Higher Education: Loans

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 5th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a visiting professor at King’s College London, an adviser to 2U and an honorary fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. I am discovering that this debate is a kind of valedictory for the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. I would like to say how much I have enjoyed his interventions from the Front Bench during the debates we have both participated in. I am sure he will continue to contribute to this House; we need his contributions, and I have greatly appreciated what he has done.

It is rather peculiar that on this valedictory we are having a debate about these measures, when of course the truth is that the structure of higher education finance we are considering is one that all three parties have introduced during their times in government. If there is any example of a shared consensus on how to finance higher education, it is the Blair/coalition Government proposals for fees and loans. It is now a stable system, and one that all three parties have contributed to and should support.

It is of course not a system of up-front payment; that is its crucial feature. It is a graduate repayment scheme. When graduates repay, at a rate of 9% on earnings above £21,000, it is nothing like having a commercial debt. If a child of mine left university with £25,000 on their credit card or an overdraft of £50,000, I would be extremely worried as a parent. However, knowing that during their working lives they were going to pay back 9% of their earnings above £21,000, and that they would do so only if they were earning more, and if for whatever reason they were earning less they would not have to—in other words, they would be paying through PAYE—would not cause me concern.

Far more importantly, it does not concern students, which is why we have seen steady increases in the numbers of young people going to university as the successive changes have been brought about. Those changes have led to a growth in the number of places, particularly at universities that students have been choosing. We have indeed begun to see growth and shrinkage between different universities, reflecting student choice. We have seen more undergraduates getting their first choice of university. We have seen more places at university in total; indeed, these reforms made it possible to remove the cap on student numbers.

The increase in the number of university places has been particularly beneficial to students from lower-income backgrounds—the marginal students who are not otherwise getting in. Indeed, we have seen a surge in the number of people going to university from low-income backgrounds. At the beginning of this process, nearly 10 years ago when the Blair changes were first brought in and my party opposed them—with exactly the argument that we have been hearing again today: that they would put off low-income students—10% of students from the poorest backgrounds were going to university. After 10 years of these changes, 20% of students from the poorest backgrounds are going to university. That is not good enough—it is still way behind the 60% of young people from the most affluent backgrounds going to university—nevertheless, it is a doubling. We are on a journey in which we are gradually improving social mobility, with more young people from low-income backgrounds having this opportunity.

So the evidence is that they are not, to quote the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, “debt-averse”, for the reason that it is not debt. I love the noble Lord’s example of his time at university. When he left, I suspect—because we are roughly contemporary—that he was facing an income tax rate of 35%. Now graduates face an income tax rate of 29% above a very high threshold. If he was not income tax-averse to going to university, why should they be income tax-averse now if they are facing a 29% rate of PAYE above a high threshold?

I will not detain the House for much longer, but it is possible, if you get into the figures, to take a flow of payments and convert it into a stock. You can create extraordinary figures for liabilities or assets if you take what is essentially a flow of payments and convert it into a stock.

For example, graduates, during their working lives, are very likely to pay at least £500,000 in income tax. As, by and large, people who go to university earn a bit more, they leave university with the prospect of £500,000 of income tax debt, at least, around their necks. Should we be anxious about that? No. In their working lives, if they earn a decent income, of course we will expect them to make a contribution to the Exchequer through income tax. Just as you can apparently create enormous figures for debt by aggregating lots of years of income tax, if we think of the amount that we as a nation will spend on the National Health Service over the next 20 or 30 years, we can also construct an enormous figure by taking £100 billion a year or whatever and multiplying it by 20 or 30. So graduates have an enormous pile of income tax debt—£500,000 at least—in order to pay for trillions of pounds of National Health Service spending. That is because government is a going concern. Neither of those figures should be of concern to us, because we can manage them through the annual flows of income and expenditure.

I should like to draw these brief remarks to a close, however, by welcoming a point in the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, because it is the only way I should conclude a short speech when we are apparently saying farewell to his Front-Bench service. I agree that we need from time to time to look at how the system is working. We do not need to change the structure—we do not need another big review; another Dearing or Brown—but of course there is a social choice in this system. The social choice is the balance between private repayment by graduates, and the public—the generality of taxpayers—taking the burden of writing off repayments that will not be made by graduates who, for example, do not earn enough to reach the threshold. That is a public-private balance which, in a way, reflects that of public and private benefit from higher education.

