Erasmus+

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Earl of Clancarty]

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they intend to negotiate the United Kingdom rejoining the Erasmus+ Programme.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have not proposed any plans for rejoining the Erasmus+ programme. However, we will work to reset the relationship with our European friends, strengthen ties, secure a broad-based security pact and tackle barriers to trade. We will look forwards, not backwards, by improving our trade and investment relationship with the EU while recognising that there will be no return to the single market, the customs union or freedom of movement.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree, nevertheless, that if the Prime Minister wishes to reset our relationship with Europe, there would be nothing more germane to this project than rejoining Erasmus+ and enabling the cultural exchange which, through its reciprocity, is at the heart of that programme—an essential element that the Turing scheme lacks? The EU Commission says that it is open to discussion. We have done this for research by rejoining Horizon; we now need to do the same for education but, most of all, for widening the opportunities in Europe for our young people.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The Prime Minister and the Government are working hard to reset our relationship with our European friends. The Prime Minister hosted the EPC at Blenheim Palace, where he was able to engage with all our European friends, and he has recently visited Germany, France and Ireland to progress that positive bilateral work. I think the noble Earl slightly underestimates the impact of the Turing scheme, which has enabled considerable numbers of young people to go overseas to work and study. The Government support it and will want to think about how we can develop it.

Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for the opportunity to speak in this debate. This is about schools, but I will start by talking briefly about higher education, as it has a bearing on the debate. Ideally, all education should be free, and that ought to include higher education. I strongly believe that it was a grave error of the Blair Government to introduce tuition fees and effectively commercialise universities. Despite the problems we now face, if Germany can successfully operate a free higher education system, for example, why can we not do so if we believe in the principle of free education? I raise higher education in this debate because of the respective choices that face parents and students in every area of education, which may have little to do with principle but everything to do with necessity.

We have already heard from my noble friend Baroness Bull about the particular performing arts schools where, unless the state decides it is going to start operating its own tuition-free ballet school, for example, there is no option for the parents and students concerned—just as there has been no option since 1998 in higher education except to get a loan.

I agree entirely with the noble Baronesses, Lady Fraser and Lady Bull, about the need for certain exemptions. The Labour Government’s own dance and drama awards have potentially been caught up in this too. I hope the Minister can say that the 15 providers for performing arts training through these awards will not attract VAT.

To make the wider point, not every parent has sent their child to an independent school because it is what their parents did, but because what was required for the particular child has not been readily available in the state sector. They will scrimp and save to do so and make use of bursaries which will likely now be less available. This is true for the arts, which have been significantly diminished in the state sector, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said, but have flourished in many independent schools. Nevertheless, let me remind the House what Keir Starmer said in his speech at the Guildhall on 14 March:

“Every young person must have access to music, art, design and drama. That is our mission”.


He went on:

“we are launching a sector plan to support the entire ecosystem of the creative industries”.

Schools are of course a major part of the ecosystem. The goal should be that the state sector arts education be at least as good as independent schools are now, and make that offer unnecessary. However, when you realise that, for example, independent schools spend on average five times as much on music as state schools currently do, this is a hefty challenge. Will the Government rise to this challenge and keep their promises on art education in view of their intentions for the private sector?

I make one further point, in the interests of co-operation—there is considerable adversity in this debate. I believe in good education for everyone whatever their background. However, I also believe in advances in education—Education, if you like. What independent schools have been able to do, unencumbered by the accountability measures and the narrow tunnel into which state education has been pushed, is experiment, and that should be valued. As my noble friend Lord Aberdare pointed out in the 11 to 16 year-old school education debate on 26 July, some independent schools have developed their own curriculum offers and assessment methodologies. The Government, the state sector and, indeed, Becky Francis could be learning from these developments in the independent sector so that education as a whole may benefit.

King’s Speech

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I will concentrate my remarks on arts and arts education. I declare an interest as a visual artist. I am heartened by the change in language, particularly around arts education. I am sorry we do not have a specific category for the arts in this debate on the gracious Speech. The arts are an essential aspect of our democracy and this needs to be better recognised at all levels of government within the UK.

