Higher Education (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(6 months ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Bolton
That this House takes note of the Report from the Industry and Regulators Committee Must do better: the Office for Students and the looming crisis facing higher education (2nd Report, Session 2022-23, HL Paper 246).
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the members of the committee, who put so much work into compiling this report, and our staff, who were extremely helpful. The noble Lord, Lord Hollick, was the chair of the committee when we started this report in March last year, but we also had a lot of help from our special adviser, Mike Ratcliffe, and from the committee staff of Dom Walsh, Dominic Cooper and Itumeleng Osupeng. I should also mention Alec Brand.
As I say, we started our inquiry into the OfS and higher education in March 2023, a time when we felt that the higher education sector was facing a whole raft of challenges. They have intensified since then, and I think we were right to decide that this should be our priority at that time. The challenges that higher education is facing pre-date but were exacerbated by issues such as Covid. It is important to remember that some of these are very long-standing challenges that higher education has been trying to deal with for quite some time. We had the raft of difficulties, and we have had issues such as the loss of EU research funding that have challenged universities even further. There have, of course, been industrial disputes, which have not helped, but I think that all the issues such as inflation, the cost of living and the lack of funding have made industrial action more likely.
The committee’s overarching finding was that the Office for Students was performing poorly; it is important to make that basic point. We did not choose our title casually—in fact, we had many alternatives that could have been a bit more colourful, shall we say. We said it “Must do better” because this is an important institution that regulates a very important sector of the British economy, and for it to be performing poorly is extremely important and a very real problem for us all. I think that this report is one of the strongest of recent House of Lords committee reports, and therefore should be taken seriously.
The name of this organisation, the Office for Students, was chosen deliberately by the Government to imply that it would put the interests of students before the interests of providers, yet our investigations found that neither students nor providers of higher education have confidence in the OfS. There were poor relations with both providers and students, and a very clear perception of a lack of independence of the OfS from government.
I will talk about several of our conclusions; I know that colleagues will venture more widely. My overriding concern as we went through this inquiry was the complacency on the part of the OfS about what we described as “the looming crisis” in higher education. There is more discussion of it now—just recently we saw some alarming figures—but even when we were taking evidence more than a year ago, we could identify severe difficulties in the whole sector, not just the odd institution.
The freezing of tuition fees for so long meant that many universities were in real difficulty. The Russell group has suggested that its universities are losing £4,000 for every domestic student. Perhaps not surprisingly, that has pushed universities to become increasingly dependent on cross-subsidisation from international and postgraduate students, whose fees are not capped. That has been a feature for many universities, not just one or two. On the other hand, recent statements and comments from Government Ministers that there should be a reduction in the number of international students are causing real concern and may already be impacting international applications.
We raised alarms about the information we had on the financial challenges but, at the time, the OfS gave very general assurances about the health of the sector and did not share our concern about the direction in which things were going. However, in its most recent financial sustainability report, published just last week, the Office for Students says that 40% of HE institutions are expected to be in deficit this year. That is after many institutions have made severe efficiency savings— or cuts, as they are probably better called. In many institutions there is little leeway for further cuts without significant consequences, and this could affect the quality of the education they offer.
I have a couple of specific questions for the Minister. What action are the Government taking in relation to the looming—indeed, current—crisis facing the HE sector? What is the Government’s attitude to international student recruitment? Clarity on that point would be very helpful all round. I wonder whether the Government really understand the danger of institutions collapsing and/or a decline in the quality of the education provided.
One of my main memories of the evidence we received was that of a vice-chancellor who said that, were his institution to see financial problems looming, he would not talk to the OfS about possible solutions and long-term viability because he thought that its attitude would not be supportive but combative, and that it would look for problems and criticisms of the institution. It is really worrying that the reputation of the OfS is so bad within the sector.
I have heard anecdotally from some in higher education that our report has prompted some change in tone and that the OfS is sometimes using different language in its visits and contacts. If that is the case, it proves that the House of Lords can have a positive impact.