It is legitimate from time to time to have a debate about what is the right balance between graduate repayment through PAYE and the likely level at which, eventually, graduates’ loans will be written off because they cannot afford to repay them. Incidentally, that would be impossible if we fixed the term in the way the party opposite want, but I think that every five years—once during the lifetime of a Parliament—such a structured review would be worth while.

I end by welcoming that aspect of the noble Lord’s proposal. This need not be done every year: the information is available. Once again, I thank him personally for the lively and well-informed contributions he has made to our debates on higher education and other matters in the recent past.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I particularly support the final part of the Motion to Regret of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. I add my voice to that of other Peers to say how much we have benefited, especially during the passage of the higher education Bill, from the contributions that he has made in this House. Following the example of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, I declare my interest as a visiting professor of King’s College, Cambridge, an honorary fellow of King’s College London and an honorary fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

In the first part of his speech tonight, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, expressed his rejection of what he regarded as the neoliberal approach to higher education. I must confess that my heart warms to that. Part of me wants to recommend to Ministers the recent book by Stefan Collini on higher education, published by Verso, but I accept that for some years we have had a tripartite consensus about these fundamental matters of financing higher education, and I see little possibility of that consensus changing significantly. I should say, as someone who has worked all his life in the university sector, that I understand that it is not the function of the general public just to keep us in the style to which we have been accustomed. None the less, the last part of the noble Lord’s Motion to Regret contains something of great seriousness. I am more uncomfortable than the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, about the spiralling figures in this area. Everything that we look at unnerves me somewhat. Student loans, for example, in the last year rose to £12.6 billion—17.1% as the first cohort of students who claim the higher level of them graduated. Graduates who pay fees up to £9,000 a year are estimated to have left university with an average of £44,000 worth of debt compared with an average of £16,200 faced by students who graduated five years earlier.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

I have one quick word on gold, silver and bronze. It is my understanding that although this system is being used in the first pilot, which I think will be completed in April, it will not necessarily stick. Although the Government are convinced that there must be some sort of distinction between the very best, the not-so-good and the really not too good at all, I think there will be a much subtler way of going about it. With any luck, it will not be restricted to just three categories. I hope that, as this system of analysis—the teaching excellence framework—becomes more familiar, it will be welcomed by the sector and by most of us.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 69, which is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. I have to declare my interest as an elderly pedagogue—as a visiting professor at King’s College London, where the college itself has just produced a statement with its students union. As it happens, and totally coincidentally, this is broadly in line with the arguments that I am about to advance.

I am well aware of the concessions made in this area and grateful to the Government for them. They have gone a considerable way but I am still not convinced that the Government are fully aware of the dangers implicit in a survey of the NSS sort. These dangers are very real, given the Government’s other stated objectives in higher education. For example, at an earlier stage of the debate the Minister praised the Athena SWAN scheme, which is designed to promote the role of women in higher education. But it should be noted that Erasmus University has carried out a survey in similar style to that of the NSS scheme, which demonstrates a clear in-built bias in student reporting against women. The bias was about 11% against women lecturers. There is therefore a real problem.

Anybody involved in this who has looked at these student survey reports, as I did during my 25 years as a professor in the university in Belfast, knows that there are real dangers of bias—and that is one of them. In one case, I have seen the outstanding scholar in the field—in the world—referred to in the most dismissive terms because a scholar is essentially eccentric, and there is not the toleration among young people today of eccentricity that there was a generation ago. It is as simple as that and it is worth making that point.

Secondly, there is the problem of racism. Again, I am absolutely certain that the Government’s approach in this respect is sound and good. In fact, the Minister in the other place, Jo Johnson, has identified himself very much with the race equality charter in higher education, in which the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, has played a significant role. There is no question of where the Government stand on this matter. None the less, I hope that attention will be paid to a paper on this problem produced at the University of Reading by Adrian Bell and Chris Brooks. It shows, in a very calm and not overstated way, from a review of the literature that there is potentially a racist bias. There is certainly something that looks like a bias in favour of white professors in this sort of exercise. There are problems of racism and sexism. There was a very good discussion of this in an article by Chris Havergal in the Times Educational Supplement on 14 August 2016.