Over the last 14 years we have seen the progressive downgrading of the arts in our school education. According to research by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, only one in 12 people working in film and TV is from a working class background. Both the EBacc and Progress 8 were introduced specifically to sideline the arts. Both should go. They are accountability measures, not part of the curriculum. We do not need a review for this.

A good proportion of the 6,500 new teachers should be arts teachers, including dedicated teachers in arts subjects at primary school level. Will the Government improve ITT bursaries for art and design, and music, so that they are on a par with the sciences? The arts offer in state schools needs to be brought up to the same high level as exists in many private schools, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said.

I trust that the rhetoric around so-called “low-value” courses in higher education has ceased and that changes made at the Office for Students reflect a different culture. More importantly, will the Government make it a priority to help to prevent more closures of arts courses threatened at universities?

The educational community would cheer to the rafters if the Government were to negotiate rejoining Erasmus+. Turing is better than nothing, but is a pale imitation of what Erasmus as a reciprocal programme achieves, and much more. Will they do so?

After years of cuts to local authority and Arts Council funding, what the arts need most is substantial state reinvestment. Do the Government agree? In terms of overall government spending, the moneys concerned are a drop in the ocean, yet the benefits accrued, including financial rewards, far outweigh such modest expenditure. It is embarrassing that one single city in Germany—Berlin—gets more state funding than the whole of the UK.

The Arts Council is overloaded, taking on much of what used to be funded by local authorities. There are instances where funding is urgently needed. I will give two examples. At the smaller scale is a brilliant museum located in a deprived area of a town in Buckinghamshire whose council funding is threatened to be cut off and the building and the attached gardens, used by local people, sold off. On that point, will the Government take steps to halt the sale of our precious public buildings and spaces, many used for the arts and other community activities?

Secondly, at the other end of the scale, following the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, will the Government urgently address the concerns around Welsh National Opera—an opera started originally by miners and teachers, and a company that through touring benefits both Wales and England? Emergency funding is required to stop musicians going part-time, but in the longer term England and Wales together need to review the current Transform funding model that so clearly penalises WNO.

There should be space for classical music and community projects, and the other arts including theatre and the visual arts, which often get overlooked. I ask the Government to take a look at the recommendations in the visual arts manifesto led by the Design and Artists Copyright Society. One recommendation is the appointment of a freelance commissioner for the arts to look at their rights and levels of pay. It is good that the Government are addressing workers’ rights—this should be a part of that.

In April, the Guardian reported that 74% fewer UK bands now tour Europe post Brexit, and that this affects their ability to tour America. The clear desire by the Government to address music touring is encouraging, but I also urge the Government to look at the effect of Brexit on all the creative industries, including the visual arts, craft and fashion. There is a growing sense that we will not regain the former pre-eminent position our creative industries had not just in Europe but across the world until we rejoin the single market.

School Funding: Special Educational Needs

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We give schools a great deal of discretion over how they use their budgets. It is right that we want the experts who know their community to use funds as they see fit, and the noble Lord knows from his own experience that schools use these budgets in very different ways. I was in a school recently which actually no longer used teaching assistants, but had dropped the class size dramatically as a result. It had teachers but a much smaller number of pupils in the class. The underlying principle, that we should trust our trusts and school leaders on how they spend the budget, is the one that any Government should support.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, we are talking about pupil premiums, and the Government once promised the introduction of an arts premium, which was never delivered. It may be a bit late now, but I hope that whatever Government are in charge on 17 July will reconsider that.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Earl may be right that we are timed out on an arts premium.

Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell and Lord Marks of Hale, on their maiden speeches, and of course my noble friend Lord Aberdare on his very comprehensive introduction.

At the outset, I say that I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, said about EBacc and Progress 8. They both need to go. They are holding the arts back in our schools and beyond. A future Government should make that pledge before they come to power.