I said earlier that the name OfS was deliberately chosen to imply that it was on the side of students. The committee found that, despite its name, it was unclear how the OfS defines student interests. Indeed, it was said that there was a suspicion that the term was used as a smokescreen for the political priorities of the Minister. We were given the example of free speech, which we heard was not a priority concern of students. We took direct evidence from students on the concerns about OfS engagement. We particularly heard allegations that the OfS issued veiled threats over the future of its student panel when individual students on it were making their concerns known. The OfS responded to our criticism and said that it would expand its plans for a review of its approach to student engagement. That is to be welcomed, as is the fact that it will take up our recommendation to report annually on student engagement. Does the Minister have any information about when we might see a report on that?
There is another area of real concern and puzzlement. Why has there been such a breakdown in the relationship between the Office for Students and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education? The QAA, which assessed quality and standards until 2023, was widely accepted as a significant and independent body doing a very good job. Things are now being changed, and this is possibly going to result in a move away from European standards. This in turn could damage the international reputation of some of our universities, which have such a high reputation historically. The Minister needs to clarify this because I am not sure that the OfS has the capacity to assess the quality of all HE institutions. The OfS has completed only eight such studies and reports so far. Can it do it for the entire sector and in a timely way? Will it be as professional, comprehensive and reassuring as the system we had with the QAA? What happens there really matters.
Other concerns that we had were about the burden of regulatory compliance. We needed some clarity on the OfS’s priorities. UUK says that in each university 17.6 staff, on average, are involved in compliance. Those people are having to deal with the bureaucracy that the Government often say they wish to reduce. It would be good if the Minister could comment.
I must also say a word about political interference. There is clearly a concept throughout higher education that the OfS is there to do the wishes of the Government, rather than act as a totally independent body. I am sure that the Minister is well aware of the criticisms that have been made—the idea that if there is a headline in the Daily Mail, the Minister will tell the OfS to go hard on that particular issue. That is the perception, and it rings true in many respects. I must also mention other issues because the perception of interference is not helped by the fact that the chairman of the OfS takes the Conservative Whip in this House. The all-party committee as a whole thought that anybody in such a significant role should not be taking any party Whip when it came to activities within Parliament.
Our report has shed light on the very widespread concerns that exist. The challenges in HE are intensifying and are very real indeed. The OfS is now beginning to recognise that some of the issues we raise are pertinent and need attention, but the challenges facing the sector are very significant. I have long believed, and have said for many years, that pre-legislative scrutiny is helpful to Parliament and to government in getting things right. What we have never done is sufficient post-legislative scrutiny; I have now suggested to our committee that we should do post-report scrutiny to see whether our committee’s report has had a real impact and made a difference. I think it is beginning to, but the committee will return to this issue to try to make sure that the OfS improves its performance.
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, I think Members here will be pleased that I intend to be brief and not detain them too much longer. It has been a very wide-ranging debate and, as the Minister has acknowledged, we have a high level of expertise in the Room, which has been very useful and constructive. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, will acknowledge that the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, prove that the committee was not captured by providers. I reassure him that we took evidence from Michael Barber and Nicola Dandridge, and have followed through on all the written evidence. The weight of evidence that we had backs up what our report actually said. It was not a subject that we entered into lightly, nor did we with the criticisms.
I wish that we had more time, because I would very much like to have discussed further with the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, some of the phrases that he used, such as “mass HE sector” and “poor-quality student experience”. Terms like that are bandied around far too freely, when in fact the vast majority of students get a very good experience and a worthwhile qualification at the end of it.
In fact, if we are talking about how we judge those qualifications, I chaired the council of the University of Bradford for several years and I was always frustrated because very often the quality is measured by how much graduates earn once they leave the courses. In Bradford, we wanted our graduates to stay in Bradford and the region and help to raise that region, yet, if you look at the earning potential in Yorkshire compared with London, we were always going to be at a disadvantage, which did not actually reflect the value added. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Norton, would say the same for Hull.
