Social Mobility
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, perhaps I may raise the issue of the new universities and the large numbers of young people from working-class backgrounds who choose to do law and invest in their futures by going on to qualify as solicitors but do not get training contracts. There is an absolute dearth of these contracts for students from modern universities—the former polytechnics and all these new universities that the Government are so keen to create. Ordinary working-class families encourage their children to go into areas where they assume there will be jobs, but there are no training contracts because they all go to the privileged.
Higher Education and Research Bill
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(7 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Deech
I take it upon myself to answer the noble Lord. Amendment 469, when we get to it, deals with precisely that point.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, support the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, in his Amendment 65. There should be such a duty on the Secretary of State, although it makes me think about the duty on the Lord Chancellor to protect the independence of the judiciary. We do not see that being lived up to in the way that we would like, so just placing duties on Secretaries of State does not always deliver the outcomes that we want. But I certainly support the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake.
I want to give some comfort to my noble friend Lord Stevenson because I share many of the concerns expressed in his amendment. I am not in favour of for-profit universities: I should make that very clear. The ideal of the university is so precious and important to our nation. We should ask ourselves this question: where is a world-class university that is for-profit? The answer is that there is not one—not Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Cambridge.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
MIT has some provisions in its statutes that ensure that the money is fed back into MIT for research at the highest level. If that were part of the standards that we expect of the new private universities, one might feel rather differently. But my concern is that, if you speak to Americans in the field of education and higher education in particular, they look with envious eyes. Yes, they have grand universities, wonderful new liberal arts colleges and some great state universities, but they feel that in Britain we have, across the board, a much higher standard of university than can be seen in parts of the United States.
One thing that concerns them is that they went down this road themselves some 10 years ago. They let the business world bring all its entrepreneurship into the university world and by God, they are regretting it now. They have started having scandals. It has even reached our ears about Trump University, but only because Mr Trump’s name has of course become rather more familiar for other reasons. He was sued by students on the basis that the university set itself up claiming that it would deliver education in the world of business, but in fact the students were absolutely short-changed and exploited. Many of them were ordinary working folk who had thought that it would advance their careers, and in fact they were taken to the cleaners.
A pay-off is now taking place, but there are other cases in the pipeline. We should be very wary about where this will take us. There is the idea that universities could set up without any probationary period to show that they are acting in a proper way. My noble friend Lord Stevenson suggests in Amendment 2 that there should be a period of four years. I certainly agree that there should be a serious period of time to see whether these new institutions will be up to the standard we want this country to be recognised for.
I rather like the idea that “UK universities” will become the kitemark for institutions that follow the traditional pattern, but I am afraid that I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that the pursuit of modernity has to be approached with some caution. I say this particularly when remembering so well the New Labour years. I regret the mistake made by New Labour in its enthusiasm for markets. I have great enthusiasm for markets and I like all aspects of them in their right place, but I do not like their consolidating interests such as the utilities. I do not like markets where you do not get real competition, and I certainly do not like their entering areas of our public life like education and health, where the result is in fact a diminution of investment. So I am very concerned about what the Bill means.
I appreciate what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said earlier about his children and their friends going to universities where they felt rather short-changed because they did not get the teaching they expected. I am happy that the Government are seeking to pursue good teaching by creating the right kind of framework, and I have no objection to some of the things proposed in the Bill. However, I am concerned about autonomy and the potential for interference by Government and bodies that are basically a part of Government. I am also really concerned about this business of introducing into the sector profit-making universities which basically will be a milch cow for hedge funders and the like. I have no hesitation in saying that I am concerned about us going down this road, and I support the attempt by my noble friend Lord Stevenson to find a way through that will reconcile the mistake that Labour made when it said that profit-making universities could be brought into the system. I do not think we will relish that in the years to come.
Higher Education and Research Bill
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws ExcerptsTuesday 6th December 2016
(8 years ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I too declare some interests. I am the principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, I was formerly the president of SOAS and before that I was chancellor of Oxford Brookes University. They are very different institutions, but each is exceptional and each delivers education of high quality that is admired around the world.
This legislation is seriously mistimed in my view. Universities are still reeling from the Brexit vote and its implications for higher education in this country. The vote put in jeopardy the huge amount of research funding that British universities receive from the European Union for collaborative projects, and it is inevitably going to reduce the number of students coming from EU countries, who are going to review their position when they know that they will be charged fees at the higher, overseas rate.
