear from me the present position concerning it. The Committee, as the House knows—and indeed, without knowing it, those of us who know Lord Robbins would be quite certain—has given the whole subject an intense, exhaustive and comprehensive examination. The Committee has seen over 100 witnesses, whom it has heard orally, and has already had over 100 meetings and dealt with 400 memoranda submitted to it. The Committee's members 562 have visited six countries, including both the United States and the U.S.S.R. Its report is now well advanced and, I understand, if no unforeseen difficulties arise, is likely to be signed sometime in September. There will then be a considerable printing job, because it is the Committee's wish that the report when published shall be accompanied by a considerable bulk at least of supporting memoranda. It is, therefore, unlikely that we shall be able to effect publication until the last days of October.

§ Mr. Tam Dalyell (West Lothian)

Would the right hon. Gentleman care to confirm or deny the persistent rumours that there is a minority report?

§ Mr. Boyd-Carpenter

As the Committee has not either signed its report or concluded its deliberations, it would be extraordinarily foolish of me to speculate whether, in the event, there will or will not be a minority report. The hon. Gentleman will, I am sure, realise on reflection that when we have entrusted a task of this importance to a Committee, then until it has reported the less we seek to inquire into its proceedings, the better the result will be.

When we have the report and it is published, the House and the Government will have to take decisions of great gravity and certainly of enormous importance to our whole university system. Pending receipt of it, I am sure that all of us, and particularly those who bear direct responsibility, are wise to keep an open mind on a great many of the issues which will certainly then arise.

The hon. Lady the Member for Flint, East said during her speech that I would seek to blind the House with a host of favourable statistics. As the hon. Lady was speaking, I thought that she would have been a little happier in her speech if she had had the opportunity to make it a year or so ago. As she knows, and as everybody in the universities knows well, there has been, and is continuing, a very considerable effort and a very considerable expansion.

Therefore, we must approach this debate not on the basis of the somewhat extremely critical line taken in the pamphlet written by the hon. Lady's noble Friend Lord Taylor, but rather on the basis that we are engaged in the biggest expansion in our universities in our 563 national history and that the only issue which arises is not whether we should expand substantially, but as to the precise degree and speed of expansion which is right and sensible to undertake in view of all the factors involved. That is the issue.

We cannot discuss this matter without realising—our discussion would be unrelated to the facts—that an enormous expansion is taking place; and that in itself inevitably dictates the lines on which further developments can follow. We are starting, I think for the first time in any century, seven new universities, the decision to start which has been announced since 1957. One of them, the University of Sussex, already has 425 students. I understand that both Norwich and York will be taking students in the autumn, and work on the other four is going ahead.

On top of that, as I had the pleasure of announcing to the House on 31st May, the Royal College of Science and Technology in Glasgow is being accepted for university status. I understand that an application to Her Majesty in Council for the grant of a charter is going forward and there is every reason to hope that that great institution will be functioning as a university when it comes back in the autumn.

Then there is the expansion in student numbers which has been taking place. The figure was 87,000 in 1951–52. The figure at the beginning of autumn last year, at the beginning of the academic year which is just finishing, had risen to 116,646 and as thehon. Lady has reminded us, and as the University Grants Committee has indicated is achievable on present provisions, we are going for a figure of 150,000 in 1966–67.

One figure which arises from that is a little striking. In the present quinquennium, the planned expansion in student numbers is at the substantial rate overall of 33⅓ per cent. Perhaps even more striking is the expansion in financial terms. In 1951–52, when the present Administration took office the total of public expenditure central and local on the universities in all directions was £36.7 million. The expenditure in the current year is at the rate of £146 million.

564 It would be equally wrong not to underrate the extent to which the process of expansion has been helped and will be accelerated by some of the action we have recently taken. The House will recall, for example, that when my predecessor announced in April, 1962, the grants for the current quinquennium, he said that they could be reviewed within two years. As the House knows, that review has already taken place and an increase for the four remaining years of the quinquennium comes into operation from the beginning of next month, providing in all over the quinquennium an extra £16.1 million. There has been a £5 million increase in the capital grants, bringing the figure to £30 million for the current year, and increases bringing the figures for the next two years to £33½ million.

I do not—picking up another word used by the hon. Lady—bring out these facts with any measure of complacency. Experience over the last year of this enormously important problem can, I hope, prevent me at any rate from falling into that. But I am equally sure that, if one takes a balanced view of what is being done and of what is to be done in future, it really is necessary to have a fairer and more objective view than one sometimes gets in pamphlets and observations from the benches opposite.

One can also see the physical results of what has been happening in financial terms over recent years. One of these results has considerable personal appeal to me. About 10 years ago, it fell to me as Financial Secretary to announce the decision to build a great technology centre at Imperial College. Two or three weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting what is already an institution of international fame and standing, with 3,000 students, rising to 3,700 in the plans up to 1966–67. What is of enormous significance and interest is that no less than 40 per cent. of the students are doing post-graduate work.

It is work of the utmost interest and its importance is apparent even to the layman. For instance, there is the work in the extremely interesting field of research which lies between electrical engineering and medicine. There is, too, the work on those aspects of engineering which deal with soil mechanics, which has already resulted in Imperial College 565 being able to give helpful advice on the construction of dams in Asia. A whole variety of things is going on there.

Then there is the new construction going on at universities all over the country. In a very interesting speech—I read it but I did not have the pleasure of hearing it—on Monday, the hon. Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Crossman) said something about scientists believing in the future when they see laboratories being built. In that context, they must be encouraged by some of the things that have been done or are being done. Let us take some examples of work completed recently or due to be completed shortly.

