Bill Rammell - Ethnicity and degree attainment

Check against delivery

Thank you Ruth. And good morning everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Today sees the publication of a serious report on a serious subject.

You all know about the challenges that my Department, the Department for Innovation, Universities and skills, was set up last June to meet. These were set out in the Leitch Review and in World Class Skills, the Government's response to it.

To equip our country to compete successfully in the global markets of the 21st century, we will need over the next ten or fifteen years to bring about an increase in skills levels, from basic literacy and numeracy right up to post-doctoral research skills. We will need in particular to increase the proportion of working-age people with higher education qualifications from 29 per cent to 40 per cent - and that during a period when the number of school-leavers will be falling.

The rewards of success will be great - not only in terms of prosperity but also of social justice and community cohesion. It follows that the penalties for failure would be correspondingly severe.

My Ministerial colleagues, including the Prime Minister, and I have spoken many times in recent months, and to many different audiences, about the grave responsibilities that these challenges place upon us in Government, upon educators, upon learners and their employers. But there is one message that I want to draw from everything that we have all said that is especially relevant to this occasion and to this audience.

If there was ever a time when this country could afford to waste the talents of any of its citizens - which I doubt - then it's over. Everyone is born with different aptitudes - personally, I have no ear for music - but at the same time everyone has an innate potential that can be nurtured and developed.

It must be nurtured and developed. And then it must be recognised with qualifications that command the respect of employers and the wider community. That is the path to economic and social change for the better. It's the road to individual betterment and families that take pride in it.

That eminent Victorian, Thomas Carlyle, got it exactly right when he wrote that 'nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment'.

Which brings me to the theme of our conference today.

When I speak of meeting our people's learning and skills needs, I obviously mean all our people. Only the ignorant - and yes, I know there are some around - believe that the black kid on the south London estate or the middle-aged Bangladeshi housewife in Ealing are any less able of making a positive contribution to our collective good than white men who have been to Eton and Oxford.

But don't let me get started on the shadow Cabinet.

What I think is that, if the learning needs of one, or more than one part of our population are not being met by one part of the education system - if, for example, they are significantly under-represented or under-achieving, then what we don't have is equality.

And equality will never exist so long as our education system is failing to deliver the same opportunities to different social groups or social classes.

The report that's being published today is far from the first piece of research on black and minority ethnic achievement in higher education. Indeed, its starting point was a previous piece of research in this area published by my Department a year ago. That revealed a worrying attainment gap between students from some minority ethnic communities and white students.

Whatever the reasons for it, that means that we don't yet have equality of opportunity in higher education. And if you believe, as I do, that we can and must achieve equality, it means that there is work to do.

So to what extent does this report help us in that task? Significantly, in my view, but in a way that's quite unusual.

As I've said, it's far from the first piece of research to reach the conclusions that it does. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it presents those conclusions in a particularly grown-up way.

If I may, I think I can summarise them in two sentences.

First, there is a perceptible gap between the achievement of black and minority ethnic students in higher education and white students, and between men and women.

Second, the causes of that gap are incredibly complicated, and they vary from one place - indeed, one person - to another.

I have absolutely no doubt that this analysis is correct. But its consequences are not exactly comfortable. For the whole of our modern history, public policy-making has been driven by finding a problem and then spending some money to do something about it. But what if the problem is too complex to be reduced to such simple terms?

From that perspective - and while bearing in mind Malcolm X's warning that 'you can't legislate for good will' - discrimination or prejudice pure and simple would be relatively straightforward to tackle. You outlaw it and then you enforce the law. And in time, society as a whole gets the point.

I'm not going to pretend that discrimination doesn't still exist in our universities, or that there's no excuse for challenging it in the most robust fashion wherever it does exist. But the research makes clear that this is a very sensitive area for institutions with no evidence that conscious discrimination is taking place. However, it's also the case that we'd see perceptions and behaviour playing an important role in students' achievement.

Does that mean that we should we ignore the achievement gap, just because we can't see a single, self-contained way of bridging it?

