Students have a right to expect contact time with lecturers and reasonable class sizes, says vice-chancellor
Universities should face financial penalties if their lecturers teach for only a few hours a week, or class sizes exceed an acceptable limit, a government review was told today.
Professor Paul Wellings, chair of the 1994 Group of 19 small research-intensive universities, recommended all students be given minimum expectations of contact hours with lecturers, class sizes and feedback.
Wellings, the vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, was giving evidence to a cross-party review into tuition fees, led by the former BP chief executive Lord Browne. The review will report this autumn.
Wellings said the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the organisation that gives public funds to universities, should issue penalties if institutions fail to live up to students' expectations.
"If a university offers x as a minimum standard, and then is always in breach of that, the funding council's yearly engagement with that university could begin by saying 'why are you not up to the pace, given you are making these commitments?'
"Ultimately, it could ask if public resources are being used to best effect. What is in the jar should be what is on the label."
The 1994 Group is calling for higher tuition fees – but for some limit to be imposed on what students are charged.
Meanwhile, in a speech at Birmingham University, the new universities minister, David Willetts, promised to respect higher education institutions' independence.
"We must respect the autonomy of universites. We can strengthen this by giving them the widest possible range of funding streams," he said.
He also said that a generation of young people had been let down by "governments messing around with vocational qualifications" and that teenagers were taking qualifications that were not valued by employers .