There are stages 1 and 2 of the chemistry buildings at Bristol, costing over £500,000, the chemistry building at Reading, costing over £300,000, stage 3 of the engineering building at Leeds costing over £400,000 and the natural philosophy building, which I saw earlier this year, at Aberdeen, costing £675,000. There are plenty of other examples. Do not let us underrate what has been done.

But I am not seeking to duck the perfectly fair question which the hon. Lady put. Is this big expansion which, in all fairness, we must admit has already been undertaken and planned, enough? Related factors are very important. First, there is the immense but temporary imminent expansion in the size of the revelant age group. Secondly, there is what I hope will be the permanent tendency to stay on longer at school, resulting in larger sixth forms.

The size of the relevant age group indicates some measure of the problem. The size of that age group this year is 713,000. In 1966–67, this will go up by more than 200,000 to 921,000. Then it drops to 822,000 in the following year and comes down to 731,000—not very much above the present figure—in 1971–72. Then, as far as one can foresee, there will be a slight upward curve again but nothing comparable with what one can call the explosion of the figure in the 1966–67 group.

The effect of what we have done so far is often judged—I am not sure how good atest it is, but it is a test—by the percentage of the relevant age group who find university places. Let us trace the development. In 1951–52 the percentage of the then relevant age group who could 566 find places was 3.59 per cent. In fairness, I must add that other higher education establishments outside the universities provided 2.9 per cent. There was thus a total of 6.49 per cent. in higher education in that year. In the current year, when we are dealing with an age group 90,000 higher, the figure is 4.6 per cent. for university places and 5.24 per cent. for other higher education, a total of 9.84 per cent.

Turning to the problem year of 1966–67—infinitely the most difficult year that can be foreseen—on present plans the percentage who will get university places will be very close to the present figure—4.56 as against 4.6, which is only .04 less. In the rest of higher education, the percentage will actually be higher—5.55 as against 5.24. Thus, in the total of higher education even in that year, 10.11 per cent. of the relevant age group will find higher education places as against 9.84 per cent. in the current year.

If one goes beyond that, the position improves as a result of the combined effect of the continued increase in the provision of places and the steep fall in the size of the relevant age group which follows 1966–67.

§ Mr. Austen Albu (Edmonton)

Has the right hon. Gentleman the respective figures for men and women?

§ Mr. Boyd-Carpenter

Not to hand. If they are available, and if he has time, my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education may be able to give them tonight. The figures I am giving include both men and women.

There is the related question of what standard we should follow. It is often suggested that two A-levels should be sufficient. But I believe that that is an over simplification. Some holders of that qualification may not want to continue to university, preferring other forms of further education or to go into employment. Some may not be suited to university education and, of course, the G.C.E. examination itself is not immutable.

Another comparison often made is with other countries. Here we are not comparing like with like. I assure the House that I do not propose to indulge in any reflections on any other country's system. Were I to do so, and if any question of an honorary degree ever arose, some ass 567 would no doubt seek to interfere to prevent it, so I will do nothing of the sort.

What is important is that our system is different and has developed in a different way. First, we have the highest ratio of staff to students of any university system in the world. Our teacher-student ratio is 1–7½ compared with 1–10.3 before the war and with present ratios of 1–13 in the United States, 1–12 in the Soviet Union and 1–30 in France. We are also the only country, at any rate in the free world, to have a general system of subsistence grants to university students. I cannot include in this analysis the Iron Curtain countries because that involves an analysis of their economic system which would be infinitely tedious to the House and would doubtless not be in order in this debate. In the free world we are unique in having a very wide general provision not only of university education itself, but of subsistence allowances for students. There is little doubt that our system provides for the ablest students in a manner and on a scale which is exceedingly impressive by world standards.

The hon. Lady referred to the most interesting speech which Sir Eric Ashby made at the opening session of the Congress of the Association of Commonwealth Universities—a speech to which I had the pleasure of listening. Sir Eric dealt with this very issue. He referred—and the hon. Lady quoted him—to the fact that in certain other countries a young man or girl had a greater chance of a university place than was the case here. But Sir Eric also pointed out that our system—"élite-ism" he called it—worked in a different way by concentrating high resources of staff, equipment and grants upon a more limited number of students.

I am not seeking to argue the relative merits of the two approaches. I am anxious only to bring out the facts upon which decisions may have to be taken. Our system provides university education, as distinct from other forms of higher education, to a smaller proportion of our younger people than in some other countries. On the other hand, for the ablest students, at any rate, it provides it on a scale of staff, and so on, which gives to them the greatest help and which has the consequence that our wastage rate is very lowcompared with that of other countries.

§ Mr. William Hannan (Glasgow, Maryhill)

Is the right hon. Gentleman arguing that standards should be raised, and that in this country only the ablest young students should be entering universities? Will he bear in mind the fact that in Scotland the tradition is that even those who are marginally qualified always find a place in universities? Is he arguing that this tradition should be altered?

§ Mr. Boyd-Carpenter

At the moment I am not arguing either in defence or in attack of that system. I am anxious to establish the facts of the matter, upon which, in the light of the Robbins Report and other factors, we shall have to make up our minds. I share the hon. Member's admiration for the educational system in Scotland. I was seeking simply to establish—and I hope that this is the way, at this stage, that I can best help the House—what the facts of the matter were.