Finally, as I have said before, I am an elderly pedagogue, and I have some experience of looking at student assessment forms. We are in this position for two principal reasons. I absolutely accept that across the House we want to see the TEF succeed. One reason is that, once one moves to fees, I am afraid that something like this is absolutely inevitable. The other reason is that the research assessment exercise, which began in a very low-key, relatively amateur way in our universities, became much more specialised. Its format had to be improved. It was not just that scholars and universities had their attention directed towards doing research because that is how your career is made, but because vast amounts of ordinary university time was spent in gaming the exercise. Everybody involved in this knows that this is the case. In other words, we were seeking a spurious scientific metric: “Is a quarter of an article in this journal equal to a third of an article in another journal?”. So it went on. Noble Lords will be amazed, but everybody who works in universities knows that what I am saying is true. The amount of time spent by academics in meetings on this!

I have a vision of how this Bill began in the mind’s eye of a Government. About 10 years ago, there was a story in the Daily Mail in which students went to their professor’s door and found a note saying, “Sorry I can’t be here to teach you this afternoon as I have to go to London for a meeting of the research assessment panel”. That professor would know that his vice-chancellor would never say that that was inappropriate. If we have already made a mistake in doubling down on a pseudo-scientific, over-elaborate metric without realising its dangers, we should not repeat it when it comes to teaching.

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, I believe we can get this right. I declare, or confess, a life spent in higher education. We saw a great wave of—let us say—enthusiastic assumptions that we could get rankings, and then sobriety struck. I was very pleased to see this morning on the BBC education news that Singapore, which was a hotbed of ranking, has decided that it is not the way in which to assess children’s learning, and I do not think it is the way to assess undergraduate or postgraduate learning. It is important that we should be looking not for rankings but for excellence. The reason we should not be looking for rankings is fundamentally that we are looking for excellence, as far as it can be achieved. If you merely rank, you do not know who is excellent. It could be the case that the top-ranked were nevertheless not excellent or that, very fortunately, there was a great deal of excellence even in the middle of the rankings, so let us get rid of rankings and look for excellence.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 133B. They are pretty straightforward. They concern the notion that students should not feel that they are being discriminated against; they should not actually be discriminated against and they should not perceive that they are being discriminated against. The suggestion is that there should be blind-testing as far as possible—and if blind-testing is not possible, there should be a second examiner who should not know the name of the students.

Amendment 133B applies the same principle to admissions. BAME students in particular feel the possibility of discrimination, so this is to reassure them. I beg to move.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Desai. I learned earlier this evening that he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, as did I and the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. That university is about to be further distinguished by the fact that one of its alumni is to become President of the United States in two days’ time. But I did not agree with his saying that it is easy to assess university teaching, partly because of the mixture of research that is involved with teaching and the difficulties of making judgments in that area.

I will come to this issue in Amendment 189, in my name, but there is a real danger that the Government are aiming for a spurious scientificity in their attempt to deal with the problem. On the other hand, Amendments 133A and 133B hit on something that can and should be dealt with to protect students’ interests. It shows greater objectivity in the treatment of students, which is all the more necessary in the epoch we are now in, when these matters are greatly disputed, much more than they were a generation ago. Broadly speaking, it is easier, and I think more appropriate, to meet the requirements of the government manifesto by aiming at things which actually hit at what I might call the fecklessness of university teachers—not marking properly or quickly enough, not being good enough at getting in contact, not replying to emails. Those are things that legislation should be aiming to correct to protect teachers, but it should not aim at a spurious scientific metric, which is quite a dangerous thing to do.

The thinking behind Amendments 133A and 133B, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Desai, is very solid and goes to the heart of putting, as the Minister said, the student and the legitimate protection of the student’s interests at the heart of things, rather than seeking a bogus popularity among students. This is a legitimate concern for students and they have a right to be protected in this matter.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, as someone who is not an academic, I find it quite surprising that amendments of this sort should be necessary, but given that they have been moved and supported by very long-established academics, it is clear that there is an issue here. I thought that that blind-marking assessment was what happened all the time in the established universities, but it may not be the situation in some of the newer or smaller providers, and the question is what will happen with some of the future providers. To me, this is something any student should have a right to expect. Nobody, whatever their background, should be discriminated against, consciously or unconsciously, by whoever is involved in marking an assessment. If we are being told by academics, as it appears we are, that these amendments are necessary, I would certainly want to support them. I hope the Minister will take it in good faith that they are necessary.

