Technical and Further Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Cohen of Pimlico and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st March 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. It probably is important that any education administrator should be familiar with further education because it is a very distinct type of education. I have a question that I would like the Minister to clarify. Clause 22(4), which it is now proposed to delete, indicates that the administrator must,

“carry out his or her functions in a way that achieves the best result for … the company’s creditors as a whole”,

yet Clause 14 says that the primary,

“objective of an education administration is to … avoid or minimise disruption to the studies of the … students”.

There seems to be a slight contradiction here regarding whether the education administrator is going to put students or creditors first. I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said, that perhaps the problem is with creditors: if they feel they are going to be last in line to get paid back, that might make more problems for colleges in getting funding. Can the Minister perhaps clarify the apparent contradiction between those two clauses?

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

I generally support the amendments. I started from a very particular consideration: I wondered whether I would be prepared to be an education administration person, because I think I am qualified to be so. The first thing I would want to know is where my financial backing was. The first thing I would ask for would be a guarantee that I would not end up personally liable, as under normal insolvency law I would be. I would need a back-up. The problem here, as with all public sector bodies—I have been through this before when we were thinking about what to do about a failing nationalised industry—is that if the Government are the guarantor or provider of last resort, the creditors will be perfectly happy but I am not quite certain how the education administrator gets out of it. I do not think I would be prepared to be an education administrator without an underwriting behind me. Mere appointment by a court would not do it for me. Have the Government thought about this bit?

Technical and Further Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Cohen of Pimlico and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, I know personally several young people who will probably have to pursue a course much less suited to them than an apprenticeship because their welfare-dependent families will otherwise lose too much in benefit. That seems wrong. The Bill is surely not entirely about getting us a skilled workforce; it also has a social purpose—rescuing children from unsuitable parts of the education system, places where they will never learn what they need, when they really need to be in a decent apprenticeship. Finance must not stand in the way, but stand in the way it will—nobody wants their mother to lose housing benefit—unless we can find a way around this issue, which I suggest is by treating people in apprenticeships as if they were in further education.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I wholly support what the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, while equally recognising that benefits are not directly a matter for the Department for Education.

There are anomalies in the way in which we treat young people. For those in approved education or approved training, child benefit continues until the child 20 years-old. Reading the list of what counts as that, it seems even more incongruous that apprenticeships are not included. For instance, it includes A-levels, Scottish Highers, NVQs up to level 3—which, of course, can be closely linked to apprenticeships—a place on the access to apprenticeships scheme, foundation apprenticeships for traineeships in Wales, the Employability Fund programmes and places on Training for Success. There is a whole raft of education and training courses on which young people continue to get their benefits, but they lose them for apprenticeships.

We know that only 10% of apprenticeships are taken up by young people on free school meals, which is surely an indicator that that is a disincentive, particularly for families, because they will lose out on additional benefits when a child goes into an apprenticeship. An apprenticeship salary on minimum wage may be barely over £3 an hour, so the loss of child benefit and tax credits may be a significant penalty for that family to bear.

The National Union of Students said:

“If apprenticeships are going to be the silver bullet to create a high-skilled economy for the future, the government has to go further than rhetoric and genuinely support apprentices financially to succeed”.


We urge the Minister, in the interests of joined-up government, to talk to his colleagues in the benefits department to see whether something can be done to ensure that disadvantaged young people do not feel that this is a major disincentive to taking up apprenticeships.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Cohen of Pimlico and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

Perhaps I may add to my earlier remarks. This proposed new clause is absolute anathema to those of us who are chancellors of substantial private universities set up under the 2004 legislation and regulated to the hilt. My organisation, BPP, has 20,000 students, we have 5,000 to 6,000 undergraduates and we make a profit. We charge £5,000 a year, which is very much less than £9,000 a year, for a three-year degree, and £6,000 a year for a two-year degree. We have part-time degrees all over the place and we offer degree-awarding apprenticeships. We are fairly specialised. We stick within the general field of law and business, although we have just branched out into nursing and medicine—so tomorrow the world.

However, none of that is envisaged in the clause produced by my noble friend Lord Stevenson. I cannot believe that this House intends to outlaw this kind of university. Indeed, you can hardly do so because BPP was granted university status in 2013 after four heavy-duty years of regulation—and we are still heavily regulated, which we do not mind at all.

We would all be perfectly happy with the autonomy clause. For BPP, autonomy is guaranteed by a very tough academic council. You try telling the academic council what to do. That is just impossible—and occasionally it frustrates things that the management would like to do.

Therefore, we really do have to rethink this and, as my noble friend said, bottom out what we mean by “for-profit universities”. I cannot believe that BPP is the only organisation that would be affected by this proposal, yet it is the only one of any size that I can describe. Further on in the debate I will want to emphasise that we went through four years of heavy-duty regulation to get there. To be honest, that is about what it took to convert us from a first-class, long-established training establishment to something that had proper academic qualifications and worked as a university. Therefore, I suggest that we look very carefully at probationary degree-awarding powers. I feel equally strongly about the idea of outlawing private sector universities. There would be one set of things called UK universities, which would be the gold standard, and then there would be the rest of us. What would that say about the 2004 legislation—or indeed about the future of universities in this country? We will have to think about this rather carefully.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment on the basis that it seemed to contain some things that were very worthy of discussion. As we have heard, this is obviously a rather controversial area, but it gives us another chance to look closely at what we understand by universities and at what characteristics in them we value.

There is much to support the ongoing role of the Privy Council in the establishment of universities, providing as it does impartiality, expertise and universal standing in the awarding of royal charters. This clause would also allow for Acts of Parliament—but, again, it is open to debate as to whether there should be other sources of authority. There is a general anxiety that there should be authoritative powers to set up new universities because there is a concern that the Bill as it stands seems to give a fairly free hand for new universities to be set up without necessarily the standards that we have all grown accustomed to.

The other amendments in this group to which I have added my name are all to do with autonomy, which we discussed at great length in the debate on Amendment 1. The success of universities depends on their ability to take their own decisions, so that they can be flexible and responsible to the environment in which they are working and decide for themselves on courses, staffing and admissions. The Bill as drafted includes a number of areas where a future regime could seek to intervene in matters that are for individual institutions. Autonomy has been recognised as providing a key competitive advantage and, indeed, has been identified as a critical factor in making the UK the top performer in the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending in tertiary education. These amendments would enshrine university autonomy in the Bill.

We welcome the Government’s amendment that states:

“Guidance framed by reference to a particular course of study must not guide the OfS to perform a function in a way which prohibits or requires the provision of a particular course of study”.

This addresses concerns about the Government directing individual institutions on which courses they can open or close. However, autonomy is such a fundamental principle of the UK higher education system that we would want the Bill to go further. The amendments in this group enshrine that.