It will also affect staffing. Many of our academic staff—in fact 15% of the UK’s university academics—are from the European Union. In places such as Oxford and Cambridge, there are the ancillary staff: the people involved in catering, hospitality, cleaning and all those other roles that make universities work. Many of them are filled by people who come from other parts of the European Union. In addition, the higher education world depends on hundreds of thousands of non-EU students who choose to study here, but the combination of Brexit and the recent rhetoric about international students having to leave immediately on graduating—the rather unpleasant way in which people have been spoken about and the racist language—means that people are feeling very unwanted, which is likely to have an effect on our intake. One of the biggest challenges facing our universities is repairing the damage caused by the perceived pulling up of the drawbridge to the rest of the world, and this Bill is not going to do anything to help the sector do that.
The Bill displays the application of a rabid and fanatical commitment to market ideology, which is being used to determine policy in a field where it should not be used at all. It is this classic thing where we have something that is world-class and which we can be proud of, yet somehow we are going to start visiting the market into it in ways that will be detrimental. We see that being done stealthily in the National Health Service, the justice system and the BBC—all of them aspects of British life that act as the mortar that holds the bricks together, that bind us as a society and that give us stature in the world. Yet somehow we are so laissez-faire with them.
This Bill will make it easier for new private providers to set up for-profit universities on the back of our taxpayer-funded system, receiving financial incentives from government that we taxpayers will pay for. They will be able to obtain degree-awarding powers, despite having little or no track record. Welcome to the Trump University phenomenon, which others have mentioned. I remind noble Lords of the huge compensation payouts recently received by hundreds of students who have been defrauded. I cannot emphasise enough that a robust gateway into the sector should be the highest priority for the establishment of any new university. I want to understand why the royal charter mechanism, which sets the bar high, is being jettisoned.
The declared intentions of the Bill are to prioritise student interests and teaching quality and to put an engine under the national research capacity. All those are things that I support, but it is much more likely that there will be a bad deal for students, because it will raise student fees. It will also be a hammer blow to our global reputation and will put too much power into the hands of politicians, despite the commitment that the Minister for Universities—whom I admire greatly and I see standing there—made when he said that the Haldane principle would be protected. I would like to see that said in the Bill. Those studying and working in this sector are understandably anxious, because the idea of profitability is going to take priority over quality education. They fear it will mean a lowering of the cost of teaching staff and the deprofessionalising of academics. We have seen that already with zero-hour contracts for young university teachers. They see it as a way of raising the fees in many of our institutions, and they are right to be anxious about that. I quote the American Federation of Teachers:
“Student debt at for-profit colleges is student debt on steroids: bigger and ‘badder’. Bigger because nearly all the tuition at for-profits comes directly from student loans. ‘Badder’ because many for-profits fail to provide high-quality education despite raking in billions in federal financial aid—failing their students and, ultimately, the taxpayers”.
I am afraid we are not learning the lesson there.
I remind everyone that I care about research in our universities and I am worried about the way in which we are going to see that dealt with. Our higher education system is one of our great national assets. We have to understand how important it is and guard it preciously. I am afraid the Bill falls far short in the eyes of many.
Care Leavers: Life Chances
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, my question is simple. How did we get to the place where we talk about “corporate parenting”? I ask this House to think about that notion. The idea that some children might not be able to stay with their own parents is one thing, but the idea that we talk about corporate parenting in a world like this—what does that mean?
Lord Nash
I apologise if the noble Baroness does not like the expression but the intention is to give these children someone who is in loco parentis and can fight their corner. It is about changing and spreading good practice, and making sure that the local authorities’ task in loco parentis does not burden them with a tick-box approach and extra duties.
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, support the amendments and thank my noble friend Lady Jones for placing them before the House. I want to make reference to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who, rather under a cloak of humility, did not mention a film which she recently made about the internet. It starts with a very disturbing episode about young men—15 year-old boys—watching pornography and the extent to which it was almost an addiction for them and how, increasingly, they wanted to see more explicit imagery. They then recognised in conversation that it had affected the way that they felt about girls and what they expected of girls sexually, and how it had contaminated relationships in the school. The film is something which everybody in this House should take a look at because we can often become rather dislocated from the realities of the lives of adolescents in our society because of our own age. This is really a debate about the quality of life and intimate relationships.
I am on the advisory committee to the campaign One Billion Rising. It is a campaign about sexual violence towards women and girls around the world. The horror of it is that if you do the kind of work that I do, in the courts or in international human rights, you see clearly the way in which women and girls are subjected to violence daily. I regret to say that this is not being diminished. In fact, the ways in which young men come to see women are being worsened and darkened by much of the information and imagery that they see on the internet.
I remind your Lordships about the Ofsted report from back in 2013, which has already been referred to. It pointed out to us that sex and relationship education required improvement in more than a third of our schools. In primary schools, that was because far too much emphasis was being placed on being nice to your friends— we want that—but very little was being said about the fact that more and more girls reach menstruation in primary schools. Puberty is coming earlier for our children and they were not being prepared for many of those physical and emotional changes in those later years of primary school. When they reached secondary school, they were then ill prepared for what they often faced in the company of boys—boys who were watching the kind of pornography that I have spoken about.
