Lifelong Learning

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my colleague and noble friend, Lady Garden of Frognal, for securing this debate. I declare an interest as an academic employed at the University of Cambridge. It might sound a little surprising, having just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Rees, that somebody from an elite university must none the less declare an interest in lifelong learning, but even at the University of Cambridge there is the possibility to engage in lifelong learning. I will come back to that in a moment.

First, I pay tribute to my own mother. I am the sort of student who went straight through school, university, a master’s and then a doctorate; my mother left school at 16 with O-levels and always felt that she had not achieved her potential. When she got to 48, she stopped and thought, “What do I really want to do?”. At that time you needed to apply to university before you were 50 in order to get a grant, so she gave up work and went to university aged 48. I am not sure about your Lordships, but the last thing on earth I would want to do now is stop work and start an undergraduate degree. It would be far more nerve-wracking at 48 than it was at 18 for many of us. For those people who stop in their tracks during their working life and say, “Now is the time to go into higher or further education”, it is hugely important that those opportunities are there.

That was a personal anecdote, but there are so many people for whom university is not the right thing to do at 18. Yet, as the noble Lord, Lord Rees, indicated, there is a tendency now to assume that it is almost a rite of passage: people stay at school until they are 18 and then they go to university. They may or may not benefit from going to university at 18. Some people do; others do not. They may find that at 18 they want to go out and earn money, travel the world or do other things. The last thing on earth they should be doing is going to university just for the sake of saying, “I’m going to university”. That would be true whether or not they were incurring £9,000 a year or more of debt in tuition fees. It is a question of what is right for people at certain times in their lives.

For many people, going back in their 20s or 30s can be far more beneficial for their self-confidence and the skills they need to engage in the workforce. There are opportunities through further education colleges to gain the sorts of skills and re-entry qualifications that might enable people to do foundation courses and then go into higher education. It would be enormously beneficial if the Government would think about ways of encouraging people back into education at certain levels, rather than assuming that if you have not done it at 18, you have stopped.

I said I had an interest to declare. That is because my day job at the University of Cambridge for many years has been teaching master’s and undergraduate students who are at Cambridge full-time, but there are two other aspects that I think are of interest. One is a temporary thing that is worth mentioning, partly because it brings back the memory of Lord Garden. In Cambridge we have a link to the military and every year our master’s programme in international relations has five or six students who are funded by the MoD. One of our alumni was the late Lord Garden, who came as a mid-career member of the military. Each year we have people from the Army, the Navy, the Royal Air Force and the Marines. They add hugely to the quality of the courses because they bring a different perspective, and that is true of people coming back into higher education.

If you come to university at 18 and everyone in your cohort is 18, you have an understanding of learning and you carry on as a cohort, but people who come back into higher education at a later stage bring a range of life experiences that are beneficial to the whole group—and the lecturers. Again, if all you do is go to university and become a teacher in higher education, you do not necessarily have the breadth of understanding that is brought in by people who come in from the outside world. Teachers as well as other students can benefit from people coming in mid-career.

But that is a very niche thing. From the end of September, I will be teaching a part-time master’s programme, which begins to speak to the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Rees, was talking about. Our part-time master’s programme in international relations brings in people who may have come straight from university—or they may be high-flying bankers or businesspeople, or they might be people who have decided to take a career break or mothers who want to come back into education and then the workforce. The course, including admissions, is structured on the basis of taking into consideration not just GCSEs and A-levels but what people have been doing in the intervening five, 10 or 20 years. What you have done in the workplace or your other life experiences can be taken into consideration when it comes to admissions. For people who may not have thought about coming back into higher education—or who may have switched off—there is an opportunity to do that even at somewhere like the University of Cambridge.

In addition, there are courses run by the department for continuing education that allow people who have left education, and not thought about skills for many years, to come and do them at weekends. They get a sense of what it is like to study again and ask themselves whether someone at the age of 25, 35 or 55 could come back into education.

Those opportunities exist in many universities. Over the years, we have seen an expansion of university education right across the United Kingdom: Bedford, Chester and the Highlands, for example, all have universities. The opportunity for people in local communities to go in and work, so as to gain experience through some taster or access courses provided by universities, could be a way back into higher education. It could also be a way of learning skills which link back to the local employment environment.

Such things are hugely important, but for too long the focus has been on academic education that goes through to A-levels at 18 and straight to university. It is hugely important that we think of education as something that people can come back to at whatever stage is appropriate to them. From their personal experiences, what matters to them for their self-fulfilment? Also, what will matter in terms of jobs? Increasingly, people are not taking on jobs for life; they may need to change careers or reskill. We should think increasingly about how people can move through further and higher education, and other types of study, so that at every stage of life they are fulfilled and equipped to take on the sort of jobs that a 21st-century economy offers.

What opportunities does the Minister envisage for 21st-century lifelong learning? How far can the Government encourage people to think about going into further or higher education at a time which suits them? How does that fit into wider understandings of apprenticeships and the other training that the coalition Government, and this Government, have been dealing with very well over the last six years?