Computer Science Applications to English Universities

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The details of admissions arrangements are for individual universities to determine. However, as I outlined in my initial Answer, a higher proportion of UK undergraduates than international applicants received offers. Although the circumstances that the noble Lord outlined, where people do not get the places that they want, are obviously disappointing, I do not think we can put that down to discrimination on the basis of country. Many noble Lords will recognise that the international popularity and status of our higher education system in this country, and the financial, cultural and social contribution made by international students, directly financially benefit UK students, and the country more broadly.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that this Question, and the Answer to it she has just given, point to the fact that the fee structure is not allowing the universities to function properly? When will the Government change it?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

From the very moment we came into government we have been considering how to deliver our objective of a funding system for higher education which provides stability and sustainability for institutions, that is fair for students and recognises the challenges they face, and which enables our higher education sector to continue providing its contribution to economic growth. We are looking at a whole range of options, and we will provide further information about those as soon as possible.

Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is a debate that I never thought I would be taking part in, the tone of which we should note. We on these Benches do not like what is going on here in education. Different bits of the education sector are being taxed differently. With special educational needs, you can claim some of the money back. Well, that is always going to run smoothly; there will never be a cashflow problem and nobody will ever get it wrong. Also, it is dependent on that wonderful thing, an education and healthcare plan.

If there is a more unloved bit of the education sector than the education and healthcare plan, I have not seen it. It takes about two years to get—if you have the right lawyer and the right type of parents, who fight for it. Schools are blocking it because they do not want it to go through. The weirdest thing about it is that we have broken the £100 million barrier of public money going into resisting it and going to tribunals. Some 90% plus of the tribunals are granted—it is almost a rite of passage.

If the Government had said that they would help the private sector in dealing with special educational needs, having dealt with this first, they would be getting a much more favourable hearing from me. It is an absurdity to base an exemption on something that favours—guess who?—the educated, wealthy parents who can afford the legal fees to get through. There is something fundamentally wrong here.

I am in favour of making sure that we get better provision in state schools to address special educational needs. However, the whole system has gone wrong. If it is based around this, I cannot see how it is going to happen. Let us remember that private education has been looking after X amount of those with SEN for more than half a century; it is a very established pattern.

Also, the schools doing this have a percentage of pupils who do not have the plan, often because their parents are not prepared to put themselves or their children through the delays and the process of getting that plan. They are creating a critical mass for the economic reality of that school. If we lose these, or a percentage of these, what happens to those schools?

I hope that the Government have, at some point, done an analysis of how many pupils they can lose from this sector. The Government have recognised that it is important, so I hope they have. For pupils who do not have a plan for leaving the sector or going back into a state school, it would help to know the economic benefit. I do not know what it is—is it positive or negative? It would help if we could find out.

This contribution from the independent sector is clearly necessary at the moment. I hope the Government will tell us what they are going to do that will mean it is not necessary. Can they please tell us how they will do this, and when it will arrive? I do not like the idea of people having to go to independent schools to get the education they need but, at the moment, it is clear that they do. Will the Government address this problem in the round, and will they tell us when they are going to get rid of the plan?

King’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jolly, with a sense of sadness. She is someone who arrived, went straight into the hard work and has stayed there for such a long period of time. We will miss her at all levels, and I hope that her retirement in north Cornwall is fun—fun should come first, she deserves that—and also that she does not gloat too publicly about it.

When it comes to maiden speeches today, there is of course the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. I congratulate her both on her role and a very good speech. With her track record, what else did we expect? I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, as well. Both speeches were linked by the emphasis on education, and it is there that I would like to put most of my efforts, although the noble Lord, Lord Wrottesley, just spoke about the football Bill. I will be having a good look at that, about whether we can get something for sport in general out of that bit of administrative mess. Let us wait and see.

When it comes to education, I will concentrate on the area where I have to declare interests. I am chairman of Microlink PC, an assistive technology company, president of the British Dyslexia Association, and I am severely dyslexic myself—that is, apparently, the official definition.

When I look at the current state of special educational needs in this country, I know why these things were done. The road to hell is paved with good intentions: we may not be in hell yet, but we are certainly at about the third stage of purgatory. We have a system which has encouraged specialist law firms to form, to make sure that parents can get the help that they are legally entitled to. If that is not a definition of failure, I do not know what is.

Other Ministers have helped to put some sanity into this system. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, probably deserves some credit for making small changes there as much as she could. As a Minister, she did not need to have assistive technology explained to her—the first I had ever come across. We must have a saner approach to how we deal with this. The idea that you have a £6,000 budget for every child with special educational needs to come out of a school is a fiction. It just does not happen, because that £6,000 is taken away from the school and every other pupil. It would be infinitely saner to start investing some of that fictional spend on specialism and better awareness within the school. You will take the pressure off, and many people can be dealt with like that.

Certain things scare local authorities—which are another big factor here; they are at war. How many years ago did we break the £100 million barrier, with local authorities contesting EHC plans and then losing 90% of the time? It is ridiculous. Can we do something so that the schools are better placed to handle this? Many more people can be helped in the school by a proper, trained person—and be given some actual incentive to do so. The system is frightened of itself. The lawyers come in, and the articulate and informed parents get the help that they need—but those who are not articulate and informed do not. We have to change that.

