Special Needs Schools
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts(4 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I too strongly welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on her eloquent speech. I will focus on the general situation facing specialist colleges in a rather broader sense—including but not confined to those that we think of as special needs—which cater to small, specialist groups of students of various different kinds. I want to urge the Minister to ensure that this population and this type of institution receive more targeted and coherent attention and support at national level than has been the case.
Of course, much of this debate will focus on the large and important group of children and young people with learning difficulties for whom the mainstream curriculum is unsuitable or who struggle to cope with formal settings. We know that there is a real crisis here, especially in catering to those with complex multiple needs.
However, there is also an important and diverse group of students for whom the issue is not that they struggle and will probably always struggle with the mainstream curriculum or the classroom environment, but rather that they belong to a rather small group with special, distinctive requirements, which is widely spread across the country, so in any given area there will be only a few of them. This means that we need specialist institutions with wide and national catchment areas.
We actually do quite well at school level, albeit largely because of a legacy of charitable and privately established institutions. Central government has then done a pretty good job of recognising and incorporating these into the national schools system. I grew up near one of the most famous, the Mary Hare School for the deaf, which sends pupils on to a range of extremely demanding academic courses at university level. We have music schools, such as the Menuhin School and Chetham’s School, where more than 90% of students get financial assistance, including through the DfE’s music and dance scheme.
Where things are not going so well is at college level. Education does not end with school—less and less so. We need to recognise areas of specialisation that cannot be offered in each and every locality or even region, but which are none the less vital. We cannot just rely here on our inheritance of a few well-established institutions, such as the Royal National College for the Blind or, indeed, the wonderful sounding college that the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, helped to establish. We need to think more coherently and creatively about what sort of specialist colleges we need for this older age group and how they should be funded and run.
Noble Lords may know the sad story of the specialist national colleges. This was actually a very good idea, trying to create national institutions with specific areas of expertise. But, although lots of money was put into capital, there was no coherent thinking about how they would recruit and be funded. I remember visiting one early on and being horrified that it was expected to operate, recruit and fund itself as though it was just another local FE college with a particular, small catchment area. Not surprisingly, most of the national colleges have now closed.
We do not make clear provision for scarce and valued crafts and trades with small workforces. Training in some, such as musical instrument making or clockmaking, have clung on by being turned into fully fledged residential honours degrees in a couple of institutions, but the lack of national planning is evident. College-based courses have closed. In other countries, we would have apprenticeships, with specialist colleges providing the off-the-job training, and there is no mechanism somehow, in our central government, for thinking about and providing these.
Another group which suffers from being small and low-profile is our rural population. Agricultural and land-based colleges, which have to offer residential accommodation, are often struggling. There was supposed to be a proper review of these colleges a few years back. If it happened, it certainly never saw the light of day outside DfE. Specialist adult colleges survive in London; outside, there is just Northern clinging on by its fingertips. We have a construction skills crisis and only one of our specialist construction colleges is left standing. All this has relevance because it points up that, at college level, there is no real mechanism for thinking about specialist groups, of which one of the most important is young people with learning difficulties and physical challenges. But they are not the only ones and their colleges are not catered for, because we have no proper national mechanism for thinking about such specialist provision. I urge the Minister to ensure that, within her department, more focused attention is paid to looking at what national provision is needed for post-school college opportunities.
I also want to raise a very specific issue, because I think it speaks to the current absence of dedicated attention. Many specialised colleges are not standard public sector institutions, and many rightly offer qualifications ranging right through to levels 4, 5 and 6, which is higher education. At present, there seems to be real confusion over how the new VAT requirements for private school fees will apply to higher-level qualifications in institutions that also offer lower-level ones. This issue has been raised with me and other noble Lords, with respect to the dance and drama awards, but the lack of clarity speaks to this general point I am trying to make.
Our higher education sector also has a multiplicity of institutions and, as far as I know, there has been no discussion of introducing VAT on fees in higher education, which would, of course, feed through to student loans. My sense is that the lack of clarity on what is happening in specialist institutions—which would have a knock-on effect—comes from the fact that nobody is in a position to demand and get clear guidance. Can the Minister ensure that the Government clarify this particular challenge?
I also have a much more ambitious request. For what we normally think of as the special needs population, but also for the other small, spread-out, critical, specialist and often needy groups, we need to think far more coherently about specialist college provision across the country as a whole.
Education Sector: Equality of Opportunity
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts(1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord makes an important point about early identification of children with special educational needs or some form of disability—he is absolutely right. In the early stages, that needs well-qualified teachers, with the support of inclusive practice and expertise developed throughout the school, to recognise that. This Government are determined to improve that provision in mainstream schools.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, earlier this year, schoolteachers got a fully funded 5.5% pay increase, but no such award was made to college staff, even though most pupil-premium students in the 16-plus age group are in colleges. How do the Government propose to address the impact of this unequal treatment on colleges, including the haemorrhaging of skilled staff?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness will understand that in FE there is no pay review body in the same way as in schools. The Government were pleased to be able to fund the 5.5% pay increase for schoolteachers. The noble Baroness is right that, although we recognise the enormous contribution of FE staff, we were not able to match the pay for FE teachers on that occasion. This week, we have for the first time extended the retention incentive to teachers in the first years of their careers in FE. Applications for that opened on Monday, and lots of FE teachers have already applied for that. In our discussions on the spending review, we are thinking about and arguing hard for the support that further education needs and deserves, as the noble Baroness rightly said.
