Covid-19: Children

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I know that we are all grateful to the noble Baroness for this debate and for her outstanding speech. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of our society and of our economy will be defined by the way in which we educate, support and safeguard this generation of children. Nothing matters more, and nothing is more deserving of public investment, if we are to build back better—or indeed build back at all.

The impact of the pandemic on schooling has been huge, especially for children from poorer families. The NAO recently concluded that our response should have been more effective in addressing especially the problems faced by disadvantaged children. We all know now that the Recovery Commissioner has resigned because, in his view, the support made available fell far short of what was needed. The Early Intervention Foundation has detailed the deterioration in children’s well-being and mental health, and the former Children’s Commissioner revealed, as the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, said, that more than 800,000 vulnerable children are in fact invisible to public services.

By any standards, our children, and therefore we, are facing a crisis, which demands not a series of funding initiatives but a concerted national effort to put children first—not just a recovery plan but a concerted national effort. What might that involve? First, we need a strategy. I too am a member of the Lords Public Services Committee and was, frankly, shocked recently to hear a senior civil servant tell us that there is no strategy in government to address the needs of vulnerable children. That says to me that there is no way of setting priorities, co-ordinating action, allocating resources and measuring success. We need a strategy. We also need leadership. The PM’s support for this cause is welcome, but we need to go further. The call by many for a Cabinet Minister with responsibility for children should, on this occasion, be heeded. We need more than a champion, figurehead or tsar; we need someone who can authorise action and be accountable for progress.

There is no disguising the fact that we also need resources far in excess of the current allocations—and not just for education, which has been touched on today. The independent review of social care which, as we have heard, has published its first report, says something with which I agree:

“There is no situation in the current system where we will not need to spend more—the choice is whether this investment is spent on reform … or propping up an increasingly … inadequate … system.”


This is an issue for which resources are important. Although we have made resources available for business and of course for the NHS, allocations to education, social care and mental health have been, frankly, disappointing. We also need to pay more than lip service to the lived experience of parents and children when we come to design our services, so that they are more relevant and more accessible. The policy lab in the Cabinet Office has done some brilliant work around this redesign of services; why cannot we use it as we move forward on the children’s plan?

We could do more to incentivise and deliver collaboration between central government departments, and between the centre and local authorities, the health service, the police and civil society. Because it is nowhere near good enough at the moment and, too often, it leaves children receiving disjointed, fragmented services that cost much more than they should. For example, at the present moment, the directors of children’s services have a statutory responsibility to co-ordinate action, but there is no similar responsibility placed upon health or the police, except in regard to safeguarding. We also need to find ways of sharing data better, so that we can identify quickly where we need to target our support, or just understand the plight of individual children. Many schools at present are not even made aware that a pupil is receiving support from social services, and that quite simply is not good enough.

Finally, as other speakers have said, we need to invest more in early intervention and prevention, because at the moment our actions are often too reactive. Again, the report from the independent review of social care makes the same point today: it says that spending is too often skewed towards acute services and away from effective health. I would say that that is true of every service that impacts on children. For me, putting children first is, as they say in the vernacular, a no-brainer. They just deserve better than we are currently able to give them.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Bichard Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill because it acknowledges the importance of skills and vocational learning to the economy, productivity and, let us not forget, the capacity of people to fulfil their personal potential. I hope it will be a significant step towards reversing the huge decline in adult learning we have experienced in recent years which, as some of us believe, is overdue. But whether it is successful in doing that will depend not on bold ambitions and warm words but on the detailed delivery. In particular, it will depend on some issues which are either not covered at all in the Bill or referred to only in outline. I want to touch on one or two of those today.

The first is advice and guidance. The White Paper for skills and jobs rightly says that we need:

“Clear and outcomes-focused careers information”


and that it is

“fundamental to the success of our reforms.”

The White Paper says:

“We need impartial, lifelong careers advice and guidance available to people when they need it, regardless of age, circumstance, or background.”


I would also say that we need a system in which the Careers and Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service are working more effectively together to create an all-age careers system better able to support learners seeking to navigate what will be a much more complex system following the implementation of this legislation. I would also like to see us providing more face-to-face coaching, not just a better digital information bank. I think that will be especially important as we exit the pandemic. I know that Sir John Holman has been appointed to advise on all of this, but we still await his recommendations, and it is unfortunate that it has not been possible to incorporate them in the Bill. Perhaps the Minister can update us about where these recommendations are, when they will be published and how they will sit alongside the Bill.

The second issue is the lifelong learning entitlement. The Open University has pointed out that this is presented in the Bill as a bolt-on, creating a separate funding system for modular study. A more ambitious reform would have been to create a unified credit-based system for learning that does not distinguish between different modes of study. But leaving that to one side for the moment, Clauses 14 and 15 leave some very important questions unanswered—questions which I have raised before in the House in debates on lifelong learning. For example, will people be able to use their entitlement to study at an equivalent or lower level to their previous studies? The local skills improvement plans might well encourage them to do so. I know that this is subject to consultation, but could we not take action on this earlier? What will the repayment terms be for any loan? Will we continue—perversely, I think—to penalise students who choose to study at a distance? How exactly will the credit transfer arrangements work between providers?