I realise that I am running out of time. Can we also have certain other things that are needed, such as flexibility? Dyslexia is only one condition. Systematic synthetic phonics is a great phonic tradition for learning to read, but it overloads the short-term memory of dyslexics and other people who have problems reading. The best defence I ever heard from a civil servant on that approach was, “Well, some dyslexics learn with it”. Oh, so some do not? Can we bring back a system where flexibility is taken a must-have when dealing with special educational needs? If we get only more central guidance on how the whole school should conduct itself, we will have more failure. I plead with the Minister to take on board the fact that she will have to address things by individual need not by diktat.

School Funding: Special Educational Needs

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

No, I do not accept that. As I said, this Government have focused very much on supporting schools and teachers to do their critical job brilliantly, and we should not question that. The support that we have put in for special educational needs has been unparalleled compared to any previous era.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the report also says that we have been cutting the use of information technology; I remind the House of my interests. Can the Minister tell us of anything that gives more promise for someone with special educational needs to function well in the school system—and in the workplace later on—than using the correct form of assistive technology?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Having a highly skilled teacher to work with, combined with the assistive technology to which the noble Lord referred, is the critical part. That is one of the reasons that Huawei has worked with the sector: to reform the training not just for SENCOs but for those on their initial teacher training and early career frameworks to support children in mainstream education.

Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, certain themes come across in trying to sum up what has been said in this debate. A clear one is the fact that we do not seem to have a handle on training for skills—a skill you can actually do in later life—or we have a dozen badly attached handles on it. We have an education system that is plugged into passing X number of little dots.

It is also an education system which says that getting your A-levels and going to university is what you should be aiming for, regardless of things such as how much money you will earn and what you actually want to do. You are taught by a group of people who have done this, which I am afraid is one of our problems: we have this conveyor going through. When it comes to skills and training et cetera, we know that you did things such as what used to be NVQ level 4 or HND level 5 when you messed up your A-levels. That was true when I was at a college doing my A-levels. Regardless of whatever you wanted to achieve in life, that is what you were supposed to do. It has become incredibly apparent that we have not thrown that off.

I do not know what hold the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has over the Whips’ Office, but allowing him to have the first dig at any debate means that an Education Minister really has to have a word with their friends. There has to be something here, but the noble Lord is essentially right. We have not taken skills seriously enough. They are secondary options. It probably goes back to grammar schools and secondary moderns, and beyond that, but that is what we have.

I have a couple of special interests that I should declare. I am dyslexic and president of the British Dyslexia Association. I also work for a disability assistance company, Microlink. One thing I have discovered, and indeed raised at many points, is that if you tell one group: “You’ve got to pass English, you’ve got to pass Maths”—which means remembering formulae, when all dyslexics have bad short-term memory; I think I have met one person who denied that in about 40 years—you have actually created a problem. Other groups have problems with it as well. Other people just do not learn because they do not think it applies to them, but you have still got to get English and Maths.

The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, spoke about how your phone has a calculator in it. The calculator has been around an awfully long time; it just happens to be in a convenient place now. There is something else on his phone he did not mention: the voice operation button. Every single computer that you buy today allows you to talk and turns that into text, then will read stuff back to you; it is built in. Twenty years ago, you had to plug the stuff into it, but now it is there. We have an automatic way in to allow you to access information. We are still not fully taking that on board.

Ten years ago, I had a long battle to allow people to take apprenticeship qualifications without passing a written English test—true, it was a tapped English test, but it still had to be a written English test. The examples of that were ridiculous in the end; it was basically that they had not thought of it. A lot of the briefing for this debate spoke about good standards in basic skills; if you are going to expand the base of people who will take these qualifications, you must allow other ways in. Many people struggle with English; it is a difficult language. If you want the academic reason why, the English got conquered by the French and created this non-phonetic structure that we pride ourselves on taking other words into—learn that without a phonetic route.

Going through, you must have a degree of flexibility. The Minister is probably the most informed person on this subject that I have seen sitting in that place in this House. I hope she will be able to give me some assurance that we will make sure that that barrier is not there in the future.

The second thing I should say here goes back to the point that we know what the education pathway is. We also know that the most important people for influencing what you will try to do are your parents; teachers come second. We know that if they had been a banker, for instance, you are likely to become a banker—or an actor or politician; in all those cases, you will think of doing that. If they are unemployed, that is what you think happens to you.

We have one big challenge: careers pathway advice in the future. We have spoken about this, and I believe the Government have been talking about it and doing things. It is a big challenge; do not underestimate it. The full benefits of any change now will probably not be seen for many years, possibly decades, but we have to start at some point. If we are to expand this to take in all the new technologies and developments, we must start now. Can the Minister give us some guidance about how this expanded knowledge of what is available is out there?