By way of illustration, let us take the example of France, which operates the other system—a system of a somewhat larger proportion of people coming to the universities but a very different and very much lower staff ratio, a system which is altogether different from ours. There is an interesting comparison. Taking not strictly universities alone but the relevant age group entering full-time courses equivalent to British degree levels, the figures for 1958–59, which are the latest available, are 7 per cent. for France against our 6.8 per cent. of people entering, and 3.3per cent. for France against our 5.2 per cent. for people qualifying with a degree. In other words the wastage, under the French system of somewhat larger admissions, was very much larger than ours.

I assure the hon. Member that I am not arguing for one system or the other. It is a very difficult balance. We have to put on the one hand the desire we all have to give opportunities to all who can use them. On the other hand, a system which involves a large wastage inevitably carries with it a good deal of personal frustration among those who fail to complete a course. That illustrates how difficult these international comparsions are.

The approach of much of our thinking on this matter must be affected by what Lord Robbins and his Committee say. The Government and the universities 569 may have to judge whether the rapid rate of expansion which is going on at present can or ought to increase still further when we have the Robbins Report. If that happens, great problems in respect of resources both human and material will have to be solved, for the existing programme leaves little scope for further effort on educational lines and at accustomed standards. Indeed, a good deal of what the hon. Lady herself said as to possible approaches shows that her thinking on this matter is not wholly out of line with ours.

She said a good deal about university staffs. I do not want to go over again the ground which the House traversed during the interesting debate on science on Monday. Naturally, we regret the loss of able university teachers and scientists, but we should not take too narrow a view about this matter. We must remember that there is at the same time a considerable inward flow to our universities of very able people from Europe—several famous economists whose names will immediately leap to the mind of the House in general and hon. Members opposite in particular. We have been gainers as well as losers from the flow of university teachers between different countries.

I do not agree with the hon. Lady that we will not have the staff for our expansion. Staff numbers are rising. At the beginning of last autumn—the beginning of the academic year just ending—the number of full-time staff was 13,824, an increase of 7 per cent. on the previous year, against an increase in student numbers of 4.7 per cent. There is therefore no justification for what the hon. Lady has said about the failure, so far, to continue successful recruiting of staff.

Since then there has been the 10 per cent. overall increase in the university salary bill which was announced to the House earlier this year, which operated on 1st April. That is being followed by the reference to the National Incomes Commission of the question, what is the appropriate level for university salaries? I made it clear in a debate last year that one of the functions of the Commission is precisely to seek to evaluate and consider rather unusual problems such as this.

§ Mrs. White

If the right hon. Gentleman is now telling us that we are not short of staff at universities, is he saying that it is because we are short of buildings that we cannot take all the qualified students?

§ Mr. Boyd-Carpenter

I am not saying that there are no limitations of staff, buildings and money. All these, in their different ways, operate. What I was venturing to differ from the hon. Lady about was tier statement that we would not be able to get the staff for the expansion, and that we were running into real difficulties in this respect. That is not so.

Sometimes we lose some very able people, although I am inclined to think—although I am perhaps judging the matter from a limited number of cases within my personal knowledge—that it has been the lure and attraction of the immense research facilities which the United States provides, on a scale that is plainly beyond our resources, that attracts some of these people, rather than the salary scales, particularly when allowance is made for the different cost of living in the United States. I hope and believe that the improvements in our own facilities—although not on the United States scale—of which I gave some expression to the House in an earlier part of ray speech, will have a helpful effect in this direction.

I should like to follow the hon. Lady a little further in her general reflections, which she based, rightly and wisely, on that same speech of Sir Eric Ashby's from which both of us have quoted this afternoon. I found Sir Eric's approach very interesting, from a point of view which the hon. Lady did not tackle, namely, the philosophy which should underlie our policy in respect of the universities.

The hon. Lady mentioned the three approaches which he quoted—the economic approach, that trained minds, particularly in science, have a direct monetary and economic value to the community; the social service approach, that is, that it should be a right for those with certain qualifications to have advance education; and to what he called the consumer goods approach, that university education is a good thing which should be available with the other good 571 things which an expanding economy can produce, I think that the truth is probably based on a mixture of all three. I think it is helpful not to try to apply any precise mathematical formula to our policy but to try to work in these three considerations with some measure of balance.

The other reflection I should like to stress—and here I must part company with the hon. Lady at this stage—is the importance which I attach to preserving the freedom, and the economic freedom, of our universities. That is not necessarily going to be very easy when the enormous national importance of certain studies is as well realised as it is today. I am quite sure that whatever form of administration we evolve for our universities, in the light of the Robbins Report we should be very careful to resist the temptation to allow any Minister or any Government to interfere in the academic arrangements and in the curriculum arrangements of our universities. That is an obvious temptation and it is one which we shall be very careful to guard against, and that is where, if the hon. Lady will allow me to say so, I rather fail to feel any enthusiasm for the particular administrative arrangements which she tentatively put forward.

§ Mrs. White

I think it is rather important for the right hon. Gentleman to make clear at what point he supposed I was suggesting a restriction on economic freedom. We have, after all, the University Grants Committee today. I was suggesting a different organisation of such a body. I felt that there should be a strategic body and that there should be devolution on a territorial basis. I do not think that the present one can carry out its functions adequately.

§ Mr. Boyd-Carpenter

The University Grants Committee is a body a large part of whose membership consists of distinguished academics. That is an important safeguard. I thought that I saw in the hon. Lady's speech, as I have noticed in some other observations of her right hon. Friend's a tendency to appear to wish to diminish the measures of academic freedom. There was the speech of her right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition about the entrants to Oxford and Cambridge. I think that the rights of colleges and universities to 572 regulate their own entrants is a crucial part of their independence.