Higher Education Funding
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on securing this debate and declare an interest as a professor at King’s College London, a trustee of the Council for the Defence of British Universities and a member of the Augar review of post-18 education and funding in England.
We are all very aware of the declining value of student fees, but I also emphasise to noble Lords the precipitous decline in direct government top-up funding for high-cost subjects. A university gets little more for a home student in chemistry or bioengineering than for one studying business or law, with horribly distortionary effects. We highlighted this in the Augar review with, I have to say, minimal effect. We have some special problems in this country, but this is a global issue, and that is what I shall say a little about now.
Countries everywhere have expanded student numbers, often at speed. They recognise citizens’ aspirations and the importance of graduate skills, but the background is sluggish growth. University is still a route to most of the best jobs, but the average return for a degree inevitably falls and government budgets are under increasing strain. The simplest response to this is always to reduce per-student funding. At the moment, England has higher levels of support per home student than any other part of these islands. Scotland has student number controls and has recently reduced the number of places it funds, and still spends markedly less per student than England. Northern Ireland has lower fees and lower funding. The Republic of Ireland is committed to demand-led enrolment without student fees, although it levies a so-called contribution. Its enrolments have risen, but its spending per student has gone down substantially. The European University Association confirms that this is the modal pattern: enrolment up, total government spending often up, spending per student down. In the USA many states are cutting funding for their public systems, and if you talk to Australian or Canadian vice-chancellors it feels like you are still at home. The challenges, the worries, the difficulties and the solutions that are not quite as attractive as they seemed are all the same.
So, with no easy answers on finance to be borrowed from elsewhere in the world, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that we really need to turn our thinking around a bit. We should start to think not just about how to top up funding but about what it is that we want to fund, and therefore how much and how we want to fund the different parts. What does it take to deliver what we recognise as high quality in engineering or law? When we look across the world at everybody cutting funding, cutting per-student funding, increasing class sizes, abolishing most personalised feedback in many of our institutions, what does this do? What happens? What do our students learn? How far are we charging students and taxpayers for what economists call “signalling”—which in this case is having letters after your name—rather than a transformative experience?
I do not think we know nearly enough about this and I do not think we know nearly enough about what makes different institutions more or less efficient in how they use their funding. With the current model running into the sand, not just in England but everywhere, we should be thinking much harder about what we want university education to be and what universities should be doing in a mass system where we want to respond to the desires and aspirations of the entire citizenry, and then we should think about what the different components cost and how we might best pay for them.
King’s Speech
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts(4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the Ministers on their appointments. I agree strongly with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, in her maiden speech, that skills are central to economic growth. Skills are also central to opportunity, not just for young people but, critically, for adults. People should find it easy throughout their lives to learn and to update their skills. We are pretty good already at identifying skill needs and shortages, but if we do not improve opportunities and access then nothing good will happen to supply.
I emphasise to the Minister and the House the enormous importance of further education colleges, which did not figure in the King’s Speech—although I grant that he had only so much time. Their funding has suffered very badly recently, falling further and further behind schools on a per-head basis. This means that they are increasingly unable to provide the training we need for core shortage areas such as engineering and construction—we cannot build without builders. More generally, we are failing to realise colleges’ potential as a core part of any tertiary and higher education system geared to growth and opportunity.
North America has a lot to teach us here. In the United States, community colleges make part-time advanced adult study available across the country. Meanwhile in the UK—not just England—this has gone into disastrous decline, with ongoing falls in college-based higher education courses. In Canada, colleges supply an increasing amount of short, specific and high-level vocational training, often to recent graduates. Here, bizarrely, our higher education funding policy intentionally prevented this for decades.
Arrangements for the lifelong learning entitlement, passed into English law last year with, happily, cross-party support—I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for her valiant work in this House, which was not at all confined to this area—give us an opportunity to build far more flexibility and adult participation into our skills system and get rid of our crazy barriers to upskilling. It was also always intended to bring colleges and universities much closer together, in something approaching a single system. When does the Department for Education expect to reschedule and restart its consultative roadshows with the sector on the LLE? Will the Government ensure that colleges and college-based courses are fully incorporated into their planning and development?
I recommend to the Minister’s attention the Open University’s current collaboration with colleges in education cold spots. She will be aware that the creation of the Open University was one of the finest achievements—perhaps the finest—of the first Wilson Government, but she may not be aware that its original remit covered technical and refresher courses, not just degrees. If this country is serious about skills, it must look seriously beyond full degrees and not just pay lip service to a more nuanced system.
Finally, the Government have very good reason to reform the apprenticeship levy. Anyone involved with apprenticeship policy knows that the current funding system has had major unintended and undesirable consequences. Opportunities for young people have plummeted, especially in more deprived areas. Many young people who would like an apprenticeship cannot obtain one. We have been doing some research at King’s—I declare an interest as a member of its academic staff—on the way in which lower-achieving young people transition into the workplace. We are talking not about the bottom 20%, but about the 50% or 60% who do not go straight into university. We find that, for every one who gets an apprenticeship, three have tried very hard and failed to find one. The Government’s own figures show that only 20% of apprenticeship starts are in skill-shortage occupations.
I hope that the Minister can reassure the House that the review will be thorough and incorporate the needs of SMEs, young people and the entire country, and not just the desire of levy-paying employers for more ways to spend their levy.