The mover of this Motion, my noble friend Lord Aberdare, had to point out to me that “education” is not mentioned in it, even if it seems nevertheless logical that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, will answer for Education. Such is the modern-day conventional assumption that what we call skills and education go together hand in hand, but that does not have to be true, depending of course on how one defines both words. “Skill”, like “innovation”, has become a watchword, even a buzzword, to the extent that it is perhaps too easy to stop seeing what the word means and instead pay lip service to something we have not thought carefully enough about, and perhaps to promote certain narrower meanings above other meanings. For instance, my research tells me—I bow of course to the expert linguists and historians among us—that “skill” comes from the Old Norse “skilja”, which seems to have had quite a number of past meanings, including, believe it or not, to break up, to separate, to discern, to distinguish, to understand, to find out and to decide. Even further back in time, this word was used to denote knowledge or even divine wisdom, which begs questions about the separation of knowledge and practice that we have heard about today in this debate. There are meanings here that are wider than a skill being simply the supposedly or conventionally right way of doing something, or learning something that becomes automatic because it is practised. The original etymology seems to contain other things like analysis, breaking things up and perhaps putting them back together again—deconstruction in other words—critical thought, and even perhaps contemplation, which our more modern, narrower understanding of “skill” does not seem so much to contain.

This older understanding is important because, over a number of decades, education itself has changed significantly within the UK. The particular modern usage fits our current, very specifically framed, educational system. Of course, as we have already heard, there are many different kinds of skills, including life skills, craft skills, and green skills. But the idea of skills that are necessary for specific jobs, including the job of study itself, nevertheless holds a kind of primacy within this world of skills. Education itself, particularly higher education, has become monetised and therefore transactional in a way that was not true 30 years ago, but is now very true since the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and the accompanying expectations that an increasing number of students now have. Among those expectations I point out three: first, that students can get a piece of paper telling them that they have an extremely good degree that validates their course of study; secondly, they can get a well-paid job at the end of their course, which is part of the expected transaction; and thirdly, they have learned the skills that will equip them for that job. That is true even of those who follow the academic route, because of the change in culture of higher education.

Therefore, when the Government talk the rhetoric of “low-value” courses and send out the message that the arts and humanities are less important by cutting the top-up grants to those university courses, they are also saying that the skills learned for those courses or during that time of study are less important because the skills, like that important piece of paper which gives you your grade or the examination that determines that grade, must be something that according to the modern understanding of a skill is quantifiable because it has an objective, predetermined use.

I will make just one further point. The irony is that the real world thinks differently. Companies consistently want well-rounded people, not necessarily those with very specific, narrowly defined skill sets, important though those might be. I also know from my own experience closer to home that not all colleges, such as drama colleges, are interested in the skills that enable you to get a good degree. They look for things beyond specific skill sets such as passion, enthusiasm and originality of thought, which perhaps in the “skilja” definition might also be thought of as skills.

Higher Education: Arts and Humanities

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Earl of Clancarty]

To ask His Majesty’s Government, following recent announcements of proposed university staff cuts, what steps they are taking to support the study of the arts and humanities in higher education.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, we recognise the importance of the creative and performing arts to our economy. While some higher education providers have seen decreases in arts and humanities staff, academic staff numbers across England rose by 1.9% between 2019-20 and 2022-23 to 21,640.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, Gillian Keegan’s freezing of further funding for creative arts courses at universities, which has occurred since I tabled this Question, is surely pouring oil on already extremely troubled waters. We have a Government who seem wilfully blind to both the current threat to the arts at universities and the strategic importance of that pipeline. Will they reconsider that funding decision and take steps to protect the jobs and departments at Goldsmiths, Middlesex, Kent and elsewhere that are so necessary for the creative and economic future of this country?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We absolutely agree with the noble Earl that high-quality provision across a range of subjects in the arts and humanities is critical both for our cultural enrichment as a society and for our workforce. That is why we require the Office for Students to at least maintain funding for those high-cost subjects at the current level of £16.7 million. As the noble Earl is also aware, we have dedicated funding for both our world-leading cultural institutions and other performing arts institutions.

Educational Trips and Exchanges

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I will make a couple of points about education in Europe for British students. The first is about maximising opportunities. My 19 year-old daughter is currently doing an MA in drama in France, outside any exchange system. I have to say, her French is improving in leaps and bounds, which is a good in itself. However, it is clear from our own experience that the costs and red tape involved are now prohibitive for disadvantaged students in a way that simply did not exist before Brexit. This is not just about Turing and Erasmus; Brexit itself has made studying in Europe so much harder for British students.