No one who gave us evidence, no one we spoke to and no one on the committee is against regulation. Everybody knows that if public money is involved, there have to be elements of accountability. The question is: what is the balance between accountability and interference? That is the main area where we did not see a situation that we would want. We produced another report recently about who regulates the regulators. That is also something we are going to come back to because it is a very significant point: there is a need for more parliamentary accountability of regulators. Actually, I think that if we had had an ongoing drumbeat of accountability of the OfS to Parliament, we might have avoided some of the problems that have emerged more recently.
As for the “looming crisis”, the Minister wants us to be cautious. I think we are seeing a trend here, and it is worrying. There are many universities that are concerned about their financial position this year and many that are looking to the future and seeing a very precarious situation in years to come, so I do not think that we can be complacent about this at all. The funding of higher education is a very difficult political issue for everyone: this is not just difficult for one party but for everyone, because it is very hard to resolve.
I still have some concerns about the marginalisation of the QAA and it being pushed out of this situation. The international reputation of our universities is desperately important and one of the reasons they are such big earners for this country. We have had some reassurance today about better relationships in the future and about a better role for students in terms of consultation, and those are to be welcomed, but there is a very long way to go before we have a satisfactory situation here. As I said in my earlier remarks, I am very keen that the committee should return to this subject and monitor what is happening in the future. That would help in having better regulation and a better balance and partnership between universities and those who are regulating. In the meantime, I beg to move.
Grammar Schools
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, with whom I worked when I was junior education spokesman in the Commons and she was our prime researcher in the House of Commons Library. Thinking about that reminded me just how obsessive certain people on the Conservative Benches were about grammar schools at that time. It also reminded me that in 1979 Bolton was introducing the comprehensive system. The 11-plus had been abolished and parents had been asked which comprehensive school they wished their 11 year-olds to go to. Then we had the general election on 3 May and there was a sudden change. The comprehensive plans were cancelled and an emergency 11-plus was established. Pupils left primary school in July of that year not knowing which secondary school they were going to. That is an example of how obsessive some people on the Benches opposite are about grammar schools. It is about time they learned about the failures of that policy.
We have heard a lot today about the evidence indicating why a selective system does not work. It does not work in the interests of those poorer pupils about whom we have heard and does not deliver the social mobility that is so often talked about. In fact, it reinforces privilege for very many people. We have heard that evidence and I remind the Benches opposite that many people in the Conservative Party understand this. I suggest that they read what the Conservative chairman of the Commons Education Select Committee has said. If I read out his recent comments, they would make a perfect speech on this occasion. However, there are a few other things I want to say. Nevertheless, I shall quote one thing he said recently:
“It is now a well-established fact that by age 11, poor children are lagging nearly a year behind their more affluent middle class peers. They are not only less likely to pass a grammar test at age 11, but it is also unlikely their parents would consider one”.
That goes to the point of what is so important about this debate. The Government need to understand that you do not give equality of opportunity to children simply by creating hurdles for some of them to get over.
We have heard a few personal stories. I shall illustrate an episode from my experience concerning two young girls from the same council estate in the north of England. They started out in a brand new primary school on the same day and took the 11-plus together. I was the lucky one. I passed the 11-plus and was offered a place at a very good school. Indeed, it was considered to be the best. My best friend was the unlucky one. She was not unlucky because she failed the exam: she passed it. But when you took the 11-plus then, your parents had to sign a form stating that their child would stay at school until the age of 16. My best friend’s parents did not understand that. They did not want to sign that form. When they were eventually persuaded to do so by my head teacher, my best friend went to the school without parental support and without a proper uniform. Four years later, when she was 15, her parents paid a fine to the local magistrates’ court and got her a job in a local grocery shop. The 11-plus did not give her opportunities. I was lucky, not because I passed the exam but because I had parents who supported me and wanted me to get an education. If we are to make a real difference, we must tackle the problem of those parents who cannot engage in education and do not understand the value of the opportunities that should be provided.