I should like to make my position clear. It is that I hope and believe that in any steps that we take to modernise our administrative apparatus in respect of universities, the preservation of their freedom and independence is a matter of major importance. One has only to look at one or two other countries to see what dangers flow from neglecting that.

§ Mr. Albu

Is it not a fact that the present Administration first broke the rules of the University Grants Committee with their proposal for the expansion of Imperial College and the other two colleges in the field of technology?

§ Mr. Boyd-Carpenter

First, there are no rules broken, and, secondly, there is the duty of the Government on behalf of the taxpayer to regulate the supply of support by way of grants, and that is something that the Government cannot abdicate to anyone. So, with respect, I think that the hon. Gentleman has confused or telescoped two quite separate matters.

I only want to add one more general observation. The hon. Lady referred to the pamphlet by her noble Friend Lord Taylor. It bears a foreword by her right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, but I think that Lord Taylor is responsible for the following observation: For eleven years Conservative Governments have been putting the brake on educational advance. What are the facts? Total public expenditure on all education—universities, grants and all—in the current year is at the rate of £1,250 million. That is about £100 million up on last year and compares favourably with £414 million in 1951–52. It looks as if the noble Lord is confusing the accelerator with the brake. As a great admirer of his, I hope that he does not do that when he drives his car.

It is also unfair to allege that we devote a smaller share of our national wealth to education than is done in many other countries. Let me take the U.N.E.S.C.O. figures for 1957–60. These are most important figures, because it is plain that our educational expenditure has risen more in respect of our 573 national product since then. The U.N.E.S.C.O. figures show our figure as a percentage of gross national product to be 4.2 per cent. They show the United States to be 4.6 per cent. I would only comment that the United States does not devote anything like the same proportion of her national product to other social services, such as pensions and health service. Let us compare our figure of 4.2 per cent. with other countries. According to the U.N.E.S.C.O. figures. West Germany's percentage was 3.6 per cent., France 3 per cent. and that socially progressive country Sweden, 3.2 per cent. And I have no doubt that since then the figures have moved in our favour.

This debate comes, I think, at an appropriate time, even more appropriate than the happy coincidence of a great international gathering, because it comes at an immensely important time in the history of higher education in this country. We are not only spending more money on it than we have ever done before but there is also a much greater interest in the matter than ever before—what I think my hon. Friend described as an insatiable aptitude for education. As I have mentioned more than once, we shall very shortly have the Robbins Report—this autumn—and I cannot forecast—and it would be wrong if I could to do so, but I cannot—what it will contain. However, I am quite certain that such a Committee, after such labours as I have described, will produce proposals of major interest which all thoughtful people will want to look at fair-mindedly and open-mindedly. Indeed, it might well be the case that they will enable us to set a course of development for our universities for a generation or more.

Major decisions may well have to be made. I hope that the House will forgive me if I say this, for I feel it very strongly; it would be a great pity if these decisions, which are of national importance, have to be made in an atmosphere of a political dogfight. We have tried, and I say this for both parties, on the whole, to keep our universities and our university education as far as possible out of, at any rate, the sharper asperities of party political controversy, and I am sure that there has never been a time like the present when the need to approach these matters fairly and open-mindedly has been greater for all 574 of us. The time may well come this autumn when we shall have perhaps a fleeting moment of opportunity for this generation to render a great service to our nation.

§ Mr. Merlyn Rees (Leeds, South)

It is as well for me at this personal moment to realise that I can depend upon the traditional tolerance and indulgence of hon. Members on both sides of the House. For I am faced not only with the normal problems which confront a new Member, but with the additional one arising from the fact that I am here in place of one of the most distinguished and honoured former colleagues of hon. Members, the former Leader of my own party and a man whom the whole nation mourned just six months ago.

I learned during the recent by-election of the very high regard in which Hugh Gaitskell was held in South Leeds. I know only too well, at this moment, the very high regard in which he was held in this House. Comparisons are odious at the best of times, and, bearing in mind the comparison which many hon. Members must be making now and will be making in the next few minutes, I can only ask for even more of that tolerance and indulgence for which hon. Members are noted.

I am one of the Welshmen of the great dispersion of the 1920s and the 1930s, but although, as a consequence, I have spent the greater part of my life in an outer London suburb, to which I owe a great deal, my roots are firmly embedded in the mining valleys of South Wales where many of my family still live and where I was nurtured. Many of the values and virtues and general outlook on life which I have come to associate with my native Wales I have already recognised in that part of the West Riding which I represent in this House. The West Riding has long been noted for the independence of mind and of character of its people. In its fertile soil has long flourished every major development in the field of higher education.

In the City of Leeds there is not only a world-famous university. There are four teacher training colleges, a college of technology, a college of commerce and many forms of adult education. This fact has encouraged me to speak in this 575 debate, and for the first time in this House.

I think that now there is general agreement on the need for an expansion of higher education. The arguments that remain are on amount and on the direction in which to go. This has not always been so, and I feel that the reason for the change is the very apparent need for higher education as a form of capital investment. This is a very powerful argument which I believe in strongly and to which I shall return in a moment.

I wish to point out, however, that there is an equally powerful argument for higher education, whether it is useful or not. The arts and the social sciences are equally important as the natural sciences and technology. I think that I am using both sides of the argument when I say that we shall not get the teachers we need in all parts of the education system unless we greatly increase the facilities for higher education. Based on my own practical experience, I can say that unless we can radically reduce the size of classes, a great deal of the very valuable educational reforms which will get on to the Statute Book will be vitiated.

