Youth Unemployment
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I thank my noble friend and pay tribute to him. He was a reforming Minister in the last Labour Government and did lots of work in this area. I am conscious that I learned a lot from him in those days. He is absolutely right that this is both a scandal and a challenge for the economy.
One of the difficulties we have nowadays is trying to work out how we reach young people if they are not engaged in society. I was talking to an experienced youth worker recently, who said that she is worried about the range of young people who are simply off-grid. It is not just that we are not aware of them: they are not on benefits or claiming anything; they are simply disappearing. Part of our job is to go out there and find out where they are. For example, trailblazers in different parts of the country are looking at how you track down young people who are not on our radar and then support them, draw them in and engage them in their spaces.
We are trying to find more creative ways to do this. I have talked to young people for whom school just did not work—they failed or were failed by school. But it is possible that they will engage in different kinds of apprenticeships or skills-based training, and that work experience might draw them back in. Our job is to find these young people, work out what will make the difference for them individually and give it to them.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, I too welcome and commend the Minister’s passion and commitment. I recently met around 100 young people, as part of the work our diocese is doing, and their number one concern is the impact of technology and AI on their future jobs. There is now robust research in the United States on the likely impact of AI on entry-level jobs. Are the Government aware of that research and do they intend to commission research on the likely impact on the UK of artificial intelligence and strategies that might emerge?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The right reverend Prelate raises a really interesting point, and I am very glad to hear that he is talking to young people individually. I would always be interested to hear more about what they say to him, because I find that I learn a lot more from what young people say than from what anybody else says.
He raised a really important point about AI, which I know is an area in which he does a lot of work. We are starting to witness the impact of AI in the labour market, but there is uncertainty over the scale of that impact, especially over the next four years. The Government are planning against a range of plausible future outcomes. A lot of work is going into this in government. Most forecasters project that, in the end, AI will lead to a net increase in employment but with varying impacts across different sectors and for different people. When you get this kind of change and churn in the labour market, the people who lose out most are those at the margins. Our job is to try to make sure that we give those who would otherwise not succeed the skills to do so. For example, the Government are investing to transform apprenticeships and looking at more shorter courses and ways to give young people a chance to gain skills in new areas, such as digital and AI. We are conscious of it and are very much working on it.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(3 weeks, 4 days ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and to associate myself with his remarks. I speak to Amendment 427C on behalf of my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, in whose name the amendment stands. He very much regrets his inability to attend today’s Committee debate. His amendment offers a reasonable and practical solution to the finely balanced tension between freedom and regulation in education provided by religious bodies.
As things stand, the Bill recognises two types of full-time education: education undertaken in either a school or an independent educational institution. The latter would need to be registered according to the 2008 Act and the requirement to register would apply to education that is more than “part time”. The need to include education provided by religious bodies in national mechanisms for oversight is well understood by all. The Church of England, for example, has taken enormous strides forward in both safeguarding training and safeguarding processes in local parishes that welcomed an average of 95,000 children each week in 2023.
We welcome the Government’s goal to strengthen educational oversight across the nation but, in relation to education provided by religious bodies, there are three issues with the Bill as it stands. First, as the National Society for Education wrote in its response to the Government on safeguarding in out-of-school settings:
“Compulsory state registration for religious activity involving children would significantly extend the role of the state in civil society and represents a considerable and major change to the nature of religious freedom”.
Freedom of religion and belief is a precious human liberty and legislators should think very carefully about the unintended consequences, as well as the intended ones, before enacting regulations that might inadvertently threaten that freedom and inhibit religious diversity.
The possibility of unintended consequences brings me to my second point. There is a risk that imposing extra bureaucratic burdens on many volunteer-run out-of-school settings would have an unintended chilling effect. Those unintended consequences might easily follow from a new burden to tot up religious educational activities, such as choir practice, for fear of exceeding the part-time hours below which registration is not required. This is to say nothing of the practicalities of securely and safely holding all the personally identifiable data that registration and keeping details current would impose on the Government as well as the religious educational institution.