Birmingham Schools

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right that everybody needs to take their fair share of the blame in this. Nobody comes out of this particularly well. One could say, “How did the local authority miss these issues for years?”. It was only when Ofsted did a batch inspection of 21 schools and saw a common pattern of behaviour which had accelerated dramatically in terms of threatening behaviour in recent years that it became absolutely clear what was happening. As I said in relation to the actions we have taken with Park View Educational Trust, we dealt with these matters extremely speedily. We have now substantially tightened our procedures in relation to schools becoming academies and we will, as a result of events in Birmingham, look further at that.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister acknowledge that we owe a great debt to Peter Clarke for this report and that its modulated contents disprove many of the concerns in the media at the time of his appointment? It is a modulated, precise report. As to its content, after the Minister’s Statement, I am much clearer about the Government’s thinking on the governance of these schools. However, the report also criticises the conduct of a number of teachers. I am not sure how the discussion is going to develop on the point of the teachers—as opposed to governors—whose conduct is discussed in the Clarke report.

Birmingham Schools

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Monday 9th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, may we hear from the noble Lord, Lord Bew?

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, the great lesson of Northern Ireland is to combat not just violent acts but also extreme ideologies, communal ideologies and religious ideologies of bigotry. Can the Minister assure us, in the light of the statements of both the Home Secretary and the Education Secretary in the other place this afternoon, that the Government are still united on the basis that it is necessary to combat the ideologies of extremism as well as violent acts?

[Lord Nash]

I can absolutely give the noble Lord that assurance.

Education: Reform of GCSEs

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I thank the noble Baroness for her comments. It is true that we now have the best generation of teachers that we have ever had. However, clearly we need to do more to improve teacher training, which in this country is very patchy. We need both to improve our TT colleges’ standards generally and have more training in schools.

I am aware of the issue of summer-born children and have seen the statistics, which are stark. I would be delighted to discuss the matter further to make sure that this is properly taken into account. The same goes for the agricultural and horticultural industries.

We believe that the turnaround time is long enough, but we will make sure that all head teachers are aware of the issue of the crossover turnaround time.

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his earlier reply, in which he said that there will be discussions with the devolved Assemblies on the implications of these important reforms. May I ask him about the underlying spirit of these discussions? The Minister for Education in the Northern Ireland Executive—ironically, in this context, a Sinn Fein Minister—has said that he wants to see uniformity of standards maintained throughout the whole of the United Kingdom. Will the Minister reassure the House that this will also be the approach of the Government of the United Kingdom? These will be difficult discussions, but I hope the Minister can shed some light on the principles with which the Government will approach them.

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a good point. The principles will be based on a strong attempt to achieve a uniformity of standards, consistent with our belief that this system of standards must be a rigorous one.

Schools: History

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Thursday 20th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I, along with other noble Lords, would like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for securing a debate on this important subject. I have to declare an interest, or perhaps more accurately a passion, as a practising professional historian, and acknowledge that I am the secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Archives and History. Perhaps I may say something briefly about that. One of the greatest pleasures of that role was the fact that earlier this year, the all-party group decided to make an award to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, who spoke earlier in the debate, and Professor Eric Hobsbawm, acknowledging the tremendous contribution they have made to the study of history in this country.

I want briefly to draw attention to the fact that it is often said that we are a parochial people. Actually, one of the most striking things about this country is the way in which, more than any other country in the world, we produce major historians of other people’s countries. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, is a striking example of this. It is an indication of the fact that the accusation of parochialism in that respect is entirely false.

However, today I want to make the case for more teaching of British history in our schools, and I want to make it with some care. I accept in part the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, earlier in the debate that the school timetable is inevitably limited and other subjects have to be accommodated, and I suspect that it will be a struggle to find more time for history. But the content of what is being taught in our schools at the moment is a real issue. I also want to make clear the spirit in which I approach the issue of the teaching of British history in our schools. A diary entry for 13 September 1975 in John Rae’s memoir—he was the headmaster of Westminster School and one of our progressive public school headmasters—goes as follows:

“I am disturbed to read a series of articles in the Times Educational Supplement arguing that as Britain is now multicultural, schools should no longer pass on a monocultural tradition. What nonsense. If the history and literature of this country were watered down to suit ethnic minorities, the United Kingdom would be little more than a geographic expression”.