One of the odd things about the teaching profession is that the further one gets away from the actual point of teaching, the higher becomes one's status and the higher is the salary. And yet, to me, the sole reason for the whole operation is to teach students. During the war I served in the Royal Air Force where the whole reason to be there at that time was to keep aeroplanes in the air. As a mark of this, pilots received flying pay. I am wondering whether there is a case for introducing "teaching pay" into the salary arrangements. I offer this suggestion to the Minister with some diffidence, although the diffidence is lessened because I am given to understand that now he has some concern with teachers' salary arrangements.

I said earlier that everyone is agreed on the need for expansion of higher education. I feel strongly about the problems that remain, but I will not go into them now. Perhaps, in the spirit of the occasion, I may ask a question of the right hon. Gentleman which is related to the needs of my constituency. In South Leeds there is a high school, one of the 576 old municipal secondary schools set up under the Act of 1902. It has a powerful sixth form which will grow. There is also a comprehensive school which has a quickly generating sixth form which will grow very rapidly. There are secondary modern schools which run advanced courses and some have sixth-form classes as well. May the children in my constituency who are at school now, and who will be at school in the next decade, be assured that when the time comes for them to move into higher education there will be sufficient places for them?

This growth of sixth forms is, in my view, one measure of the reservoir of ability which exists in this country. Another measure of it is the great expansion of courses which is taking place in the field of technical education. I do not mean just the C.A.T.S but also in technical colleges. I am not concerned only with degree courses, diploma courses and courses leading to professional examinations but also with the very valuable management courses which are held up and down the country. It would, I think, be a great pity if the current concern with the need to set up a top-level Harvard-type business college should lead us to overlook the valuable work being done for middle and lower management which is being extended to include quite remarkable courses for developing shop stewards; because this, too, is management.

This reservoir is seen in adult education to which my constituents owe a great deal and to which, over the years, they have given much. For it was in my part of Leeds that the W.E.A. flowered early. There are far more people capable of advanced education. I am encouraged in this view by the success of the emergency training scheme for teachers which was set up after the war, and also the organisation of further education and training schemes which, as many hon. Members will remember, enabled ex-Service men to obtain a university education when otherwise they would not have been able to do so. The House may be interested to know that there are five hon. Members who attained a university education under this scheme. It so happens that all five that I know are on this side of the House. One of them is my hon. Friend 577 the Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice). There is also my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Duffy). A third is myself.

This expansion of higher education will raise many problems both educational and administrative. I venture to suggest that it will also raise social problems. For we cannot put this increased number of young people through the forcing house of a mental discipline and expect them to emerge the same people. They change socially as well as academically.

During past debates on foreign affairs I have sat in another part of this House and heard hon. Members on both sides say that one of the great hopes for Soviet Russia was the fact that the Russians spend large sums on technical education, and that this would breed a new sort of middle class which would reject the old order. I shall not take that argument further; the analogy is by no means complete, but there is sufficient of it to cause concern to many of us, to whatever political party we may belong. They look at life completely differently and there can be no complacency on the part of anyone. It is a political challenge, and it is developing into a social challenge in general

The whole of this experiment in the expansion of higher education is a challenge. Our response to it will decide whether we are to remain one of the leading Powers in the world. Our response to it will also determine whether the people of this country in general and the people of the North in particular—I include among those my constituents—are going to enjoy a significantly higher material standard of life in the years to come.

I have little patience with the argument that there is something noble about poverty. I know too much about it in whatever degree to believe this. I believe passionately that there is a case for using science and technology to raise the standard of living of the people of this country. If, concurrently, we not only think of that, but think also of the arts and social sciences, we shall be taking a step towards making eventually a better country. The key to it all is an expansion of higher education.

§ Mr. R. P. Hornby (Tonbridge)

I suppose that there is not a single hon. Member on either side of the House today who does not remember with awe the experience of making a maiden speech in this House. How much greater those feelings of awe must be for one who has followed a predecessor of the distinction of the late Hugh Gaitskell, a man for whose great brilliance, integrity and courage we all had tremendous admiration.

In taking the opportunity to congratulate the hon. Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Merlyn Rees) on the speech to which we have just listened, the compliment I should like to pay to him, and which, I hope, would give him and his constituents the greatest pleasure, would be to say how happy I believe his predecessor would be to know that he had chosen the occasion of this debate to make his maiden speech and how happy he would have been to have heard the manner in which the speech was delivered.

It also gives me great pleasure to follow and congratulate a representative of the City of Leeds, of which I have very happy memories if only because I once had the pleasure of playing football against Leeds United there. Listening to the hon. Member, I could not help feeling that he has combined the eloquence of Wales with the forthrightness of Yorkshire. As he happens to live in a suburb of London, that may enable him the more conveniently to give us the opportunity of listening to him often in future. I am sure that all present wish him well in the House.

I confess to finding this an ill-timed debate on an exceptionally important subject. I think that in the back of all our minds is the feeling that we are waiting for Robbins. Weare saying certain things in this debate rather to emphasise particular points which we have had in mind for some time and because we hope to find some of our favourite points emphasised and underlined when that report becomes available to us.

I agree very much about the need for a rapid expansion in higher education as an important national investment. The hon. Lady the Member for Flint, East 579 (Mrs. White) made an additional point that this is not just a matter of national investment, but one of personal ambition for a university place. She carried the argument to the point of saying that it is a civic right. Although perhaps sympathetic to that aim in future, I feel that we have to recognise that the civic right for everyone of ability to full-time education up to the age of, say, 21—which, according to the Taylor Report, would include a one-year residential stay in the university—would involve us in huge sums of expenditure and very major matters of priority of expenditure as between one field and another.