I will give a little example of where we need to do it. I am part of our DCMS team and we get presentations by the creative industries—film, et cetera. Do noble Lords know what happens to the back-room boys of the film industry? They are usually graduates, often in English, who decide that they want to go into the creative arts. Then they have to retrain, work on the job and spend time running around. They do not take HND or NVQ qualifications at level 4 or 5 in the subjects they need; they may be difficult to find. Indeed, there are local pathways for skills at this level, which is roughly the training, if I have it right—I have a nod there from the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who is retaking her place, so I will take that as a win. But that is a local pathway, not a national one, and this is a national industry. Surely, we should be expanding our national careers structure to take in level 4 and 5, and say where you can go, because there is a huge unmet need. That need is historic; the first time I heard of a lack of technician-level training in this House was well over 30 years ago.

We have got to start to address—the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, was the first to say it—the idea that we are not taking these things seriously. Unless you do that, you will continue down this path of ignoring where the demand is where you can generate a better than living wage, and go on to do other things.

I could have expanded on these points—a lot of the other information was about social skills—but there are just a few seconds left to me. Everybody says, “tell the teacher to do it”. Teachers have an awful lot to do. Are we encouraging children in our schools—for instance, in sports clubs and arts organisations—to get a taste in school, then go out to where they will meet adults they will have to talk to and interact with? You can acquire many social skills there in a non-professionalised way, with people they may look up to, not people they are forced to say “Sir” or “Miss” to in a classroom. That would be a better way forward.

We can try to make school a smorgasbord of trying things—trying a few essentials to go on and do other things to acquire more skills, inside and outside the structure. Unless we get out of the idea that we are just getting rubber-stamped to a certain level on subjects, then told, “Off you go, life is perfect”, we will continue to fail. It is quite clear that most of us do not learn that way, or we do not learn successfully. Unless we can embrace that at a more fundamental level than we do now, we will merely continue to make the mistakes of today.

Expansion of Free Childcare

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We have to be careful about describing 200,000 additional children going into childcare aged two from this April as something “going disastrously wrong”. I argue that it is a huge success.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I know from some of the information that has come to me that it has been estimated that we are 40,000 workers down on the target to implement this fully—in a sector where about half the workers are saying that they want to leave within the next 12 months due to a lack of pay and overwork. What will the Government do to square that circle?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The figure of 40,000 is the increase in the workforce that we need to achieve by September 2025. That is exactly why we are having a phased introduction to this policy. Even before we increased the rates for providers last year, there was almost a 13,000 increase in the workforce, and we have a number of initiatives to build on that.

School Inspections: Funding

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his remarks. I agree that we have a system in this country with high autonomy in our schools. We trust our school and trust leaders to deliver for our children, but with that autonomy goes high accountability.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, there is a principle that what gets inspected gets done. Can the Government say whether, if inspections are not done properly, we might be doing things badly? We have got to ensure that there are enough resources if we have a system of stick and carrot.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I take the noble Lord’s point, but there is not a lot of evidence to suggest overall that inspection is not done well. There is significant quality assurance of inspections, and, during 2022-23, an overall judgment was changed in only 0.6% of state-funded school inspections.

Schools and Colleges: Special Educational Needs

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 15th April 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that, when meeting the needs of those with special educational needs in the school and college system, a legacy of training and knowledge is retained within those institutions.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name in the Order Paper and remind the House of my declared interests.

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

My Lords, the SEND and alternative provision improvement plan aims to create enduring and inclusive cultures in our schools and colleges, by delivering training and knowledge to improve SEND support. We are delivering teacher training frameworks for greater SEND content, a new qualification for school SENCOs, the universal services programme, national standards, teacher training bursaries for specialist SEND teachers in further education and partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that reply. However, why do we not have a strategic plan to make sure that at least the most common special educational needs—I once again remind the House of my interest in dyslexia—are embedded within schools? We do not want to go through the process of parents having to spot that their child is struggling, but for the school to come to the parents and say, “You have a special educational need”, not the other way round. It is reckoned that over half of special educational needs are not spotted at school.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I would say two things to the noble Lord. First, we do not need a diagnosis for a child to be able to offer them support; it is important that a child gets support as quickly as possible. Secondly, our improvement plan is exactly the strategic plan that the noble Lord refers to.

Student Loan Interest Rates

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the student loan system is renowned for bad repayment rates and, as has just been mentioned, high interest rates. Would it not be the right time to get some system that the Government back and is on the government books? That is what needs to be done to get us away from the accounting procedure. It is ridiculous. I declare an interest as somebody who has a daughter who is coming up to her finals.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think the noble Lord is aware that there is a cap on the interest rate, but I remind the House that interest rates do not impact on the income of borrowers. Repayments are a percentage of income above a repayment threshold, irrespective of interest rates.

Schools: Special Needs Pupils

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for the work she does as chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland. She raised an important point and is absolutely right. In our schools and colleges, support should be in place to address the identified need, barriers and level of impairment, as she described it, so that children and young people can not just participate but thrive in their education and preparation for adulthood. That should not be dependent on the nature of the diagnosis.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, will the Minister comment on a meeting I had earlier today, in which representatives of different ethnic groups were saying that it is much more difficult for them to get diagnosed with dyslexia? This is because the teachers do not know how to pick out dyslexia from things such as second-language problems, and the fact that those parent groups do not know that diagnosis and assessment is for them and not just for white boys.