Thirdly and finally, there are the difficult edge cases such as yeshivas that do not quite fit any of the categories that the Bill proposes. No one disputes that such out-of-school cases demand adequate scrutiny to ensure that children are being educated both broadly and safely, in addition to any religious component of their education.
This brings me to the amendment proposed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. It would offer a balanced and proportional route forward by ensuring that the provisions of the Bill can be met where a setting such as a yeshiva limits itself only to religious education; that the local authority has been clearly notified that an attendee has suitable out-of-school education separately and with sufficient time set aside to allow children to receive that broader education; and that the provider of that religious education demonstrates to the local authority that it provides the required safeguarding measures. I commend the amendment to the Minister and the Committee.
Lord Glasman (Lab)
My Lords, I first thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for tabling this amendment. I respect his gentleness and his nobility—it is very much appreciated.
I begin with just a couple of remarks. I very rarely speak in the House and, when I got here, I was given very sage advice that the more you speak, the less people listen. I therefore beg the attention of the Committee in this case, as it is a matter of great importance to me. It may come as a surprise to my fellow Labour Peers but, in the 14 years that I have been here, I have never once voted against the party. Party loyalty is a crucial part of our constitutional system. I therefore just say that this is a very important matter to me. It is not a matter of conscience—Clement Attlee used to say to Ministers who publicly rebelled, “I thought that conscience was supposed to be a still, small voice”—but a matter of obligation.
I am the Lord of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill. Stoke Newington does not really matter in this case, because people there do not care, but Stamford Hill is the centre of the last remnant of European Hasidic Jewry. Their origins mainly lie around 17th-century Ukraine but also Poland. Of the 6 million who were murdered by the Nazis, 3.5 million were Hasidic Jews. They were absolutely devastated by that.
They are a very strange bunch—very mystic, spiritual and absolutely not involved in Zionism or things like that. Those who live in Israel refuse to serve in the Israeli army. They are non-violent, and very committed to exile and a kind of redemption through prayer. For those here who are Muslim, I would say that they are very close to the Sufi tendency. For those who are Christian, I would say that they are probably closest to the Amish. In the film “Witness” with Harrison Ford, there is actually that mistaken identity moment with the child.
I was brought up close to them but not of them. Obviously, my story is different. At the age of 14, I became a socialist and an atheist and my troubles began—and the party’s troubles also probably began at that moment. I have always had a relationship with them, both family and personal. To me, they are a very precious remnant of a destroyed culture. It is a glory to our country that this very peculiar religious community could exist only in our country. It only survived in our country in all of Europe.
I could tell you stories I was told when I was young. They had no idea that all their rabbis, community and family were in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and those areas. After the war, there was no one there. I met people who went on delegations to find their family and find out why their letters were not being answered. All were destroyed. I have personally travelled through Ukraine and gone to the villages and towns where Jews made up 60% or 70%. Nobody is there. It is all gone. The synagogues are ruined; the cemeteries are desecrated. In only our country did this community survive.
They are a historical anomaly. They should not really exist; they should have been wiped out. It was not only the Nazis; the Bolsheviks—the communists—absolutely laid them to waste. They abolished religious education and yeshivas were illegal, so we should take great pride that our country is unique in Europe in having some kind of continuity of presence for this community and in the way things were sorted out with the yeshivas.
I heard very carefully what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, and I share completely this desire to try to find some accommodation and understanding of how this works. It is a ridiculous state of affairs that I have to be in Stamford Hill and defend Bridget Phillipson from the accusation of being a Bolshevik. This is an insane circumstance. I assure them that she is absolutely not, but the historical memory of the community is precisely reminiscent of the Soviet Union: suddenly, their education will be banned, their way of life will be criminalised and they will be packing their bags. It is a very moving situation. As I say, I speak as a matter not of conscience but of obligation.
The arrangement we came to in the 1944 Act was very wise, in my opinion. It is absolutely vital to say that the accommodation was based on this: the yeshivas are not schools; children are home-educated. However, they spend an awful lot of time in these yeshivas, studying the Talmud and these things. I assure noble Lords that I was very grateful not to be part of that, but that is what they do. So the children are, technically speaking, home-schooled.