I recall what the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said about the programmes in which he is engaged. It is those parents who are disaffected, alienated and do not have the confidence to take advantage of educational opportunities who we have to help. That primary school now takes children at the age of two to try to counter the impact of non-involvement by parents. If we are to make real changes and give real opportunities, it is the early years that deserve our attention, not this nonsense that segregates children at the age of 11.
Schools
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Nash
My Lords, I fully recognise the contribution that independent schools make to our school system by reducing the cost to the taxpayer and providing wider support to our state system. I know, for instance, that independent schools provide more than £700 million a year in bursaryships and subsidised funding to their pupils. From my own experience, I was for many years a trustee at the Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy in Newham, where at any time we look after up to 100 black boys—and now, I am glad to say, some girls—who are on the edge of exclusion from school. We have now sent 90 scholars, as we call them, on full bursaryships to schools such as Rugby and many others, so I have seen the benefits that this has had. I am also aware of the many school partnerships that take place between the independent and state sectors—an excellent one being King’s College School, Wimbledon, where the pupils themselves visit primary schools on a Friday.
The Government funded the Schools Together website last year, which has more than 1,000 examples of co-operation between the independent and state sectors. We have also funded 20 independent/state school partnerships between those sectors, particularly to help the subjects being taught in primary schools. There is no doubt that many independent schools already provide a great deal of help but we feel that, in some cases, there is more that they can do. We need to encourage that to happen, so where schools have the capacity and capability to do so, we will ask them to sponsor or set up new schools, or to offer a certain proportion of places as funded bursaries, on which some may well qualify already. Where they are smaller schools, we will obviously look for a proportionate response but will still look to them to engage more widely with the state school system.
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister has on several occasions mentioned disadvantaged children and disadvantaged families. Does he accept that the most disadvantaged children are from those families where the parents are not motivated and have no educational drive for their children? Even when entering school at the age of five, those children are well behind the rest of their cohort. Would it not be far better if the Government gave far more attention to early years education, rather than coming up with silly plans like this?
Lord Nash
I agree with the noble Baroness that the early years are very important and that sadly many parents do not engage as well as they could with the school system on behalf of their children. To me, that is why we should be very focused on primary schools. One of the things that we have said is that selective or independent schools may be able to help with primary education. Everybody gets so fixated on GCSE results but in fact the work, as we all know, has to be done in primaries. The depressing statistic is that if you do not get your required level 4 when leaving your primary school—your pass mark, effectively—then you have only a 7% chance of getting five good GCSEs.
Grammar Schools
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Nash
The noble Lord referred to Sir Michael Wilshaw’s comments. I am a great fan of Sir Michael Wilshaw and he has done an excellent job as chief inspector. He is right to pinpoint the great transformation in London schools, started under a Labour Government through their London Challenge and academies programme, which we have sought to continue. In fact there is no clear evidence to support his views but, as I have said, we are keeping an open mind. We are aware of the strength of grammar schools and would like more free school meals pupils going to them.
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister tell the House what representations his department has received for the return of secondary modern schools?
Education: Social Mobility
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, I will also start by congratulating the Minister on initiating this debate. When I heard his first few words, I thought that I would agree with much of what he was to say, because he talked about the importance of education in breaking the cycle of deprivation and praised teachers, and I was very happy with that. However, I am sorry that he then went on to be so aggressively political in his opening remarks, and so critical of the previous Labour Government. That made me cast my mind back to 1997, when class sizes were often over 40, and we had to make a pledge to bring them down to a maximum of 30; when many of the schools I visited had leaking roofs and even outside toilets, and we had to have a fantastic building programme to get them up to scratch; and to the initiatives we took on pre-school education and on early years generally, especially with Sure Start.
