Education: Student Loans

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 3rd June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, the Government are investigating ways of making repayments from overseas easier and of clamping down on those who evade their responsibilities, and we will introduce measures as soon as we can. It might be worth pointing out that of the total amounts of student loans, only 3% to 4% go to EU students.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that student loans in the USA, publicly subsidised but largely unregulated, are a means for the enrichment of banks and poor-quality higher education institutions that are permitted to make profits, whereas in the United Kingdom, the student loans system—designed by the Government and administered by the Student Loans Company, which the Government control—has, notwithstanding some flaws, been a source of fairness for society as a whole?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

Yes indeed, my Lords, and I can only be grateful that I am not standing here answering on behalf of the United States’ system—because I do not have a brief about that. The system was set up to be as fair as possible to the students whom we wish to encourage to go into higher education if they have the potential and aspiration to do it.

Visas: Student Visa Policy

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Howarth of Newport

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, it is a pleasure for me today to follow the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, as it was when he was Secretary of State for Education and I was his Higher Education Minister. Our vision then for higher education, as it remains now, is of a UK universities system that is internationalist and open to ideas, people and collaborations from across the world, with a diversified student body and diversified sources of finance and less dependence on the taxpayer. That remains the vision of Ministers at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, but it is apparently not the vision of the Home Office.

The message that comes from government is confused but is interpreted across the world as being that international students are no longer welcome in Britain. As a result, applications are down, particularly among postgraduate students, which is a great worry, and the share of the market in international students achieved by our universities is stagnant when it could be so strong. The best and the brightest, whom the Prime Minister wishes to encourage, are those who can most easily go elsewhere.

Why does the Home Office have a veto over BIS? The Home Office is pursuing in blinkers an inappropriate political pledge at the cost of damaging universities, our economy, our culture and our influence across the world. This is nothing to do with stemming the flow into this country of poorly skilled migrants, which is indeed a threat to employment and public services. It is nothing to do with dealing with the rackets at bogus colleges. There is a systemic failure in government.

Who are staff at the UK Border Agency to second-guess universities as to whom it is appropriate to admit? I fear that staff at the UK Border Agency are not themselves the brightest and the best. I hope that the Minister has had the opportunity to read the evidence given to us by Million+ on behalf of Modern Universities. It is a story of ever changing regulations, constant threats to universities and an absence of guiding principles and a proper code of conduct. There are reports of staff monitoring universities who are ignorant and sometimes in breach of the law and who behave with a rudeness and an incompetence that are entirely unacceptable. The tone of the Home Office and the UKBA in this area has been deplorable.

The Home Secretary has said that there should be an extra 100,000 out-of-country interviews. How is she to ensure that the agencies that carry out these interviews will be competent and not corrupt? One can only fear that this is part of a plan to reduce drastically the number of visas granted in the run-up to the general election.

It is right therefore, as the noble Lord and five Select Committees have said, that these statistics should be disaggregated while complying with the UN requirements so that university-sponsored students are taken out of the net target for migration. In that—

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, there are only three minutes each. People need to sit down the minute the clock hits three. I am afraid that there is no leeway.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I will simply say then that universities, business, cultural institutions and politicians of all parties are asking the Home Office to listen to what is being said and to change its approach. I very much hope that the Minister will be willing to do so today.

Education: School Leavers

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

Indeed, it is vital that young people come out of school with the soft skills which the noble Lord has highlighted. As far as parenting skills and others are concerned, there are of course different programmes, including the PSHE programme which so many schools are following. How schools address these matters specifically is for each school to determine locally.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, does the noble Baroness accept that if pupils are to leave schools rounded, they will have studied and practised the arts within the reformed curriculum? Imaginative capacities are increasingly important, both for the employability of individuals and for the competitiveness of businesses.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

Of course the arts are of particular importance. We touched on this in Questions and debates earlier this week. The Government fully support this, and there are various funding streams going into support of the arts. The issue seems to be that they do not appear in the EBacc, but of course not all schools do the EBacc. In any event, there will always be 20% to 30% of the timetable for such things as creative subjects, which are so vital to individuals and the country.

Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I would like to speak in support of Amendment 111A. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Whitaker on tabling it and congratulate the Committee on reaching it. I understand that it has been a long and winding road, and I hope that the weary travellers will not mind me joining them for this short step along their great trek.

My noble friend’s amendment changes the requirements to be met when a new school is proposed, so that the criteria are set out,

“which the design of the school must meet, following best practice as prescribed by the Secretary of State”.

I understand the Government’s desire to minimise the barriers to the creation of new schools, the introduction of greater variety in the school system and the liberation of new energies—and, of course, to minimise bureaucracy—but it would be a mistake to cut corners on planning and design. They go together, and it has been one of the achievements of your Lordships' House in recent years to amend the town and country planning system to require planners to take account of and have regard to the importance of good design. The Secretary of State’s outbursts against the architects associated with Building Schools for the Future programme were unwarranted and inappropriate. I declare my interest as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and chair of the Associate Parliamentary Group on Architecture and Planning.

I am very happy that it appears that a truce has now broken out between the Secretary of State and the RIBA. I was pleased to read in the 8 July edition of Building Design, in the report by the president of the RIBA, Ruth Reed, that she said that the Secretary of State had acknowledged that the James review was simplistic. Noble Lords will recall that the James review said that school design should be standardised to save money. She reported that the Secretary of State is,

“keen to get good value for money for school buildings. He is aware design matters and he did recognise that you have to invest in design … He certainly didn’t come across as someone who doesn’t like good design”.

It is encouraging to have that confirmation.