We should recognise that it is absolutely right also to emphasise just how much has already been done in this as in other fields of education, even though it is equally true that much more remains to be done. We are, after all, considering higher education, which is providing in universities, colleges of advanced technology and teacher training colleges, about 212,000 places at present. I suppose that we could add about half that number of people in part-time courses of higher education. We are dealing with very large numbers.

I confess to being so confused by international comparisons as to find them almost valueless. One can quote figures from Russia and the United States which seem to prove one side of the case, as well as figures to prove the contrary, but the standards of comparison are so vague and difficult to come by accurately that it would seem better to take as criteria the needs of Britain as one sees them and the needs for a wide variety of different types of higher education to cater for the many different claims which are made upon us. It is worth emphasising that the numbers graduating in this country seem to bear very favourable comparison with many competitors and friends on the Continent of Europe.

I should like to spend the rest of my time making one or two comments on some of the points which have been raised by the hon. Member for Flint, East and then to make a few points which, I hope, will have met with the consideration of the Robbins Committee and which I shall seek to make again when that Committee has presented its report. My first comment is on the rate of growth of the univer- 580 sities, to which the hon. Member for Flint, East made some reference. My view is that probably the aim of 150,000 in the universities by 1965–66 as compared with 116,000 today is as fast a rate of expansion as it is reasonably possible to expect without major wastage and decline in standards.

That is a very rapid build-up rate. It is a figure which the University Grants Committeenow reckons it is able to achieve. It did not hold that view fifteen months ago, but since the announcements made earlier this year by the Chief Secretary the number of 150,000 is held to be attainable on present funds. I regard it as about as fast a rate of expansion as is feasible. I take a different view about the target we have set for 1973 or thereabouts of 170,000.

It seems highly probable in view of the demand we shall face for higher education both nationally and personally that we shall want to raise that figure of 170,000 before very long. I very much hope the newer universities in planning for present numbers are taking into account in the planning of sites the possibility of expansion beyond the figures they have at present set themselves.

On the method of growth in the universities the hon. Lady said that she generally favoured the planning of larger rather than smaller universities. I was not quite certain whether she was implying a criticism of the decision in recent years to found some of the new universities rather than to put more money into the further expansion of existing universities. In the short term I think that we would have had a quicker expansion in the existing ones. In the short term it is easier and cheaper to expand the old than to create the new, which take a long time to come into commission.

I believe that, anxious as the hon. Lady and other hon. Members may have been for a crash programme to meet the immediate situation, it would have been a short-sighted policy to do that on the sums of money available, and that a far greater potential, both in quality and in quantity of university places, will be available to us as a result of the decision taken to found the seven new universities.

I also believe that there will be great advantage to the country in having university cities and university towns 581 scattered in many different places; it will spread enlightenment to the professions, to industry and to other places in many parts of the country. We should, therefore, welcome the decision to found the new universities rather than to concentrate more of our attention on the existing universities to meet the immediate need. I believe that the long-term results will justify that view.

May I now make one or two comments on issues which I believe merit urgent consideration in higher education? The first is the problem created for the schools by the pressure of demand for places within universities. There is no doubt that the shortage of university places is having a damaging effect on the school curriculum in the sixth form and even below that. It is a guiding factor in many of our schools. I hope that ways will be found, without damaging the freedom of the universities and academic standards, of associating the schools more closely with decisions about the field in which the universities propose to examine. I believe that there could be more liaison and more agreement between schools and universities in order that the dangers of over-early specialisation and over-narrow specialisation may be mitigated at least to some extent.

I hope that the Leader of the Opposition and those who support him will drop the idea, which he expounded in a speech not long ago, of messing around with the Oxford and Cambridge method of entrance. They may disagree with it, but we are talking about only two universities in more than 20. Surely within our 20 or more universities there is room for a little variety of method, and surely it is better to be a little tolerant about what is going on in this respect in Oxbridge rather than to impose a system which may or may not produce better results. A little tolerance in this field would, I think, be well advised.

§ Mr. Dalyell

Does not the hon. Member agree, if he uses the word "impose", that the Oxford and Cambridge scholarship system imposes a pattern on schools throughout the land which may or may not be desirable?

§ Mr. Hornby

There is certainly a case for consultation between the schools and the universities on the nature of this entrance machinery.

582 The third point which I wish to make about entrance is rather different and one in which I have a particular interest—which I should declare—by reason of my association with a recent foundation known as the Atlantic Colleges. I believe that in a time when people move far more between one country and another, for example, between other European countries and this country, there is a growing need to pioneer and to try to negotiate standards of entrance to universities which will be accepted between different countries. In other words, G.C.E. at appropriate levels would be acceptable to the French universities and in the Scandinavian countries, and vice versa, I hope that attention will be paid to the possibility of obtaining acceptance of this principle.

In viewing the prospect of higher education expansion and the amount of money which it will undoubtedly cost us, I cannot help feeling devoutly thankful that my right hon. Friends followed the recommendations of the minority Report of the Anderson Committee. In viewing the amount of money which we shall need in this respect, I think that we should be pursuing a false sense of priorities if we a accepted an overall undertaking to pay all grants in full, maybe at the expense of other demands in capital or recurrent grants which we should find so much harder to meet if we had adopted the majority Report of the Committee.