I am very proud of many of the things that the Labour Government did, and I am sorry that there has not been more scope from what the Minister said in his early remarks about us working together on these issues. In all parts of the House there is a great deal of consensus about what should be happening in education and how we should value each and every child. We can all agree that social mobility is important and that schools play a vital role in that. Incidentally, I hope that we can also agree that education is more than just about the product of providing social mobility. Education is of value in its own right for each and every one of us, as it gives people confidence, the equipment they need to face their lives and, indeed, enjoyment.
The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, has just said that it is very difficult to define social mobility. I have read with some interest some of the definitions that have been provided. I saw one that said that absolute mobility is whether a person is better off financially than their parents. Mention was made of Alan Milburn, whose concerns might be very well founded, given the level of personal debt that we see many young people having and, indeed, the difficulties that people will have providing for their pensions in future. So that type of social mobility is actually quite difficult. Then I saw a definition about relative mobility—a measure of which rung of the ladder a person lands on compared with their parents. Personally, I am not very comfortable with using any definitions like that whatever. Perhaps the noble Baroness is right that we should just say that we know what we mean, but I think that we should be careful about how we assess an individual’s contribution to society and, indeed, to their families.
What I think that we have to accept from the research is that in 2014 there is still, from all the analysis, a dreadful and unfortunate link between poverty and limited educational attainment. Too often that is true—not universally or absolutely, but too often. When the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, talked about language skills, her comments reinforced that. Too many social and economic outcomes are almost predictable, with too much in education reinforcing advantage and, indeed, privilege. To my mind, education should be about countering disadvantage, not reinforcing privilege, and about giving very real opportunities to all—and I mean all—of our children. We should be grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle for putting the context in which many children are making their decisions about their futures.
Many of us got educational opportunities that our parents never had. That may make us more socially mobile, but I would put it that we got opportunities to make decisions and have more choices about our lives, and that is what we should be talking about when we try to advance every child. I do not think that the amount of debate on the structures of our education system provides the answers. I am sorry that the Minister boasted so much today about the success of free schools and academies and placed so much emphasis on that, not least because, as we all know, there have been some very well documented failures that have recently been reported. Just the other day, I heard about Goole High School, which became an academy in 2011 when rated good by Ofsted; since November of last year, just two years later, that school has been put in special measures, with Ofsted concluding that it was inadequate in all categories—a pretty horrific decline in a very short time. When the Minister was talking about academies providing a step change, I do not think that he was thinking of it going in that direction.
I could certainly boast about the success of many local comprehensives that I know of in many different parts of the country, but that does not get us very far. However, I must take issue with the Minister when he says that local authorities often leave schools in difficulty to languish in failure. I do not think that trying to undermine what local authorities do in that way really helps us at all. I wish that he would not push the idea that academies and free schools are the answer to everything. Yes, we should have some flexibility. The Minister knows that my football club, Bolton Wanderers, which is on a high at the minute—we will see how long it lasts—has recently been given the green light to have a free school, which is almost a pupil referral unit with, of course, an extra dimension. I am not saying that we should not look at how to provide different structures in education, but we should be cautious in presenting any one form as a panacea.
Thinking about this debate made me think back some time. More than 50 years ago, in a primary school in a council estate in Bolton, a class of 10 year-olds sat the 11-plus examination. Education at that time required children to stay at school to the age of 15, but those children who passed the 11-plus for grammar schools were required to stay at school to 16 and complete O-levels and examinations. Indeed, parents had to sign an undertaking to that effect. I passed my 11-plus and my parents signed happily. My best friend also passed the 11-plus for grammar school, but her parents refused to sign the form. They just did not see the point of it. Our head teacher eventually persuaded them to change their minds and sign, and my friend went to grammar school—albeit without a school uniform. She was a bright girl and did very well; but that was not the end of the story. When she was 15, her mother found her a job in the local shop, took her out of school and paid a fine in the magistrates’ court to effect this—no exams, no qualifications and no further education. They were not bad parents; they just did not see the point of education.