It would be easy for me to say in the aftermath of the speeches of the noble Baronesses, Lady Berridge and Lady Benjamin, that that is a very defensive and negative reaction. In fact, when I talk about the importance of teaching more British history in our schools, I want to make it clear that I do so entirely in the spirit of the two speeches we have just heard. But it is important to remember that, as his diary reveals, John Rae was an SDP voter at the time and saw himself as a progressive, as well as to recall the important changes that have occurred in our thinking about modern British history since then. It is also important to note that there can be no question of having a modern British history that does not acknowledge the multicultural realities of our society.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the University of Cambridge to give the first lecture on modern British history at a graduate seminar. I talked afterwards to dons and fellows of colleges, one of whom was a senior historian not born in this country, but taught and raised in a major European country. He has worked in Cambridge for the last few years. From his vantage point as a European, that historian expressed concerns about the way in which our undergraduates are now equipped as they arrive at university, even great universities such as Cambridge and Oxford:

“There is no notion of the wider meaning of Britishness—Scotland, Wales and Ireland besides England—let alone the Anglo world of the Empire. This is manufacturing parochialism and it is altering the collective memory of where this country comes from”.

The truth is that we have ended up manufacturing a certain form of parochialism, but the students all know about Hitler and world wars. I think that this is a real problem which we have to face up to. It is important to understand that if we want to teach people the virtues of tolerance as against intolerance, there are plenty of examples of this from our own British political history. If we want to teach people the importance of the equality of citizenship in our country, the struggle for Catholic emancipation is in its way as significant as the struggle for civil rights in the United States. It is important that people learn the lessons as they occurred in our own society.

It is also very important that the current debate does not become politicised. When we talk about the need for more British history, there is a danger that it becomes a kind of parody argument in which apparently those of us who are concerned about the subject want to hear more about kings and queens, make people learn more dates and so on. That is presented against the exciting and interesting things to be learnt by studying Hitler. This is truly a parody. In fact, within the historical profession at the moment there is a burgeoning consensus around the issue. It is important to avoid a false right/left debate on the subject. There are Conservatives—the noble Lord, Lord Luke, remarked on the failure to understand who Churchill was in our history—who are concerned about the knowledge of British history among our young people, but it is also the case that Tristram Hunt, probably the most distinguished historian in the new Labour intake in the other place and the great biographer of Engels, is on the record as saying that we now need more British history in our schools.

It is absolutely vital that we do not have a sterile right/left debate, one that has already started to a degree in the London Review of Books. There is actually a burgeoning consensus among historians, and it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge that if there is a patriotic tradition in this country, it is of the left as well as of the right, and of the centre. We cannot have more history about Nelson and Wellington without Peterloo and the Tolpuddle martyrs. I heartily endorse everything that was said by the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, about conflict and consensus. There is no need to get involved in a false argument. I conclude by asking a question. Is there a case for a national council of historians to advise on these matters? One of the remarkable things about the British historical profession is that it is very good and has a tremendous range of scholars working within it. Probably what happens on the whole in our schools does not fully reflect the actual quality of work that goes on among British historians and their commitment to knowledge of the past. There is the possibility to avoid sterile polemics and to proceed on the basis of understanding and agreement. I hope it is something that the Government might give just a little thought to.

Education: Pupils and Young People

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Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for securing this debate. I have been in this House long enough to understand the great passion, sincerity and knowledge that she brings to this topic, which she showed in her opening speech today. I also thank the Minister for coming to the debate under difficult circumstances.

Already today the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, has raised the issue of the marginalisation of language teaching in our schools. This must be part of the theme of excellence. I will talk for a minute about Germany. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned the German example from one angle. From another angle, one of the most striking things is the decline in the teaching of German in our schools, and also the way in which we are now disproportionately dependent for our modern language teaching on private schools. These two themes are very worrying. Many noble Lords rightly believe that China is the workshop of the world and that Japan is an extraordinarily important country. We will always have difficulty finding enough good teachers in this area. On the other hand, the teaching of German, for example, should be a relatively easy problem to correct. I take some comfort from the fact that the coalition Government seem to accept that this is a special difficulty which they will address—I refer to the speech of the Secretary of State in September.