I entirely believe that Ministers want good design in school buildings. The question is how that good design can be assured or how we can do as much as possible to assure good design, particularly under the provisions of this legislation. If I may also quote from the circular that was sent out to members of the RIBA immediately after the meeting with the Secretary of State, we were told that one of the key outcomes of the meeting was an agreement to work with the Department for Education and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to consider how to achieve the best value from good school design, particularly in mapping out scenarios for the future delivery of schools. Ruth Reed said this was a productive meeting. She said:

“We have agreed to assist in identifying the constraints to achieving well designed schools including those in procurement and planning. Well designed schools”—

she observed—

“will always be value for money because they deliver optimum conditions for learning which last for decades to come.”

It would be helpful if the Minister would comment on the meeting between the president of the RIBA and the Secretary of State for Education, as well as with Mr Penrose, the Minister at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport with responsibility for architecture, if he would explain how his department intends to develop this work with the RIBA, whether he sees implications for this legislation and whether he thinks there may be a case for introducing an amendment to strengthen the commitments that the Government make in this legislation to the good design of school buildings.

Hitherto, I have lacked confidence that that would be the case. I understand that the department is consulting about making change of use easier, so that, for example, offices might be converted into new schools under permitted development rights. I seek reassurance from the Minister on that point. At face value it would appear that new schools might be opened in any old building. Perhaps he would tell us what guarantees that basic standards of health and safety, and of accessibility, can be assured by the Government.

More importantly, if “anything goes” in school design, there is a risk that the quality of education will suffer. Good design, as my noble friend said, and as the president of the RIBA also said, helps to create an environment that supports learning; is stimulating in the best sense; helps to restrain and minimise bad behaviour, ill discipline and vandalism; and creates the flexibility needed to accommodate different sorts of teaching groups and changes in the curriculum.

My noble friend’s Amendment 116A is to be debated in a later group, but she is right to stress the desirability of Ofsted reporting, among other matters, on the effectiveness of buildings and their design on the education provided in them. Design is only one of the factors that make for good education. Outstanding teachers teaching bright and motivated children will create good education in almost any circumstances. An extreme case that I am aware of was in Albania, after the fall of the Hoxha regime, when the schools were derelict shacks. There was no glass in the windows and there were no pencils for the children to write with. Yet when Albanian children visited my then constituency of Stratford-upon-Avon, I strongly suspect they had a better knowledge of Shakespeare than the children being educated in schools in Stratford-upon-Avon. They definitely had a better knowledge of Byron.

We have seen in the English public schools that good teachers teaching well-motivated pupils are able to provide first-class education in conditions of Hogarthian squalor. Good design is not more important than good teaching. Good design supports good teaching. Policy and the legislative framework should be such that the whole system and the standards set by the Government support the generality of teachers and pupils, in particular those who work in disadvantaged communities. Of course we should share experience. The system should support school leaders to benefit from the experience of design that has often been hard won in other places.

The report in the Times today of the Government’s announcement yesterday does little to encourage me to have confidence that we are going to see an insistence on good design in the new generation of schools that are to be built. One must, of course, welcome the announcement of funding for the rebuilding of schools and the building of new schools, but we are advised that this programme will be funded through public/private partnerships. We have seen in public/private partnership and PFI-funded school developments some environment and architectural atrocities, so I hope the Minister will be able to reassure us.

It is very difficult working through all the complexities of the contractual process of PFI to build in a requirement for good design. Because of this complexity, I understand that a handful of large contractors will bid for contracts and that contracts will be negotiated with the department or with the new funding agency for schools. I am worried about that because it seems to me that kind of system will not sufficiently provide for local factors to be taken into account. It is the sensitive and expert observation of local needs that is so often the key to good design, so I hope the Minister will be able to explain that the system that the Government are introducing will indeed provide assurances that design factors will have the prominence and the emphasis that they ought to have.

More broadly, I think the Government should think very carefully about the signal that they send about the importance and standing of education and schools if the policy is really that anything goes in school design. If grottily designed schools are to be permitted, the Government seem to be saying that grotty education is okay. That is absurd because that is not what the Government mean at all.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I apologise for intervening on the noble Lord. He is making a fascinating speech, but it is trespassing on being a Second Reading speech rather than concentrating on the amendments in front of us. I think the Committee would be grateful if the noble Lord would draw his remarks to a conclusion on the amendment.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I understand the noble Baroness is very delicately hinting to me that I am going on too long. I think that my remarks have been very closely focused on the amendment, but I will rather quickly wind them up. I think the noble Baroness will agree that it is closely relevant to the amendment for me to note that the Bill would increase the power of the Secretary of State to make land available for free schools. Will she say whether that means that the Secretary of State can by fiat bypass the role of the local planning authority? Planning expresses the claims of the whole local community, not just of a particular group, however enthusiastic it might be. The system should not be rigged to support the group proposing free schools: the sponsors and the particular parents of children of school age who are keen to see the school. A school is a very important presence in an area. Its presence affects everyone; it affects the movement of traffic and makes demands on infrastructure. Sites for new schools should be appropriate, and that appropriateness should be determined by local communities. There are complex judgments to be made, and they ought to be informed by local knowledge and concern for all the legitimate issues within the community.

I support the thrust of my noble friend’s amendment. My only reservation is that it seems to be a charter for prescriptiveness by the Secretary of State, and I would rather that she had couched her amendment in the terms that we have built into existing planning law and that the Bill should simply require that all those concerned with the promotion of the development of a new school should have regard for the importance of good design. Perhaps we can come back to it on Report in something like those terms.