I am not sure that all the factors that influenced those parents are not still present today. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, pointed out, not all parents read to their children, have books in the home, see education as a priority or understand its importance. If we are going to counter disadvantage, we have to tackle the causes of parents not being engaged and deal with this vital issue, because anyone who has ever taught in a school knows that, if parents are interested and involved, teaching that child is so much easier. That is why we cannot simply talk about structures or parental choice—and we certainly cannot just talk about league tables and results. As others have said, we have to look at this issue long before children go to school.
I have a few suggestions to make to the Minister on the other things that we should be doing. We need a different outlook, which sees education as being about opening doors for young people, not creating a series of hurdles, which I think we are still doing. One day I hope that we can discuss credit accumulation for qualifications. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, touched on the fact that we have to value not just the traditional pinnacle of education. What he has done in terms of other pathways, university technical colleges and career colleges is something that we can all learn a great deal from, not just in providing routes for young people but in giving real value to some of those alternatives.
We also have to teach children how to learn. The Minister said that we had to emphasise facts, and facts come into this—they play a part. But we have to teach people using modern technology in teaching, mentoring and monitoring, and do it in a way that is relevant to the modern world, whether it is talking about relationships, social media dangers or the dangers of payday loans. The noble Baronesses, Lady Massey and Lady Garden, both made very important points in that respect.
I come back to one of the essential points. We have to start very early. In a way, I was disappointed not just with the closure of so many Sure Start schemes but with the attempt by some in government almost to undermine them. If there are problems, we should build on the experience and look to close them. We need to look at what we need to do to engage parents as soon as possible. If you have a baby in hospital today, you are given a freebie bag when you go, with free nappies and free creams. There should be a children’s book in there, and things that would start to engage the child in the right way. When we talk about steps to advance social mobility, we have to start talking about the period before any child ventures into school.
Education: Contribution to Economic Growth
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, I hope that I will be forgiven for not following my noble friend on the counterfactual conditional, although I enjoyed much of his other analysis.
Yesterday, my noble friend Lady McIntosh asked at Question Time about the fact that education is more than just about its economic impact. The whole House, I think, would agree on that, though it is important that we have this particular debate to focus on those aspects.
I congratulate my noble friend Lady Morgan not only on acquiring this debate but on the nature of her analysis, which was realistic, non-political and, importantly, hopeful. I start where she started. If we are to get more out of the investment that we make in education, we have to look more at what happens in early years. Yes, in terms of economic benefits, universities make a great and increasing contribution to exports and earnings, but if we are to get all of our population to the state where they have self-satisfaction, can play a part in society and can be of economic benefit, we must start early. The most significant statistic that my noble friend used was that, at the age of five, many children are 19 months behind the average. That is a desperately serious situation that we have not properly addressed in the past.
We must think in terms of not just formal education but of getting those children off to a better start and of the factors that will determine what they can do for the rest of their lives. That is one reason why I am very proud of what the previous Labour Government did in Sure Start—helping very young children to socialise, interact and co-operate with others and to have confidence and self-respect, all of which will determine their progress later.
As others have mentioned, it is particularly important that we get parents involved. We have to break the cycle of parents who have themselves not got a lot out of education being unable to engage in the system and therefore their children being significantly disadvantaged. Everyone who has been involved in education, at whatever level, knows that when you have parental involvement, you have better behaviour and achievement and everyone finds life an awful lot easier. Incidentally, that is one reason why I have favoured home-school contracts for many years.