I am not greatly impressed by the view held by hon. Members opposite, if I have correctly interpreted their statements, that teacher training colleges should rapidly be converted by name into universities. I do not believe that that would immediately be justifiable in many places in terms of standards. What I hope will be done—and this would have an effect on the number of higher education places available—is to consider making fuller use of the teacher training college places now available. In particular, I have a feeling that if the third year of the teacher training course could be almost fully used for gaining experience in schools, while retaining the principle of a three-year course, this would release one-third of the places for further entrants and we could make considerable gains.

This would have certain advantages in the opportunities for much fuller practice in the schools which could be 583 obtained by the teachers and which would be welcomed, and presumably this could be followed by a refresher course in the teacher training colleges in the summer vacation. There is scope in this way for an experiment which could make many further places available.

One point which has scarcely been touched on concerns the number of places which are at present available and should in future be made available for overseas students in our higher educational system. At present, about 10 per cent. of the places in higher education are occupied by overseas students, a figure which reflects the greatest possible credit on this country and should be more widely known than it is. It is clear that under the pressure of demand during the coming years it will be extremely difficult to hang on to that proportion of places for overseas students against home demand.

I very much hope that we shall find it possible to maintain that proportion, because I believe that there is no greater contribution which this country can make to the standards of living in overseas countries, with consequent effects on our own reputation and on our trade as well as on their hopes for growing prosperity.

Finally, I wish to comment on organisation. It seems to me that the case for removing the control of higher education from the Treasury is overwhelming. With the best of intentions, the Treasury must find it very hard to judge the relative needs of a sphere of activity—higher education—for which they are the spokesmen, and the defenders, against the demands of other Departments with which the Treasury is having dealings. I hope that ways and means will be found of transferring these responsibilities elsewhere. I hope that the Robbins Committee will agree that this change should be effected.

I confess to being very attracted by the development of some form of regional organisation to survey and advise upon higher education developments. If this were done, many of the status problems between universities, teacher training colleges, technological institutes and technical colleges might be solved. Much variety could conveniently be maintained thereby. There would be great advantages in making known quickly and 584 readily where places were available and what types of course needed to be developed rapidly. It would also provide a very convenient way of associating local industry, needs for research, and so on, with the academic institutions. Incidentally, it might provide a pilot scheme for reorganisation which the House would do well to consider in connection with other welfare and social service activities.

I hope that in all that we do in this respect, while increasing numbers, we will not neglect the importance of preserving our extremely high standards of university education. We can best preserve them by not tampering over much with many of our existing institutions and by building new ones along the lines indicated in many of the excellent documents now being prepared by the vice-chancellors of the new universities.

§ Mr. Malcolm MacPherson (Stirling and Falkirk Burghs)

I am in agreement with the hon. Member for Tonbridge (Mr. Hornby) on many of the points he made. I disagree with him on a number of other points. I strongly support his view about the importance of maintaining the ratio of students from overseas. We should do everything we can to maintain that figure at its present level. This is sometimes not an easy point to put across in Scotland, which has been accustomed for a long time to the practice of qualified students all being able to obtain places at universities. However, if there has to be a choice we must decide in favour of maintaining the ratio of Commonwealth students.

What I do not find so easy to agree with are the decisions of Scottish universities sometimes to admit students from English schools in preference to students from Scottish schools. Occasionally, there may be a marginal academic difference on the side of English students; but it would be a happier solution if we took Scottish qualified students first and then extended hospitality to English students.

The very striking and admirable maiden speech to which we listened from my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, South (Mr. Merlyn Rees) touched on one theme which I had intended to comment on first. The hon. Member for 585 Tonbridge also dealt with this point, namely, the importance of sixth forms. The system of higher education consists of a series of institutions. It is a system which rests on the foundation of sixth forms. There are some students who go to some higher education institutions without going through a sixth form, but, broadly speaking, sixth forms are the foundation of the whole corpus of higher education. They are the basis on which higher education depends.

It is worth considering whether sixth forms are likely to have the kind of future which one would desire for an institution which is the foundation of our higher education system. It does not seem to me that the outlook for sixth forms is particularly promising. The essential point is staff. The staff of sixth forms overlaps with that of universities. Broadly speaking, universities and sixth forms take first or second class honours degrees graduates. In universities the proportion of good second-class honours degrees to first-class honours degrees has been increasing. The proportion of good second-class honours degrees to first-class honours degrees is a good deal higher in sixth forms, I believe.

During the course of the next few years, when there will be a considerable stress in finding staff in universities, I fear that there will be some temptation to take staff from the schools. Indeed, a year or two ago Lord Chorley said in another place that this was one of the sources of many recent appointments to universities. He added that it is absolutely essential that we keep a high proportion of first-rate people in the schools as well as in the universities and other higher education centres, otherwise the level there will sink, with the result that the level of the building on top will sink.

We have tended to concentrate a good deal on the comparatively narrow question of university entrance. This is in many ways the crux of the relationship between universities and schools, but there are other things. We do not handle these questions very well. We are very bad at the junctions in our education system. We have made rather a hash of the junction between primary and secondary education. We are doing badly at the junction between secondary education and higher education. We are not doing particularly well at the junction 586 between graduates and the employment they take up.

The Question has arisen in the House from time to time of attracting graduates into the Foreign Office from other than the two main institutions from which they come. In answer to Questions tabled by myself and other hon. Members, the Foreign Office has for some years said that it would like to recruit such people but cannot. This is a question of the same type as the 11-plus question and the 18-plus question. These are questions on which we are rather ham-handed.

The work of sixth forms and of universities in the first year of some professional courses is very much the same. A number of first-year examination exemptions can be obtained in universities on the basis of work done in the sixth form. This is not always administered liberally. The possibilities of this are not fully explored. This provision has not led to the sort of happy relations between schools and universities which one would have hoped for. The relationship between schools, on the one hand, and universities and other higher education institutions, on the other, needs much improving. Our educational system in general will benefit from whatever steps we take to increase the co-operation and understanding between the two sides.