Then there is the cost of study itself, including living costs. This is not addressed in the Bill; it is another matter for consultation, but it is key to the successful implementation of these reforms. The Welsh Government recently introduced reforms to tackle this by extending maintenance support, including means-tested grants, to all students, regardless of the mode of study. Importantly, they also introduced lower tuition fees for part-time study. As a result, they have been rewarded with a huge increase in participation, which is what we all want. Will the Minister tell us whether the Government are thinking along similar lines?

I agree with the principle of having the employer’s voice heard clearly in the skills system and for skills providers to be responsive to, and accountable to, local employers for their provision. Actually, some older Members will remember that this was one of the reasons why we once had a department for education and employment. Some colleges and independent training providers have too often focused on offering courses and programmes which generated much-needed funding but were not necessarily relevant to local employment needs. What I struggle with, though, is why this is being piloted with chambers of commerce and other representative bodies when they are not resourced for the task and sometimes do not have very strong membership bases. We already have skills advisory panels that bring together employers, providers and funding agencies and are supported by learning and enterprise councils, so do we really need to introduce additional complexity? Why not build on the existing skills advisory approach and make a more inclusive way of providing advice on employers’ needs?

Finally, as I suspect others may not raise it, I shall say a word about independent training providers. The Bill rightly focuses on supporting colleges and further education, but independent training providers at their best can be more fleet of foot and more responsive to employer and local skill needs. In my local area here in Gloucestershire, many providers feel that the skills Bill could make their existence more perilous. They recognise the importance of offering high-quality provision and being sustainable businesses, but many feel that they will be disadvantaged by, for example, not being able to bid into the skills accelerated development fund and being seen as second-tier providers for various contracts. During the passage of the Bill, we need to ensure that it is possible for independent training providers to continue to provide their best and to strengthen in the future.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, on their maiden speeches and bid farewell to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth, whose contributions I have always enjoyed. He will understand that, as a Southampton man, I am not easily persuaded that anything good can come out of Portsmouth but, today, I will happily make an exception and I wish him well.

For seven years, I was privileged to be vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts London, the largest and still the best centre for art and design learning in Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that I am speaking today about the need to protect funding for the arts at all stages of education, but not least in higher education. I do so because of the Government’s recently announced proposal not to prioritise subjects such as music, dance, drama, design and performing arts in HE funding allocations. This is misguided and ill judged and will do incalculable damage not just to the arts but to the future prospects of the UK at this critical juncture. That is not just because of the massive contribution our creative industries make to our GDP, but because our future economic success and our capacity to tackle unprecedented challenges like climate change and an ageing population will, above all, demand innovation: innovation from business to stay ahead of the competition, and innovation from the public sector to ensure that the efforts of science and industry are not wasted.

That kind of innovation requires people who are creative, who challenge accepted wisdom and think outside the box—the very kind of people that our art and design schools have produced in abundance down the years. Yes, our art schools produce great artists and great performers but, above all, they develop creative thinkers who are worth their weight in gold. They also produce a seemingly endless supply of great designers. People like Jonathan Ive, who transformed Apple, the late, great Terence Conran and the likes of Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, have all taken ideas and scientific discoveries and turned them into world-beating projects which, it is no exaggeration to say, have changed the way we live our lives. Time and again, we have seen how great science needs great design to realise its potential—and time and again, we seem to turn a blind eye to all the evidence.

At a more human level, for many people art and design education offers the only route to fulfilling their personal potential. For me, the greatest gift that education can offer is the opportunity for someone to realise their particular talent. Many of the brilliant students I worked with at the university had not found traditional academic subjects easy and had struggled in their studies at school. Alexander McQueen—one of our greatest ever fashion designers—would have told you that this was his experience before he went to Central Saint Martins. Why should we deny people such as Lee McQueen the chance to make their unique contribution and to enrich our lives so wonderfully by so doing?

There is more. A year or so ago, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, chaired an APPG that demonstrated the powerful contribution the arts is now making to our physical and mental health. Social prescription, in one form or another, is now accepted by the vast majority of medics as an effective way of treating many debilitating conditions. But we need a pool of trained providers to deliver treatments, and we need them now as we exit the pandemic.

I know that some of us feel that the term “world-beating” has been devalued, but there is no doubt that Britain is world-beating in the world of art and design. We did not achieve that by chance, but because of the excellence of our learning centres—envied around the world—and their ability to recruit students from all social classes and many different cultures to create a melting pot of talent. Why on earth would we want to endanger that? Why on earth, when we need to build and market a brand that is unique to the UK, would we turn away from something that has long defined us in the eyes of the world? I know that we will be told that these cuts will not have that impact, and we can spend hours debating the numbers, but the most depressing aspect of this affair is that it suggests that the Government still do not understand the critical contribution that the arts make to our national endeavour.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

May I ask the noble Lord to wind up?

[Lord Bichard (CB) [V]]

Even worse, it suggests that the Government think we have to decide between the arts and science in the way we allocate our resources.