It is important to get parents involved in another respect. In education debates we hear a lot about providing opportunity, which is right, but we face one difficulty that no Government have been able to overcome: motivating the non-aspirational. We sometimes talk as if it is a clear choice that individuals sit down to make: “I will be aspirational” or, “I will not bother taking that opportunity”. We need to understand the fears that can inhibit people’s aspirations: the fear of entering an unknown world, the fear of moving away from the security of their family and friends. I think back to some of those films made in the 1960s, where young students from the north were going down to universities in the south and being dislocated from their families. That fear and feeling of, “It’s not for us”, is still very much there in many areas, and we must find new ways to tackle that. What my noble friend said about London was interesting. There may be things that we can learn from there, but it is a serious problem.
An article in the Telegraph today shows that some towns and cities have nine out of 10 residents with high qualifications but some towns have only four out of 10 with the same qualifications. I cannot believe that that reflects an innate ability in one place but not in another; I think that it is to do with aspirations, motivations and confidence. Until we find out how we can crack that one, we will have real difficulties because we are dealing with people whose expectations are not high, and I am not sure that we are doing enough to raise them.
Secondly, echoing what has been said so far, we must value teachers and head teachers and provide them with the training, support and mentoring that they need. Mention has been made of Finland. I am not sure that that is the complete answer, but we should value and respect teachers not just by words; we need action as well. By action, I mean inaction on occasion, because the Government should not overprescribe what teachers should be doing. I think that nearly everyone agrees that we need a national curriculum, but that means different things to different people. I recall, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Baker, does, discussion about what a Secretary of State should recommend as the 10 books that all children should read. I was shadow Secretary of State at the time, and it was very tempting to name your 10 books, but Secretaries of State should resist that temptation—it is not their job to do more than have a prescriptive framework.
Thirdly, I want to mention examinations. We have to ask the basic question: what is the purpose of the testing? Is it to assess and assist the child’s progress; is it to look at the added value that that school is providing; or are we creating hurdles and just using tests for league tables? I draw the Minister’s attention to what the Chief Scientific Officer said yesterday: that the risk in education is always that exams are the tail that wags the whole education dog.
Finally, briefly, I am surprised that no one other than the OU graduate, my noble friend Lord Graham, has mentioned the Open University. It teaches us many things. It shows that many people who did not succeed on the conventional path can succeed later. The majority of its students do not have qualifications for conventional universities. It can also teach us different teaching methods. I am pleased that the vice-chancellor is with the Prime Minister in China, because there is a lot of scope there. The Open University is showing how, through its FutureLearn programme, new techniques can be used to teach people but also to draw them into education by giving them taster courses, not least those based on the BBC programme, “The Frozen Planet”, which encourage them to take up a theme, do courses and get into education. We must look at new ways to get people into education and then keep them in.
Al-Madinah Free School
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Nash
I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his question. This is a local initiative, it is quite a complicated situation and I do not have time to go into all the details now, but I can assure the House that we are all over this and will not allow this situation to continue.
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
Will the Minister confirm that the pre-registration report actually flagged up many significant concerns, which we are now seeing in practice following what happened recently? Does he intend, as one of the lessons learnt, to ensure that such concerns are properly monitored when they are flagged up? Clearly, this was not the case in this situation, including on the vital issue of properly trained teachers. Will he also confirm that there is no place in our education system—in free schools, faith schools, home tuition or anywhere—for any practices that discriminate against the education of girls?
Lord Nash
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness on the last point. There is no place in our school system for such practices and we have made that absolutely clear to this school. As regards the monitoring of schools, our procedures are extremely tight. This situation developed quite rapidly over the summer, leading up to the head teacher’s resignation.
Education: Curriculum, Exam and Accountability Reform
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Bolton
Will the Minister accept that while, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, there may be rejoicing about this U-turn, it is particularly humiliating for the Secretary of State because of the bravado with which he announced his original plans? Maybe the Secretary of State can learn something from that. Many of us still worry that he does not understand the basic problem of trying to be too prescriptive about the national curriculum or an examination system, or the difficulties of not having a proper, coherent examination system in this country. Whatever the questions are, the answer is surely not to have a 19th century model of education, as the Secretary of State suggests.
