Universities: Financial Sustainability

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government recognise the value of international students and are very proud of our international education strategy and what it has achieved. However, the Home Secretary commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee to write a report, which it published very recently, and the Government are considering its recommendations with care.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

In light of the recent report from the Migration Advisory Committee—itself no pushover—can my noble friend reassure us that the Government will allow recent changes to postgraduate visas to work through the system before they make further changes, such as severely restricting graduate visas to particular subjects or universities, either of which could severely impact the already precarious financial status of some of our universities?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I recognise my noble friend’s concerns. We are committed to retaining the prestige and brand of UK higher education, which has been so successful in attracting international students. I repeat that the Government are reflecting on the findings of the MAC report. However, I point out that it found no widespread abuses of the system but pointed to specific concerns, including the use of recruitment agents.

Schools: Gender-questioning Children

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister join me in condemning Mermaids’ practice of going into primary school reception classes and suggesting to four year-olds—including my own granddaughter, in a rural Suffolk primary school—that if they wish to, they can change their gender at any stage? This is inappropriate for four year-olds.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree with my noble friend. Again, the guidance is clear that schools should not agree to support any degree of social transition for a primary school child unless it is explicitly required to safeguard and promote their welfare.

Universities: Nuclear Energy Sector Skills

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am aware, as are the Government more broadly, of the shortages and pressures that the noble Lord rightly refers to; he understands that those are global pressures as well as domestic ones. I will write to him on the specific project in Bangor, if I may. More broadly, the Government are absolutely committed to trying to build this workforce and provide skills; obviously, examples such as those he gave sound important in that.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister will doubtless be aware of the many good examples of apprenticeship schemes serving both the fusion and fission industries, such as the UKAEA’s Oxfordshire Advanced Skills centre, Urenco at Capenhurst, Rolls-Royce in Derby and the Nuclear AMRC in Rotherham. Urenco also sponsors departments at Manchester University and plans to do so at Bangor University. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, rightly said, there is a worldwide skills shortage, with 180,000 job shortages predicted in the UK alone. All these schemes together will not touch the sides in meeting the industry’s requirements. What more can the Government do to encourage young people and teachers to gain the skills necessary to embark on highly rewarding careers in this most exciting of industries?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend makes a good point. I share her appreciation for the organisations that she named. We are investing £50 million over the next two years to pilot ways in which to increase the number of apprenticeships in engineering and other key growth sectors, as well as to address barriers to entry into these professions. We will set out more detail on that in the new year, which will, I hope, go some way to addressing her concerns.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Review

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Watson has had a good deal more time to look in detail at this Green Paper than I have, but I look forward to some conversations about it with the Minister. My question follows rather well from those of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness opposite. One issue about early intervention is that there is a paucity, not to say an absence, of the study of child development in the initial stages of teacher training and education. Frankly, if teachers are not exposed to that in their period of training, they will be ill equipped to recognise these difficulties early in their career. I implore the Minister to have a little look at initial teacher training and education, just to make sure that everything that we are saying is consistent, so we really can address the needs of all children.

Having said, that, we have had two Statements on education in two days—it is great, is it not—and there is a great deal to welcome in this Green Paper. However, we must all acknowledge that there is much more to do for children and young people with special needs and disabilities. We all, I hope, acknowledge that the challenges are not new. As it says in the Green Paper, the pandemic has exposed and exacerbated pre-existing difficulties. Some of us in this Chamber who have been teachers will know, and will have been having an uphill struggle in saying, that there is enormous unmet need and enormous challenges. However, the Green Paper also helpfully says, on page 13, that

“We need a system where decision-making is based on the needs of children and young people, not on location”.


That is absolutely right. If a child has a need, it should be met.

It may be that the standardisation of the education and healthcare plan will help with that, and it may also help, as I think it suggests in the Green Paper, with some elements of reducing staff workload. But however much we have the ambition, the lived reality for children and young people has to be, as the book says, that they get the right support at the right time, so I applaud that.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Perhaps the noble Baroness could come to her question.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

Is the Minister absolutely confident that there will be sufficient funding going forward? I have one specific question. Why is it that the special schools with alternative provisions will be free schools, when it is very clear that local authorities will have a significant role to play in the delivery of these improvements? Why can they not be commissioners of providers of schools?

Apprenticeships

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I refer the noble Baroness partly to my earlier answer where I spoke about the surveys that we are carrying out with schools. For example, the Compass data encourage seven meaningful encounters with employers. The apprenticeship programme is very much part of that.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, we should focus on the quality as well as the quantity of apprenticeships. With this in mind, will my noble friend join me in congratulating the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which in partnership with the Science and Technology Facilities Council is building a new training centre at Culham that will provide up to 150 high-quality apprenticeships in engineering, science and technology?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I agree. It is interesting to note that, for example, a level 2 apprenticeship can boost earnings by 11% and a level 3 apprenticeship by 16%, so these are career-changing opportunities.

Schools: Music Education

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood both on initiating this well-timed debate and on his thoughtful, wide-ranging and rightly hard-hitting opening speech. I too was fortunate at school to be able to experiment with five different instruments, including the French horn, continuing with two into my adult life. I am currently struggling with grade 4 on the harp.

It is now six years since the Department for Education conducted a review of music education, which led to the creation of music education hubs under the coalition’s national plan for education, and seven years since the introduction of the EBacc in 2011. Therefore, we can now analyse the effects of the change in focus and delivery of education and its impact, both on the musical life in our schools and on our musical heritage.