I turn to a more complicated problem of the statistics on which we base our discussions of education. We have received for this debate an excellent briefing pack that contains many statistics and comments on our own performance, and comparative references to other countries. I accept the tremendous value of this. We have to take into account that it appears that in a number of crucial league tables, we are slipping down. I am absolutely certain that it is right that the coalition Government take this seriously.

However, as anyone involved in education knows, it is very difficult to assess correctly the value of statistics either across time or between different countries. Exactly how much are we really comparing like with like? We all now believe that the Finnish system is marvellous—perhaps the best in the world. However, if one stops and thinks, one realises that the world is more frequently rocked by, for example, Israeli ingenuity than Finnish ingenuity. We all shudder at the statistic that 57 per cent of French pupils are required to learn certain years by rote. We all think, “Thank heavens. At least we haven’t got that wrong. We don’t do that”. Then again, if the French system is so bad, why is there so much evidence of tremendous French cultural, intellectual and scientific vitality? Therefore, one needs to be cautious about these statistics.

However, there is one statistic that cannot be challenged, and it brings home to us the great difficulties that we now face in our educational policy. I refer to Northern Ireland’s performance in A-level results compared with those of the rest of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland has not changed its educational system in the way that the rest of the UK has done over the past generation and a half and, again this year, Regional Trends, volume 40, confirms that A-level results in Northern Ireland are much better. For a long time people could say that at the bottom level Northern Ireland did less well than England, but the results at that level are now roughly the same.

That is an important statistic but there is something even more important to remember, and it is often forgotten. I refer to the perfect control experiment in the social sciences. When I was a schoolboy in Belfast in the 1960s, Northern Ireland was behind the rest of the United Kingdom in its results, and that provided a perfect control experiment. From the figures, one knows that something has gone wrong in the rest of the United Kingdom—there can be no argument with that statistic. This, I think, is the difficulty that we now face in our educational thinking. The academies project is the only and best way of facing up to that difficulty because, if it works as planned, it will, I hope, increase the number of schools with an esprit de corps. One feature of Northern Ireland is the large number of schools with an esprit de corps, and this seems to be the one way forward. As many noble Lords have said, we are very fortunate that this generation of teachers is the best qualified that we have ever had, because that is what we need.

Education: History

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Thursday 8th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, as I have admitted before in the House, I am a sort of historian myself, so I accept the point the noble Lord makes about ideology. It is, of course, always difficult to draw the line between history and politics. Things that I still think of as being current affairs my children are now learning as history. Therefore, I recognise that point. However, in trying to get that balance right, it is important that we try to move away from a sort of gobbet-sized approach to history. For instance, 17th century English history, which is very rarely taught, has many parallels with what is going on in Britain today in terms of the extent of change. If one could get that development, one would do a better job.

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that when Niall Ferguson was asked on the “Analysis” programme about two weeks ago whether he would accept the role of history tsar and whether he was being brought into the Government to write a national history curriculum, he replied, “Certainly not, because I think a national history curriculum is an abomination”? Furthermore, all Governments have their favourite historians. In the lifetime of the previous Government, Professor Linda Colley’s work was often on the Downing Street website. The great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm became a Companion of Honour. This Government may have historians that they admire as well. This is all to the good as long as, in the case of all these distinguished historians, their work is of sufficient quality to inspire our young people in sixth forms and universities, whatever the ideological background that might be perceived to exist.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I was not aware of those remarks by Professor Ferguson, but I agree with the noble Lord that if the Government were to be lucky enough that academics of his distinction, or of the distinction of other historians with a different perspective, were able to help to shape thinking, that is something that one ought to welcome.