In secondary schools, the complaint made by Ofsted was that the mechanics of reproduction were being presented in a rather biological way to young people and that there was too little talk about relationships, sexuality, the influence of pornography or a real and proper understanding of healthy sexual relationships. As people who are coming to the further end of our lives, we all know that fulfilling emotional relationships and sexual relationships come out of mutual respect. However, those discussions are not taking place in our schools and boys are not treating girls with respect.
Last year, I was involved in some sessions at a conference at the Southbank Centre around International Women’s Day. There were young girls from schools there, who spoke about the pressure that there was on girls from boys to perform sexually and the extent to which the first introduction of girls to sex is in providing oral sex to boys. The girls might be only 12 or 13, and the boys only 14 and 15. This is the world in which we are living and I do not want us to cloak it in discussions about how this should be left to parents or particular religious groupings, because these boys and girls do not come from any particular grouping in our society. This is happening across all social divides, in all classes and in all religious groupings. Those pressures have to be a subject of concern to us. They lead to unhealthy relationships and, ultimately, often to violent and degrading relationships for women.
That is why this is on our agenda today and why I say to the women sitting, for example, on the Liberal Democrat Benches that this should not be a game to be talked about in political terms—about what party did what and when. This is a discussion about something serious happening in our society, where we really are facing a crisis. Women are facing a crisis. We want our girls to be treated with respect and we want boys to hear that. I, like others, had conversations with my children when they were in adolescence. I could not be present when my boys were at school where they would inevitably be shown imagery, as all boys were, and as many of your Lordships in this House who are men probably were when you were young. However, the nature of the imagery would come as a surprise to many of your Lordships. I had to warn my boys that they would have to make those choices themselves about what they looked at, but that the warning they had to take was that it would often contaminate and poison the kind of relationships that they might want to have with people who they loved in the fullness of time.
It is the putrefying fact of pornography and its availability now that we should be concerning ourselves with. There has to be proper discussion of this in our schools and it should be compulsory. It should not be covered with an excess of sensitivities to particular groupings because no grouping will be left out of this. I am calling on this House to support these amendments because of what it would mean to the sort of degradation which is taking place, particularly in attitudes to women. We have a responsibility in this House to do something about it and that is why I urge your Lordships to vote for the amendment.
Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)
My Lords, that was indeed a powerful speech to follow and I thank my noble friend for making it. I have a later amendment on personal, social and health education generally so I shall not say much now, but I want to pick up on something which the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said about leaving it to the teachers. If SRE or PSHE, or whatever you call it, is a subject then surely it is like any other subject. It is age-appropriate, structured and has good resources. I remember a parent once saying to me, “I find it difficult enough to talk to my Johnny about his maths homework, let alone about sexual relationships”. That is the position of many parents. Schools are put in the position of having to do that work as appropriately as they can.
I support the amendment put forward so powerfully by my noble friend Lady Jones and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. They talked mainly about relationships, as did my noble friend Lady Kennedy and other noble Lords. Relationships are the most powerful component of personal, social and health education. There is no reason why sexual relationship education should not have a separate amendment to make it compulsory. I shall also speak powerfully about the need for PSHE but I do not see a contradiction in having two amendments. SRE is absolutely essential in our schools. We are trying to protect and support children as they deserve.
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord Hope of Craighead
My Lords, I hope that I may be forgiven for adding one more lawyer’s speech to those which have already been given, and particularly that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, will forgive me for doing this. My reason for wanting to speak is that I presided over the case of In re J in the Supreme Court. I think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, expressed great concern that the issue was being brought before the courts on a hypothesis; I think I am right in saying that he said that it is not the business of the court to judge hypothetical cases. We took the view that we should decide the case on the material that we were given, but it is right to stress, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, stressed, that the situation we were presented with was highly artificial in order to test one particular point: whether the “sole fact”, as it is put in the noble and learned Lord’s amendment, was enough to cross the threshold.
I do not want to add anything to the clear description which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe, gave us as to what the case of In re J was all about, but I should like to say briefly why I join with the noble and learned Baroness in resisting the amendment. In my case, it is particularly on account of its wording, given the use of “sole fact” and the reference to “real possibility”. My objections can be summarised on three simple grounds: first, the amendment as it stands is wrong in principle; secondly, when you look at the structure of the statute it is unnecessary; and, thirdly, from the point of view of family life in circumstances that are quite likely to occur, it could indeed be damaging.