One matter of considerable importance to Scotland is the emergence of the Royal College of Science in Glasgow as a university. This is of first-rate importance not just for Scotland, but the whole of the United Kingdom. For the first time in our university history a college of technology is being turned into a university. This is the kind of thing we used to talk about in Parliament, when hon. Members drew the analogy with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now we have this actually coming into being and in the autumn of this year we will have our British equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute. Comparisons with the Imperial College, London, spring to mind.

I take it that whereas the Imperial College is largely a home for post-graduate work, the proportion of graduate and post-graduate work in the new University of Glasgow will remain as the ordinary proportions throughout the university system in this country. Not 587 only is this institution about to become our first university of technology, but its first step within its own establishment, is to be the institution, apart from its scientific and technological courses, of a new faculty of social and industrial studies. Up to now in the Royal College there has been a lively general studies department, but following it becoming a university it will have, in addition to the subjects of science and technology, certain studies outside, connecting the humanities with science and technology.

I do not know how high one can put the possible achievements which may be made as a result of these moves. One probably optimistic comment was that a graduate of the new university is likely to be equally at home in the two cultures about which we have heard so much. Whether or not that is too optimistic I do not know, but this is the kind of problem the new university will be meeting. I hope, therefore, that when we talk in future about university institutions we will keep in mind the desirability of achieving this sort of result.

I have been fascinated to read about the way the new University of Sussex is tackling its job. It has been a thrilling experience to read the account of how that university is trying to approach the study of subjects which, to many people of my generation seem compartmentalised in particular ways. One should not be mesmerised by the new approaches to arts studies. In Glasgow, we have another new approach—an equally important one in our university history.

The possibility of developing really large universities has been mentioned. I used to be against this sort of development, but I am beginning to feel that there may be a case for one or more large universities. I am still rather doubtful and all the arguments in favour of very large universities—that is, of 10,000 or more students—seem to me to relate to the advantages that would accrue to the teacher rather than to the student. There was the possibility of achieving a university of this size in Glasgow where, in such a conurbation, one could have taken the power to have established a really large university. Glasgow is large enough to take one, and the Royal College could have been linked to Glasgow University and a university able 588 to take 15,000, possibly ultimately 20,000 students, could have been achieved.

I consider that the path taken in Glasgow is the wiser one. It will enable us to follow what will probably be a new line of thought in university work. In this connection, a problem which worries many people in Scotland and one about which I have asked many Questions in the House concerns the University Grants Committee's grants. Considering the figures in the University Returns, one finds that the grants given by the U.G.C. to Scottish universities—both recurrent and nonrecurrent grants—are, per head of the student population, considerably less than those given in England and Wales.

There is no point in my asking the usual questions on this topic and getting the usual replies. I appreciate that the criterion of grant per head of the student population is not an all-embracing one, but I would like to know why the amount is less. There may be a perfectly good reason, but I like to know what it is. Depending on the answer we will know whether or not to try to argue to have these grants increased or to leave the matter as it stands.

When considering the U.G.C. and, generally speaking, the system of government of universities as a whole, I am in favour of retaining a body like the U.G.C. It seems to possess a great many of the advantages which one wants in administering the universities from the centre. In public everyone is being polite and gentle to the U.G.C. I am the first to agree that it is a good, liberal-minded, progressive body which is useful under normal circumstances. However, it is not strong enough in a time of crisis; when a big forward-looking job needs to be tackled.

We would not be in our present situation—a situation in which my hon. Friends have been able to call their pamphlet by such a name as "The Years of Crisis"—if the U.G.C. had been thinking five years ahead about problems which were already being considered by members of the public. We would not have been in this difficulty had we had a stronger full-time element in the U.G.C. In 1957 or 1958 its chairman went to help the universities in Australia which, at that time, were in difficulties. The Keith Murray Report has, I understand, been of great 589 help to the Australian universities since. This was an excellent thing for Sir Keith to have done, but while he was in Australia and while in this country, no doubt giving a great deal of thought to the problems of the Australian universities, there was no other full-time member of the U.G.C.

We have only one full-time, professional member, the chairman, while the rest are spare timers. I do not underestimate the value of spare time work done by people of the calibre we get on the U.G.C. but, whatever is said, it is still spare time work. During the 1950s we should, instead of the existing U.G.C., have had a stronger body which would have been more able to develop the kind of plans that were needed at that time.

The other related question concerns the Ministry to act as the "umbrella" of the universities, but I cannot find this particularly important. What matters is the policy to be followed. We politicians are always aware that we can set up an organisation, but that the organisation does not matter two pence unless the appropriate policy is to be found in it. A change of "umbrella" does not matter twopence if the policy remains the same.

I confess that I do not greatly like the idea of the universities being under the Treasury—or under the Ministry of Education, which already has an enormous territory to cover, and might not give the specialised attention necessary. I am inclined to favour a Ministry of Higher Education, but the problem is not worth all the breath used in argument about it. We want to make sure that we get in the Cabinet as a whole a forward-looking and progressive policy for the universities.

Like most other speakers today, I have talked mainly about universities, but that does not by any means mean that I—or, presumably, they—am concerned solely with the universities as illustrations of higher education. The other higher educational institutions seem to warrant as great attention as do the universities, and I am inclined to think that the present system of university administration might well be spread to cover them.

§ Mr. Philip Goodhart