As many noble Lords have mentioned, research by the University of Sussex supports the claim that the introduction of the EBacc has led to a decline in pupils studying arts subjects in general and music in particular. There has been a 15.1% fall since 2016, and a fall of 7.4% in the past year alone. What a waste of potential. Although it is notoriously difficult to prove causality in the arts, numerous studies show a strong correlation between high-quality, sustained music education and increased cognitive development, academic attainment and spatial awareness in children, and the development of their fine and gross motor skills. There is compelling evidence that musical training sharpens the brain’s early encoding of sound, leading to enhanced performance on a whole range of listening and aural processing skills. Furthermore, children from low-income families who take part in arts activities at school are three times more likely to get a degree, twice as likely to volunteer and 20% more likely to vote as young adults. In an age in which the digital world offers instant gratification, the ability to appreciate the huge rewards delivered by incremental progress through consistent music practice has to be a more worthwhile endeavour than collecting skins and weaponry in the obsessional computer game “Fortnite”.

Sadly, it is not just the provision of music education that is in decline; it is also the quality of that provision. There have been poor levels of investment in teacher training for musicians for years—talented musicians do not automatically make inspirational teachers. Teachers delivering whole-class ensemble tuition programmes—a government strategy for first access to music tuition at primary school, originally termed “wider opportunities” —rarely have high-quality teacher training. This may explain the very low continuation rates from first access to sustained tuition, although costs will also be a factor.

It is not all doom and gloom, however, and I am encouraged to hear, both from my noble friend Lord Lexden and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, about music partnerships growing between independent and state schools. At the most local level, the charity London Music Masters, with which I have long been associated, is a community development programme operating across the three London boroughs of Lambeth, Westminster and Islington, providing free musicianship, violin and cello lessons for 1,500 children each week. The charity targets socioeconomically disadvantaged areas with the objective of increasing the ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic diversity within the classical musical industry.

There are other pockets of excellence. Newham’s Every Child a Musician initiative delivers free weekly music lessons in small classes to 12,000 children in the year groups 3, 4, 5 and 6, and each child has a free musical instrument to keep and free entry to all music exams. Newham has fully funded this project since 2011 at a cost this year of almost £2 million.

From central government, the Arts Council and Department of Education co-invest £925,000 a year on a project called In Harmony, which runs programmes in Liverpool and Lambeth, delivering musical education to 6,700 pupils across 42 schools.

Musical outcomes from charities such as London Music Masters suggest that with the right support and training, musicians can teach whole classes of students and achieve excellent outcomes. Eighteen per cent of LMM students achieve grade 5 by the end of primary school, compared with a national average of only 2%. It is therefore particularly exciting to learn that this small but inspirational charity is also developing a national teacher training programme based on a decade of practical experience. This could bring a sea change in the quality of teacher training across the sector.

I join the many other voices in this debate in urging the Government to reconsider the strictures of the EBacc. I ask my noble friend the Minister what steps the Government and the Arts Council can take to reverse the catastrophic decline in music education, and how they will encourage investment in the training of musicians to provide more efficient whole-class teaching of the highest quality. We owe it to the next generation to ensure that they enjoy a holistic education that not only equips them well for the next stage of their academic learning but provides them with the knowledge, skills and problem-solving abilities that can play such a vital role in their development.

Educational Attainment: Boys

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lingfield for introducing this important debate and to all noble Lords for allowing me to speak briefly in this gap.

My knowledge of this area comes from five years’ teaching boys and young men basic literacy skills in a young offender institution as part of a voluntary one-to-one teaching scheme. Not many children who leave education without educational attainment, let alone qualifications, will pursue a life leading to a custodial sentence, but it is true that many boys in young offender institutions have little functional literacy or, indeed, numeracy skills. This represents a real cost to society, not to mention untold misery for victims, their families and indeed the boys themselves.

Over five years, I taught a number of boys individually, which is, perhaps, the only way of making real progress in the prison environment. Of course, from my point of view, teaching was made immeasurably easier once issues of crowd control were removed. It was voluntary on both sides. Many had been labelled dyslexic, although I rarely saw any evidence of this and, using synthetic phonics and various online programmes, most made rapid progress. Almost without exception, they wanted to learn—but privately, away from mocking eyes of some of their peers, as though learning were something shameful. Almost universally, their lack of attainment in mainstream school could be attributed to truancy from an early age together with a lack of discipline at home. It is true that many admitted—almost all, in my experience—to having no resident father, and the person to whom the boys afforded the most respect was their nan or grandmother.

We should ponder not only why boys underperform girls but how to encourage boys at the earliest stage in their education that learning is useful, fun and will afford skills that will enable them to lead more fulfilling lives than they would do otherwise. Surely, the most significant factor in that would be the quality of teaching staff and the teaching staff’s training. I know that noble Lords will agree that the quality of teachers and their training has been improved through initiatives such as Teach First.

Even more can be achieved for boys in other ways, perhaps through engagement with sport and the valuable lesson that it gives beyond the skills of the game. I am also aware of various mentoring schemes in London boroughs for boys who lack encouragement at home. Some of these younger mentors have provided valuable role models. One of the most humbling lessons that I learnt in my time behind their bars was how much these supposedly tough young men valued someone—anyone—taking time with them individually, teaching them a skill that they were ashamed not to have mastered already and then showing a real, personal and non-judgmental interest in their progress.