First, on the principle, I respectfully suggest that the golden rule is that a prediction of future harm has to be based on facts which have been proved on a balance of probabilities. It is only then that the state would be justified in removing a child from the family; in our democratic society, it is not enough that there should be suspicion. It has to be based on proof, so the state should be required to demonstrate that it has real and current concerns about the child’s safety before the child is taken into care. I appreciate that I am moving through all sorts of stages in making that proposition, but that is the background to the point I wish to make. I stress that if we look at the wording of Section 31(2) of the Children Act, which we do not have on the paper before us, when it states that a child may be taken into care only if,
“the child … is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm”,
it is using the language of proof, not of possibility. That was a point made by Lord Nicholls some 18 years ago in the case of In re H.
As I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, accepted, the amendment has the effect of lowering the threshold to some degree. It assumes that the state cannot prove that the carer in question was the perpetrator—that all it can prove is that she was a possible perpetrator—and that that bald fact is all that can be done. Even allowing for the point at the end of the proposed amendment, that this is a “real possibility” and something that cannot sensibly be ignored, I suggest that we are still below the threshold which Section 31(2) sets.
Secondly, on necessity, it is important to appreciate that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, was not saying that the problem which the amendment is addressing is rare in itself. She was not saying, I think, that it is rare for two people in the situation in which the carer in this case was placed to blame each other, so that the court is unable to decide between the two. What she was saying was extremely rare was the situation which the court was being presented with: that this was the sole fact. As she put it in her judgment, the issue hardly ever comes before the court at the threshold stage packaged in that way. The point which she was making, and which one can see by studying the structure of the Children Act, is that in Part V, and in particular in Section 47, powers are available to the local authority to make inquiries and, if it is thwarted, to take further steps which may ultimately lead to an emergency protection order being applied for and so on, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, explained to us.
In the case of In re J, there was a difference of view as to whether the sole fact which has been referred to was relevant at all. In my judgment, I used the words “relevant” and “sufficient” to try to explain the difference of view. Lord Wilson and Lord Sumption said that it was not relevant at all; the rest of us said that the fact of the possible perpetration was relevant and could not be ignored, but it is not enough and is not sufficient to cross the threshold and therefore something more must be found.
The problem with the amendment is that it has absolutely no context attached to it. The sole possibilities are stated in the amendment in the starkest possible terms. However, as soon as you start to examine a particular case—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, did when he talked about the number of injuries inflicted in that tragic period of three weeks—you are adding something that is not in the amendment. Indeed, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, said that the amendment is dealing with the situation of two possible perpetrators only, but it does not actually say that. It just says “a possible perpetrator”. As soon as you begin to make inquiries and search around, you are going to add things in which begin to build up a context which the social worker will be able to put together before the threshold stage has to be crossed when the case is brought into court. My objection to the amendment is really that: that it does not give you any context at all. Surely, that is taking the matter too far.
The third and final point is the risk of damage. Let us contemplate a situation which is not far removed from the situation of In re J, where the woman—and let us take the woman because it was the woman in In re J—is living in an abusive relationship. That was indeed the case here because she had separated from the previous partner because he was violent to her repeatedly and eventually she left him. All sorts of reasons can be imagined why she did not blame him. She may have been under pressure from him. She decides to create a new life for herself, as indeed she was doing in In re J, making a relationship with somebody who is absolutely blameless, who has children of his own already. There she is, now in family with him with a further child of their own.
My concern is that, if the amendment is passed in its stark form, it holds a threat over that relationship from the very beginning. There must be a question about, “Is it wise for me to enter into this relationship? Am I always going to be at risk of being before the court for a full threshold inquiry, simply because of what happened in the past?” The amendment pays no regard to the length of time that may have elapsed between the incident when the perpetration occurred and the moment at which the inquiry is being initiated. Without elaborating further, it is the starkness of the amendment, which lowers the threshold, that is a cause for real concern.
I wrote to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, with a suggestion about how one might approach the problem—because I do appreciate that there is a problem—by suggesting that, without using the word “sole”, one might be able to reassure social workers that this factor is relevant, which I believe firmly would be the case. If an amendment were to be framed which made that point and put it beyond doubt, then I would be entirely happy and I hope very much that it would reassure social workers. However, the amendment as phrased goes far too far and is too stark and for that reason I support the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, in resisting the amendment.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, oppose the amendment. I am glad that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, has mentioned the difficulty where there is background of abuse against the mother of the child. I have been involved in cases where that has been the situation. That can often be the reason why a woman at trial does not testify, or at the police station does not give an account, of what has happened at the hands of her abusive partner who has also abused her child.
I was glad to hear the discussion that has just taken place, but my concern is the narrowness of the drafting. Before any judgment was made, I would want to be sure that one was able to explore the context and the situation that the mother was in at the time. Very often, battered women are frozen into a situation where they do not act to protect their child, and we should be very careful about not letting someone have a chance to make a new life with a new partner in very different circumstances where they would be perfectly good as a parent.