Well, you know my answer to that one already. If in doubt what to do for the best, ask yourself what your principles are.

My principles, and those of this Government, demand that people from all backgrounds and all sections of society must have the opportunity to benefit from and thrive in higher education. If that's not happening, and it's not, passivity is not an option.

Of course, much is already being done. But there's much more to do.

The report itself makes two main recommendations. They're both addressed to higher education institutions and, as far as they go, they're both sensible.

The first is to ensure not only that higher education institutions have access to comprehensive information about their students - which by and large they do these days - but also that there are systems to ensure that this data is taken into account in their institutional planning processes. The point is that unless those who make policies know what effect they're having on students, they won't know what's working and, more importantly, what's going wrong. That principle applies across the board, but observing it can be especially helpful in identifying and remedying underachievement by any particular group.

The second is that higher education institutions should evaluate and design teaching, learning and assessment activities in the light of any disparities in achievement. That, too, sounds sensible to me. If something's going wrong, there's a need to find out why before trying to put it right.

These two key recommendations and the others in the report give institutions and the sector a very good basis for action. It is the ongoing work in this area that institutions undertake that will make the difference for students.

However, I do recognise that, as the report says, higher education institutions are not operating in isolation and the issues we have to tackle go much wider than higher education.

Similar differences in levels of achievement exist at school level. And I know my colleagues at the Department of Children, Schools and Families take them every bit as seriously as I do the achievement gap in higher education. A great deal of effort is going into initiatives to raise black and minority ethnic achievement at school level, and it's beginning to show results.

Figures released towards the end of last year showed that the gap between black and minority ethnic pupils and the national average had closed, and that black pupils had made the biggest improvement in last year's GCSE results.

In 2007, almost half of black Caribbean pupils achieved 5 or more A-C grades at GCSE, compared to less than a third five years before. The increase for black African pupils over the same period was fifteen percentage points.

Universities will reap the benefits of that improvement in due course.

Many problems - and not just among black and minority ethnic communities - also stem from paucity of aspiration. It was to help address this that, in 2001, the Government launched the Excellence Challenge initiative, which we nowadays know as Aimhigher.

Aimhigher aims to widen participation in higher education by raising the awareness, aspirations and attainment of young people from under-represented groups. It focuses not only on black and minority ethnic students, but also on young people from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds and people with disabilities. The programme comprises a wide range of activities to engage and motivate students who have the potential to enter higher education but are under-achieving, undecided or lacking in confidence. Most take place at a local level, which allows them to be tailored to the needs of specific communities, individuals and, crucially, their families.

In November, I was pleased to be able announce that Government funding for Aimhigher was guaranteed for the next spending period, which runs until 2011.

There's something else positive that we can all do, and that's to listen more carefully to the views and real-life experiences of students themselves. What concerns them? What factors do they feel affect their own progress? That's something that my colleagues at DIUS and I have been doing for the last few months during a programme of visits to universities as part of our Student Listening campaign. I am sure that issues affecting black and minority ethnic students will also figure prominently in the work of the new National Student Forum.

I know that many people in the system feel that not enough is being done to secure a real equal chance for black and minority ethnic people in higher education. And I know that many accuse the Government, the funding bodies, university authorities and others of complacency. Both the BME Education Network, whose creation I very much welcome, and the former Commission for Racial Equality have been prominent in this.

It would be conventional at this point for me to call on them to work with the Government and support the actions we are taking to make the system more equal. And indeed I do.

But I also call on them to do something else. I call on them to continue to press us all for faster and more radical change. To continue to point out that we don't yet have equality in our education system. And that equality of opportunity is what our country needs, economically, socially and ethically.

We can no longer afford to let talent go to waste. It was always wrong. Now it's both wrong and damaging to all our futures.

William Faulkner wrote that 'to live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or colour is like living in Alaska and being against snow'.

That's a good thought on which to end this talk, and to begin to look forward to the tasks that remain.

It only remains for me to thank you all for listening, to congratulate once again the Higher Education Academy and the Equality Challenge Unit on their report, and to hope that you find the rest of today productive as well as interesting.

Thank you.