Does the Minister agree that we can make progress on the national curriculum and the most appropriate system of examination in this country only by building consensus, and building it before the Secretary of State makes decisions? Surely that should be one of the lessons that the Secretary of State learns from this whole experience: you need to consult with head teachers, teachers, employers and parents before you come to a decision, not after you have decided and are trying to ram that decision through.
Will the Minister ask the Leader of the House if we can have a lengthy debate in the House at an early opportunity both on what is appropriate for the national curriculum and how we achieve an examination system that is proper and cohesive and includes both examinations that are academic and ones for those with vocational aptitude? A debate in this House that allowed wide consultation would be useful and constructive for the future.
Lord Nash
As the Secretary of State has said on a number of occasions, the Opposition seem determined to leave the less privileged in this country with a less good education. He has consulted extremely widely. On the accusation that is constantly made of a 19th century education, he has consulted widely with cognitive scientists who will tell you that modern cognitive theory is that knowledge is necessary in order to gain skills. The thinking that you can get skills without knowledge is itself out of date.
Education: Development of Excellence
Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Bolton
My Lords, I think I must restrain myself and not follow directly some of the comments that have just been made. I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, and agreeing with what she said about the quality of teachers and how crucial it is that we continue to try to improve it. It is also important that we do all that we can to respect teachers and the whole of the teaching profession. I wonder where all this discussion about giving teachers more freedom sits with the Secretary of State’s apparent desire to prescribe the history curriculum in every detail. Perhaps we should remember what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said about the need for a division of labour.
I am not sure that I am quite as optimistic as the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, about the new examination system. I am not against a baccalaureate, but we are going to have a British bacc, a technical bacc, an A-bacc, new vocational qualifications, and I wonder whether we will have a totally cohesive and comprehensive system.
I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, when he says that we should look at young people from the age of 14 to 18, or maybe 19. I appreciate his work on technical opportunities, and in particular the need for parity of esteem for those types of qualifications. We need a holistic approach to qualifications and opportunities for young people between the ages of 14 and 18 or 19. I believe that we can achieve that only by a credit accumulation system, which would include modular elements, as has been suggested. That is the only way to get real parity between academic and vocational achievements. It would also allow for acknowledgement of the work in arts, music and sport that others have mentioned.
I am surprised that there has not been more mention of the need to concentrate a great deal of resources on early years education. If we are talking about long-term excellence, we must concentrate a great deal of attention there. I am also surprised that mention has not been made of the Open University, which is a world leader and something which this country should be proud of and to which our other universities should look to in the support that it gives students, its course material, openness and approachability. Others could learn from that.
In a very limited debate, there is a lot that everyone wants to say, so I will confine my other remarks to one aspect: a word that has been mentioned many times today—aspiration. Much of what is said about how we want to raise and realise the aspirations of children, young people and adults no one would question, and I fully support that objective. However, if we are really going to provide opportunity for all, we must find better strategies to deal with those who are non-aspirational: the families, parents and children who feel incapable, threatened, insecure or alienated from education. That is a real problem.
The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, talked about the influence of her mother. All teachers know that if you have motivated parents, it is much easier for the child to succeed. Unfortunately, some parents do not have a good experience of education. There are many reasons for that. We know that levels of illiteracy and innumeracy are far too high. Some are very fearful of any formal environment, some find their responsibilities overwhelming, and some do not want themselves or their children to be taken out of their comfort zone to an alien world of education that they find threatening. Sometimes, unfortunately, teachers accept that and do not have expectations for some children from families with difficulties.
The Government’s approach—some of the cuts that are being introduced hitting early years and the support for those families, and doing things such as not ring-fencing the pupil premium—will make the situation worse. We have the very real challenge of making opportunities a reality for those children and helping them to break through to make the progress that they could.