Analysis by IFF Research, focusing on the first year of the Turing Scheme, found that inadequate funding and delivery problems have disproportionately impacted students with fewer resources. As the Association of Colleges points out, the lack of reciprocity means that institutions are forced to fall back on pre-existing connections, where they are able to. Erasmus is so much richer in its offer, including staff mobility. The Association of Colleges recommends that we rejoin Erasmus+ but retain Turing as a global and possibly Commonwealth scheme. Erasmus+ is expressly referred to in the EU Commission’s proposal on youth mobility. It is keen to have us back, and I hope that a future Government will act on that.

Secondly, we require more efficient Europe-wide solutions to these problems. For instance, it is clear that, for school visits, we need the reinstatement of a list-of-travellers visa scheme and collective passports, for the whole of Europe. I hope, too, that the EU Commission is not put off by the Government’s or Labour’s response to its proposal. A future Government may change their mind. Despite what the Government say, it is not free movement—more is the pity. With a single destination specified, it will not, for example, solve the problems even of young musicians touring, and Labour is right to see that as a separate issue.

The response to this scheme that intrigued me the most was that of Anand Menon, director of UK in a Changing Europe, who, as reported in the Guardian on 19 April, said that the EU is

“scared that member states will do bilateral deals, which becomes more of a threat the better the Eurosceptic parties do in the elections”.

In this context, bilateral deals become synonymous with cherry picking. I cannot therefore get too worked up about the Government’s response to the Written Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, regarding school visits and whether the Government would establish arrangements with other countries similar to those with France. They said, on 12 December last year:

“We would consider negotiating with other countries should they approach us with an interest in making similar arrangements”.


On its own terms, this is terribly lazy foreign policy, considering that it is our schoolchildren who will be most affected and less so European schoolchildren, who will have many other easy options to choose from: 30 other European countries, including Ireland.

Independent Schools

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree with my noble friend, and I thank Brentwood School and other schools involved in the types of partnerships that he described. We have such an asset in our independent schools, and this Government are focusing on encouraging more partnership work and understanding how all our pupils can benefit from that.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, following on from the previous question, does the Minister agree that, in the perceived ideological tussle between state and private, it is sometimes education itself that is forgotten? The currently less restricted independent sector can be an incubator for forward-looking educational ideas; for instance, those of Rethinking Assessment, which submitted valuable evidence to the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee that school education as a whole can profit from such thinking.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I agree with the noble Earl. Independent schools have shown themselves to be areas of great innovation, but we also see important innovation in our state sector. Particularly where the two come together, we see some of the best results.

Skill Shortages in Business and Industry

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

About half of apprenticeships are taken up by young people under the age of 24. I think the noble Lord referred to 21, but it splits at about half under 24 and half above that. The Government have done a great deal: investing in 16 to 19 education, improving the range of options and introducing qualifications that are directly linked to the careers that young people need.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I did not hear the Minister mention the creative industries, which certainly suffer from skills shortages in many areas. Looking at this issue in the round, does the Minister agree that cuts to the arts—such as, for instance, the proposed 100% cut in local authority funding for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra—are the worst possible advert for attracting skilled workers into the creative industries?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As the noble Earl knows, one reason why there are skills shortages in the creative industries is their very rapid growth rate. Between 2010 and 2019, they grew one and a half times faster than the wider economy, and in 2021 they employed 2.3 million people, which is a 49% increase on 2011. We have created flexi-job and accelerated apprenticeships, and improved the transfer system, particularly aiming to support our world-beating creative industries.

Jobs Market: Graduates

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree with my noble friend that young people should be well-equipped to understand not just the options for their subject but that subject at that particular institution, because we know that future earnings power, and in addition future job satisfaction, vary very much between institutions. There are improvements being made, and I am happy to send details to my noble friend on ways that students can access that information.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, further to the question of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and the question of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, this is not just for the arts, and it is about not just training up or career awareness but affordability. The plain fact is that many employers in the arts today cannot afford the skilled workers they need. It is at this point that the Government should intervene.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am always slightly baffled by this line of questioning, because when I look at the performance of our creative industries and the performing arts, I see that they are resoundingly successful, both domestically and globally. I appreciate that there are skills pressures in those areas, but they are ones that many organisations are overcoming.