Academies Bill [HL]

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Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, Amendments 191 and 114 are intended to probe the Government’s view of the long term of this reform and speak to concerns expressed elsewhere in this debate. In answer to questions about the Statement on free schools, I think that the Minister spoke of pilots, although I may be wrong. The amendments to which I speak ask the Government to pilot the Bill’s approach in limited areas, or initially to cap the numbers of these new academies so that the effect on nearby schools can be considered in the light of experience. It seems reasonable to me that if the effects that have been forecast of the disruption and funding shortfalls for vital services transpire, we will know that proceeding further along this road would be an error. Other amendments in this grouping discuss the need for openness and the consideration of the wider effects of this policy when proceeding with changes of status on this scale.

Amendments 119 and 177 relate to the criteria for acceptance of an application for conversion to an academy. Crucially, they relate to the need to consider the local impact of the change in the round and to consider the impact on community cohesion of the change to academy status. These constitute very real concerns. The amendment to which the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, spoke also addresses the local impact of these schools. I support the amendment. Questions need to be answered in relation to the example that he gave of a school in Suffolk.

Amendment 76A seeks to introduce a requirement for academies introducing new or significant sixth-form provision to consult existing providers of sixth-form courses, including sixth-form colleges and FE colleges in the area. It also seeks to ensure that academies are part of regional and subregional planning groups for 16 to 19 provision. This will ensure that there is no duplication of existing provision within an area and avoid inefficiency.

Local authorities currently act as commissioners for courses for 16 to 19 year-olds funded by the Young People’s Learning Agency. They engage with all providers across local authority boundaries to ensure that courses are provided which meet the needs of students and provide the best value to taxpayers. We would need to be assured that that process would continue with academies, because there needs to be an overview.

Amendment 92A seeks to introduce a fair funding element to 16 to 19 year-old provision in academies to ensure that 16 to 19 year-olds are not treated more favourably than existing providers of education for 16 to 19 year-olds. Currently, if an academy provides or introduces new 16 to 19 year-olds’ education, the funding is top-sliced from that which is given via the YPLA to other providers in the area. This funding is provided on the basis that all the places offered by the academy will be filled.

That is not the case for other providers, which are funded on the basis of the places that they have filled in previous years. It can also create an anomalous situation whereby, if places are not taken up at an academy, but the students instead choose to go to a sixth-form college, it is still the academy rather than the college that receives this funding for those places. That creates a financial incentive for academies to offer courses for which there is no or little new demand. I am not an expert in these areas, but when I was alerted to these specific issues, it seemed that these were the very issues that we should be probing and seeking answers on from the Minister.

These amendments are not designed to shackle the Secretary of State and they do not prevent him continuing with his plan. They merely seek to assure those who have perhaps been unnerved by the speed with which he is pursuing an end to any form of community accountability for schools.

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I shall address some of the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, in his Amendment 4. Much of this is an issue of context. I was struck by the example of the case in Sudbury, which he gave in his speech at Second Reading. It is of concern that what we are doing with this new second phase of the academies project will leave certain schools and communities behind.

However, I want to suggest an angle of vision on this which I hope will be helpful in a small way to the Committee. If you look at a very traditional elitist system such as that which prevails in Northern Ireland—the grammar school system—which is different markedly from the system that is being discussed, although there is a small grammar school element to it, you will see that the results achieved at A-level and GCE are by far the best in the United Kingdom. At the bottom, the results are not so good—but nor are they now so divergent from those in England. Girls are actually doing better in Northern Ireland. Boys in Northern Ireland are doing worse than in England. However, those results tell you something: the way that our system has evolved over a generation or more is that we now accept that Northern Ireland will for ever lead the academic attainment lists at the highest level in the United Kingdom unless there are changes in policies. They tell you that at the bottom level this elitist system is not as bad in relation to England as we once thought it was. It is actually very close indeed. It is bad to be at the bottom level in England and in Northern Ireland.

The point I am trying to make is that the Northern Irish grammar school system, for all its many joys, was not formed in a political culture whereby a Minister for Education talked, as he was talking today, about using the state as a weapon for equity. In other words, the context is enormously important. It is important that the context is right when we discuss these questions and that the policy of the Government is directed towards greater equality of opportunity, which seems to be, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, conceded, where the Minister is coming from. He may not be quite the Marxist-Leninist that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, talked about, but none the less that seems to be the approach. The status quo is leaving people behind. We already have a segregated system. The status quo is already having negative effects, and the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, whose point about unintended consequences I accept, is rightly concerned that they will become more marked as side effects of this new system.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords—