Higher Education Sector

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Blunkett]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they have taken to promote the attractiveness of the higher education sector, and what work is being undertaken by the Department for Education and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to promote the sector internationally.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name and draw attention to my declaration of interests.

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

My Lords, this Government are committed to maintaining our world-leading higher education sector and promoting its attractiveness internationally. The Secretary of State for Education, in her first speech, set out the valuable contribution that international students make to our universities, communities and country. We are also working with FCDO and DBT colleagues on a new international education strategy, to ensure that we are maximising the impact of our education system globally.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My noble friend and I know, to our cost, how difficult it is to get the Home Office—or the ONS, for that matter—to change its mind about anything as the world changes around it. Given that international students pay very large sums of money to receive a service and bring enormous amounts of funding and cultural improvement to our country, is it not time to persuade the Home Office to take international students out of the migration statistics?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is right in several of his comments, including that international students enrich our campuses and communities, form lifelong friendships, become global ambassadors and contribute to the economic benefits of this country—which is why they will always be welcome. The Office for National Statistics is of course independent in producing its statistics, but I encourage people to look at the detailed breakdown of migration statistics that it also provides, which identifies different elements of migration. As I have always done in my ministerial life, I will continue to listen to my noble friend and do what I can to work on the priorities that he puts to me.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I never know what the protocols are for when to speak in Committee, but since both the amendments that I have added my name to in this group have been introduced, I will leap in. I hope the Minister does not think I am stalking her, having attended her evidence session this morning with the Industry and Regulators Committee, which was very interesting. I also look forward to reading the Government’s new White Paper Get Britain Working.

I have added my name to Amendment 18 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I see as a catch-all for some of the reporting required from the Secretary of State by many of the amendments tabled. Of the 22 amendments we are discussing today, 12 would require the Secretary of State to produce reports, so I very much welcome the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that an annual report might cover most if not all of those requirements.

I have also added my name to his Amendment 23, another reporting requirement, which focuses on many of the central functions of Skills England, identifying skills gaps and shortages and promoting ways of addressing them. It includes looking at training needs. One thing I would add to that is the education side of the picture, not just the training stage: making young people aware of the skills they need to find rewarding employment suited to their abilities and of the range of opportunities available to them.

I also welcome the inclusion in the amendment of working with regional and local bodies. I would expect to see Skills England, as I think the Minister mentioned this morning, playing an active role in consolidating local skills improvement plans, to ensure that, together, they properly address national as well as local needs and seek to forge a joined-up approach between the different government departments, which might otherwise be tempted, as they have been in the past, to develop their own skills policies that may not add up to a coherent whole. I am pleased to add my support for those two amendments.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I was pleased to add my name to Amendment 23 in the name of my noble friend Lord Knight, and I thank noble Lords who have supported Amendment 31 in my name. I said quite a lot last Thursday, which seems a lifetime ago—I was on so much medication I would have been disqualified from the Olympics—so I will try to keep it brief today.

Amendment 31 has elements which have already been overtaken by announcements by the Government, reinforced, at least as far as I can manage to access it, by the White Paper produced today. Thankfully, the foreword, signed by four Secretaries of State, mentions skills a lot and indicates the critical importance of the skills agenda to getting some of the 2.8 million people who are economically inactive back into work. It also mentions the youth guarantee and the reappraisal of priorities—for Skills England, I hope, but it is not entirely clear who is making decisions about what in terms of the growth and skills agenda and the new levy, and therefore who has actually made the decision in respect of what we are pressing for and what has been pressed for publicly in terms of prioritising entry-level and foundation apprenticeships.

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[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 27 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, to which I add my support. It would require the Secretary of State to consult LSIPs, mayoral combined authorities and other relevant employer-related groups on the introduction and number of technical education qualifications before exercising her powers under the Act. Such consultation is vital to ensure that any technical education qualifications introduced align with local and regional skills needs—one of the priorities of Skills England—to ensure that the workforce is equipped with the skills required to support the improved economic growth that we all want to see.

I recognise that Skills England has the potential to play a crucial strategic and co-ordinating role in bringing together local and national skills agendas—the Minister touched on this in her comments on the previous group—but I again come back to the fact that the approach set out in the Bill, in terms of the centralisation of powers in the Secretary of State, jars with the Government’s stated intention that Skills England will

“bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained workforce needed”

to ensure that our regional and national skills systems are meeting skills needs. I am afraid the approach set out in the Bill raises questions that the Minister is hearing time and again around whether we can be truly confident that this is the approach that will be taken when there is nothing in legislation or out there to ensure that that happens. As the Learning and Work Institute has said, it is important that Skills England must

“not be primarily a creature of Whitehall”.

I hope that the Minister can set out again, in a bit more detail, how Skills England will engage and involve local areas, local leaders and employer groups from the outset; and the mechanisms that will be developed to ensure we can have confidence that Skills England will effectively and consistently ensure, through the technical education qualifications introduced, that our regional and national skills needs are met.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 28 and 29 in my name. Given my noble friend the Minister’s comprehensive and extremely thorough response to our debate on the first group, I will try not to fall into the trap of once again appealing to the Oscar Wilde agency that cannot speak its name. If we are to have a whole-system approach—the White Paper on getting people back to work, which was published today, mentions this—and we start with ensuring both that there is joined-up thinking in government and that that is translatable in terms of relationships with business, then we need to be reassured that we are clear on where decisions are being taken. Again, I mentioned this in our debate on the first group.

I declare an interest in this group because I have some interest in a major infrastructure project at the moment. The excellent contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on the first group highlighted the issues around net zero and other environment-related issues, but there are major problems for us as a nation, as we know. HS2 has set us back. In this country we tend to look at what we are bad at rather than what we are good at, so we will obviously be affected by what has taken place with HS2 and by the massive mistakes that have been made, but there are other major infra- structure projects—some of which, in the nuclear industry, have been mentioned—where success has been substantial.

I had the privilege of going down to a college in Somerset to talk about Hinkley Point. I was deeply impressed with what has been done there but there seems to be a mismatch between the overall picture—the holistic picture, if you like—and the minutiae. I have written to my noble friend the Minister so I do not expect her to deal with this matter in detail this afternoon but, whatever we call boot camps in future and whatever immediate requirements on the ground are to be met by something such as one, if the decisions on funding them are to be devolved, how should an infrastructure project covering a substantial geographical area—as well as a sectoral one—deal with them?

I have another interest because, on Friday, I have the pleasure of initiating the new learning resource digital centre at the Northern College for Residential Adult Education. There are only two left in the country, and one is at Wentworth in Barnsley. That project has been funded because of the local schools improvement plan and the partnership that is arisen from it in terms of the digital needs of learners through lifelong learning. The reason why I am raising this and have touched on boot camps is that there is a real danger that, in our enthusiasm for devolution—I am an enthusiast for it—we start to create joins that did not exist. The Northern College has survived only because the elected Mayor of South Yorkshire has so far managed to find the resources but it was not possible to find resources joined up with West Yorkshire, which has students at the college because it is very much on the edge of South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire but does not fall within West Yorkshire—so it is not West Yorkshire’s concern any more.

With the best will in the world, the devolution that we are engaged in could disable unique things, where there is limited provision available and a holistic approach is difficult to achieve if people are not collaborating. With this Bill and the new executive agency, it would be possible to join things up if we knew where decisions were taken. It would be possible, if we accepted Amendment 29, to make sure that departments across government think and work together in order to ensure that the department responsible for housing, say—whatever it is called these days—understood what was needed to ensure that workers had a green card to get on site in the construction industry and be able to do the job.

Somehow, we have to put the bits back together while we are doing devolution where appropriate, either regionally or sectorally, and ensure that we do not by default end up with the department and Skills England, which will be part of the department, not being clear about who is doing what. In the example I gave in relation to infrastructure projects, it is not yet totally clear. I hope that, by raising the issue, we might be able to clarify it, but, at the moment, the embryo Skills England body will have to refer that to the department because nobody can give me an answer.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, partly because—I remind the Committee of this—I worked for City & Guilds for 20 years. I was working for it when national vocational qualifications were introduced—1990, I think—precisely to reduce the complexity in the qualification system. There are times when one feels that one has been around too long, but that was exactly it.

Those qualifications came in with levels 1 to 5 in order to be a simple way in which people could understand practical qualification levels. Levels 6 and 7, covering managerial and degree-level subjects, were then introduced as well. The qualifications were called “vocational” because we always wanted to include craft qualifications as well as technical ones. I worry now about what is happening to the encouragement of craft qualifications, which are vital to the economy of the country. I am not suggesting that we go back to NVQs again—they had their day and they went—but it worries me that memories are so short on this. It is a complex system because anything as complex as the myriad variations of employment inevitably will be so, but having a simple way in which one can measure levels of expertise seems to have some advantage to it.

This made me wonder how much discussion there has been with the awarding bodies. City & Guilds has been around for well over 100 years, as I say. Obviously, apprenticeships have been around since the Middle Ages, but I am not suggesting that we go back to then to find out what they did with them. The BTEC has been around for at least 50 or 60 years, I think. There is a mass of expertise there, yet they do not seem to be referenced or involved; I wonder why this is because they have some very useful skills to offer to this Bill.

I just felt that I needed to go down memory lane when I saw that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, had referred in his amendment to reducing

“the complexity of the qualifications system”.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Blunkett]

1: Clause 4, page 2, line 3, at end insert—
“(3ZA) A group of persons in subsection (3) may be an organisation that is the representative body for a sector.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I first apologise to my noble friend the Minister and the Committee that I will not be able to stay until the very end of the debate. I have a medical appointment in Sheffield for one of the many ailments that seem to be striking me down at the moment, but maybe I will be in better shape next Tuesday.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I hope to provide noble Lords some reassurance by way of guidelines, which I will come to in a moment, but I also hope to convince noble Lords—I shall try—that there is, in fact, a conflict between the idea of doing something as flexibly as possible in order to engage employers and spelling it in the Bill. I will make that argument as I continue.

I turn first to Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, Amendments 2 and 8 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. They all relate to the membership of the group of persons. At present, as I have suggested, there are no statutory criteria that prescribe the make-up of a group that forms or is formed to prepare an occupational standard. Employers play a prominent role and are well placed to define or describe what occupational competence looks like in most cases, but different expert voices might have a role to play in different circumstances. This point was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden —although probably more with respect to assessment, which we will come on to in Clause 5.

We do not see any benefit in seeking to shape or fetter the structure of these groups with criteria that would prevent the membership of a group reflecting the specific factors relating to the need for its preparation. IfATE is under an existing duty to publish information about matters that it will take into account when deciding whether or not to approve groups of persons; I assure noble Lords that this duty is being transferred to the Secretary of State unamended, so it will remain in existence. Novel and additional criteria in primary legislation to specify the make-up of a group, for which noble Lords are arguing, might provide some assurance here. However, it would be a new constraint in the system.

Slowing down groups coming together, and slowing down the development and maintenance of occupational standards, could lead to a focus on ticking boxes instead of flexibly, broadly and inclusively finding the best people to define the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to be competent in the occupation. The optimal composition of a group will vary from occupation to occupation; for example, to represent the breadth of an occupation and the employers in it that will employ apprentices, it may be necessary in new, emerging or highly specialised occupations to look openly at who can bring to bear the relative expertise in the preparation of a standard. Retaining the existing flexibility around the make-up of a group of persons is critical to achieving high-quality occupational standards.

Amendment 4 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would remove the ability of the Secretary of State to prepare a standard if they are satisfied that it would be more appropriate for the standard to be prepared by the Secretary of State than by a group of persons. I hope I have assured the noble Baroness of the need for this greater flexibility. I reiterate that it is needed for a minority of cases to ensure that standards are kept up to date without a disproportionate burden, given the volume of standards that now exists.

Amendment 5 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would create a duty on the Secretary of State to consult with the relevant industry skills and standards-setting body when preparing a standard. Such bodies are important to the preparation of occupational standards, and in most cases high-quality occupational standards are developed by an inclusive and independent group. In fact, current guidance states that groups must seek advice and guidance from organisations with responsibility in their industry for defining skills standards in England and the wider UK. We expect this requirement to remain.

I emphasise that in only the minority of circumstances, where the Secretary of State considers it more appropriate, will standards be prepared by them rather than by a group, so there is a role for industry bodies in this process and we expect that they will continue to be engaged. However, this amendment would undo the flexibility and efficiency sought through Clause 4, by placing a requirement on the Secretary of State to consult specific bodies when they consider it more appropriate for the Secretary of State to prepare a standard than by using a group. That would be exacerbated in circumstances where the relevant industry skills or standards-setting body is unable to participate when required. It therefore risks giving them precedence over others, including employers.

Amendment 6, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 7, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would impose a duty to publish criteria for the preparation of occupational standards by the Secretary of State. To be clear again, employers remain best placed to define and describe what occupational competence looks like in most cases. As I have indicated, the Secretary of State would not convene a group in only a minority of circumstances. Setting criteria for that minority of circumstances would frustrate the necessary agility that this clause aims to bring to the process. It would restrict the Secretary of State’s ability to be responsive and to ensure that the suite of high-quality standards is kept up to date and relevant.

I hope that I have set out the intentions behind Clause 4 and provided some assurance and reassurance for noble Lords. For the reasons that I have outlined, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, will withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for her kind words, which I hope do not turn out to be a hostage to fortune. I am grateful to everybody who has contributed to a thoughtful debate.

As my noble friend the Minister described, we are debating areas that are obviously very much in flux. I was interested in the earlier debate about consistency and continuity on the one hand and collective memory on the other. It is important to carry this forward in a way that picks up the best of what is already in place and iterates that very speedily and easily, with the support and confidence of employers. The noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, was quite right to draw attention to the importance of that.

The amendments in this group were trying to explore the way in which the operation proceeds. There may be things that we come back to, as I know that amendments in later groups will return to this issue. On that basis, it is appropriate to withdraw my amendment now.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

Sharia-compliant Student Finance

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 13th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I think the Student Loans Company works quite hard in order to ensure that students understand the commitments that they are taking on with student loan finance. But it is a fair point that it is important not just for the Government but for higher education institutions to be clear with students about what they are getting for their money, and then for us and the Student Loans Company to be clear with students about the impact later on in their life of the loans they are taking out.

I will reiterate the point I made earlier that sometimes there is confusion among students, who think that student debt is similar to other forms of debt, when clearly it is very different. Repayment is linked to earnings levels and, at the end of the term, any remaining debt will be written off. I try to say that as frequently as possible. It is a fair challenge that we should ensure that as many students as possible understand that that is the situation with student debt.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Would my noble friend the Minister recommend that anyone who is confused should go on Martin Lewis’s website? He is very clear about this and it might help them to understand precisely what the scheme is all about.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

It is my great pleasure and privilege to follow my noble friend and congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. We are very glad that he is here, bringing the experience he outlined, his cross-party campaigning zeal on the Post Office scandal and his work on defence. My noble friend on our Front Bench will very much welcome his expertise. I agree with him about craft skills, which my city was built on as well, and the collaboration between the public and private sectors that we will need if we are to make the skills agenda work. I appreciate that very much.

I knew about the Beamish open-air industrial museum. As my noble friend was making his maiden speech, I was thinking that he had moved from one museum to another. This is more like a natural history museum where the occasional dinosaur moves around the corridors—responsible, in part at least, for not changing the sitting hours of this House. So here we are debating something really important late on a Tuesday night, perhaps too late to do it justice. I will therefore cut my speech down. I declare my interests in the register on a wide range of issues relating to education.

I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on being able to ride the two horses—and Houses; she has been in both—referred to earlier of addressing the minutiae of this legislation and the greater vision of Skills England. I was proud to lead on the learning and skills proposals published two years ago from which Skills England, the growth and skills levy and much else have been drawn.

I am still struggling with the idea of being on the Government Benches rather than in opposition. After 14 years, it is quite hard not to make a remark like “This Bill is necessary but not necessarily sufficient” sound like a criticism. While the Bill is needed to transfer IfATE’s duties to Skills England, it is only a tiny part of creating a vision and pathway to generate the energy, drive and commitment of everyone involved to make Skills England a force to be reckoned with. Some of the questions already asked today arise directly from that.

Figure 7 in chapter 3 of the paper published on 24 September—the day the Prime Minister made a speech at Labour’s party conference—lays out the challenge of getting the right skills in the right places, not just now but for the future. That paper made some interesting comments that I strongly welcome and hope we can build on in Committee and in responses from the Government, as well as in wider workforce planning.

My noble friend Lord Beamish referred to using other departments as a template. He noted the massive investment of the Ministry of Defence. Defence procurement reminds me that we have an enormous opportunity that has not yet found its way into government policy: using procurement to drive apprenticeships as well as the necessary skills agenda for the future. When asked what consultation he had carried out on the production of his first car, Henry Ford indicated that, if he had bothered to consult anybody, their first thought would have been “faster horses”. In just the first 25 years of the last century, the proportion of movements by mechanical means moved from 5% to 95% due to the creation and development of vehicles. We are at a point where enormous change is happening as we speak.

That is why, as I imagine my noble friend will know, there is such controversy in Germany at the moment about where it is going on the skills agenda and investment for the future. We have always turned to Germany as an example of what we might have done in the past and might do today. I fear that the world is changing around us, sometimes leading us and sometimes giving us an example of how we have to skip a generation in what we are doing in order to be in the right place to deliver the skills we need for the future.

My noble friend mentioned dental technicians. I make a plea that we move very rapidly to decentralise the accreditation of industry standards to organisations such as the Construction Industry Training Board and the ECITB—both of which had a role in this area before 2016 when IfATE was created—to cut out the bureaucracy. Over the last eight years IfATE has undoubtedly developed a bureaucracy, but we owe it a debt of gratitude because it has had a thankless task. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, its chief exec, all its staff and Richard Pennycook, who has done an incredible but unsung job in a very short period of time to get shadow Skills England off the ground.

There are questions about the level of the post of chief exec, which I hope my noble friend will address not just now but in the weeks ahead. We have an incredibly powerful director-general in the Department for Education who has a reputation for delivery and is in a position to drive Skills England forward. However, we are talking not about individuals in a post but about whether Skills England will have a chair who can deal with business, trade unions and departments in an independent and vigorous fashion and advocate for the resources needed.

The apprenticeship levy—I hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will say much more about it next week—is fundamental and should be expanded. The Treasury should stop top-slicing it and thereby diminishing the amount of money and resource available to deliver. Skills England can play an important part in making that advocacy work, but not if it does not have the clout or reputation to ensure that it can be done.

I was going to raise many other questions but, to respect those still to come on this late Tuesday night, I will end with this. We have to be really ambitious. Microcredits and modular learning will mean that in future we will need a learning passport; to answer a query raised earlier, we will need to reinstate the Union Learning Fund created in 1998. I was very proud of that, because along with it went learning representatives who advocated alongside management for learning in the workplace and beyond. There are many examples of how well that worked, such as the UK Commission for Employment and Skills.

Let us not reinvent the wheel; let us work out what worked in the past and what did not, and then build on it. Let us also rejoice in the fact that we have a Minister of State in this House with hands-on experience, who understands the economic and business needs required and who can be a great leader in ensuring, along with the Secretary of State, that we get it right. Tonight is the beginning of a journey that I hope we will be on together.

Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord on bringing forward this Bill and on his contribution to the Select Committee he mentioned. I was proud to serve with him on it, under the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson.

There is a lot to be said in three minutes, but this is a timely moment—timely because there is a curriculum review now initiated under the chairmanship of Becky Francis; because, sadly, we saw over the summer the riots taking place across our country; and because, of course, we see the most enormous threats both from distortion on social media and from the re-emergence of the far right across the world. This is the moment to reinforce the importance of those values that hold us together—the ties that bind.

British values are not exclusive to Britain, but they are about our country. We debated this at great length in the committee and came to the conclusion that of course other people will share those values in their own context, but to reinforce them is really important, as former Prime Minister Gordon Brown endeavoured to do in the debate he initiated just under 20 years ago.

I was proud to introduce the idea of citizenship and democracy teaching in the curriculum over 20 years ago. Sadly, many of those who have the power to ensure that it works never had citizenship and democracy taught to them when they were at school, so they do not really get the message. That applies right across the most powerful elements within our education system. So if we are to make this work—and to detach it from the Prevent strategy, mentioned by the noble and right reverend Lord in terms of what happened in 2011, which I think is the right thing to do—we need to move quickly.

I could go on and on, but I do not have the time this morning, about how my old tutor, Professor Bernard Crick, who chaired the working group that led to the curriculum on citizenship and democracy, used to ask, “How can you tolerate the intolerant?”. Tolerance is a very odd phrase, because if you have to tolerate something, your dislike of it is such that you do not accept that you can respect and hold it on common terms.

If we are to make this work—there have been a number of iterations, and my noble friend Lord Knight has brought forward ideas about the environment—we must train teachers, we must give bursaries, which we are not doing, to enable that to take place, and we must get rid of the Catch-22, which is that if you do not teach children, they will not go forward through the GCSE. If they do not do that, the department rules out providing the support to train more teachers —and round we go. Let us take this Bill and use it as a mechanism to go forward, genuinely believing that, if we do not teach this now, we will regret it later.

School Funding: Special Educational Needs

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

He is renowned for his kindness. This Government have backed education from day one and see it as absolutely critical for our future. Given the opportunity, we will continue to do so.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish the Minister well for the future; she has been very accommodative over the years. Is it not true that, from this September, spending on schools will have returned to 2000 levels in real terms?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

From this September, funding for schools will be the highest it has ever been per pupil in real terms.

Higher Education: Arts and Humanities

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

With the greatest respect to the noble Lord, I really do not follow the logic of how the EBacc is damaging the flow to our universities. Humanities and modern foreign languages are absolutely central and at the heart of the EBacc, but we are building on that with our higher technical qualifications and T-levels in areas such art and design, which will be introduced this year. I remind the House that bursaries and scholarships for, say, modern foreign language teachers are at the same level as for physics teachers.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that it would be crazy to restrict entry from overseas students to particular universities or particular faculties or courses within those universities, not least because it would say that all the rest were perfectly okay for our daughters and sons but were not good enough for overseas students?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware that that plan has currently been proposed. Where we have concerns about quality, they are about courses rather than subject areas at individual institutions, where the outcomes for those students, whether they are international or domestic, are significantly poorer than for the same course at another institution.

Higher Education

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Blunkett]

That this House takes note of the contribution of higher education to national growth, productivity and levelling-up.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my registered interests. I am very pleased indeed to be able to lead this debate, and thank all those who are about to contribute. Across different political complexions and none, we should be able to find the kind of agreement that I hope will carry us forward for the future.

We have a choice: we can either wallow in nostalgia, meddle, or really look to a future that will be very different—a future of rapid change, where artificial intelligence and robotics will replace so many of the current employment opportunities, but will open up new opportunities for people who have the skills and adaptability to be able to take advantage of the future.

We used to talk about the knowledge economy; I do not hear it mentioned very often these days. There seems to be a view that we have too many students at universities, and too many universities putting on courses that are irrelevant. I am afraid that this view is completely outdated, and totally, utterly wrong.

This morning, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was parading his commitment, quite rightly, to the idea of productivity and growth, but the scientists, the high-level technicians, the research for the future are possible only if we have investment in our higher education system and we value and hold it dear. Innovation, knowledge transfer and the entrepreneurial skills of the future will come from people having their minds opened and their aspirations met. I am a living example of it. I went to evening class and day release to experience the value of further education, which I continue to value dearly. Being able to go to university immediately post the 1963 report of Lord Lionel Robbins transformed the life chances of literally millions of people. That understanding came on the back of what Harold Wilson used to call the “white heat of technology”—whatever happened to that?—and has been crucial to the well-being of the United Kingdom.

There are problems and challenges for our higher education system. It is going to have to adapt to changes in artificial intelligence and in the way we teach and learn, and to a very difficult financial climate. University income has dropped by around a fifth over the past five or six years. Fee levels have not increased, Brexit has affected income from European partnership arrangements, which thankfully are now being restored under Horizon—I will come to the way in which people see the contribution of overseas students in a moment—and it is a much more arid prospect for the future.

However, in Careers Week and on World Book Day, it is important to take a look at what is happening to the young people of today and to reflect on the young people of my era. According to the Labour Force Survey published two weeks ago, 850,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 are not in education, training or employment. In other words, they are either working in the sub-economy or doing absolutely nothing. Some 200,000 of them are alleged to be unable to work because of ill health, including mental ill health. Finding a holistic approach to giving opportunity to the young people of the future becomes even more imperative if they are not simply to languish and deteriorate in every possible way.

I remind the House and perhaps the world outside which might be listening that there are not vast numbers of young people going to university who should be doing something else. It is Careers Week, and people should get the right information, advice and guidance on what is best for them. For some, it will be to go straight from college or school into the world of work. For some, it will be taking a BTEC national diploma or a T-level and moving into work. For others, it will be an apprenticeship, if they can get through the hoops that are put in their way, particularly for those with low-level qualifications at the age of 16. However, for many, it will be exploring their future by going into higher education. Many of those 850,000 young people should be encouraged to raise their aspirations and expectations to be able to take on that challenge. Nothing is more galling than people who benefited from higher education and expect their children to go to university telling other people that it is not for them. We have to renew our commitment to the aspiration that drove me on. I have no idea now how because the careers advice I received was zilch. The report I got from the school for the blind I left was appalling, and the expectation of the world around me was that I was going to be a lathe operator or a piano tuner, both of which are very highly rated and important tasks, although lathe operation has suffered over the years from numerical control. The world moves on, and we should move with it.

Some 750,000 jobs are created through higher education in this country. Many of them are crucial to the levelling-up process, as it is now called, in terms of giving youngsters in the most deprived areas of the country the belief that they can do something different from their parents and grandparents. It is about breaking intergenerational disadvantage, which is why I commend my noble friend Lady Armstrong on drawing attention in her debate later today to the fact that areas of the country that previously benefited from traditional industries now suffer from the worst-quality education in the country and the worst expectation of what people there will do. It is not surprising that more people go to Oxford and Cambridge from London and the south-east because the education system in London and the south-east is, sadly, still much better than it is in the Midlands and the north. It is not surprising that when we tell people that university education might be too much for them or inappropriate for them, they might believe us.

We need a menu that enables young people to make the right choice, but that allows people who may have experienced the world of work and decided that change is an imperative driver for them to come back into higher education through lifelong learning, to re-educate themselves and be able to take on new challenges. Lifelong learning should be at the root of what we are doing, saying and investing in in relation to education.

I want to address a negative before coming to the positives. The negative has been the suggestion that somehow attracting overseas students to universities in this country is squeezing out domestic applications. Applications through UCAS from English students dropped this year by 1%. That is not surprising when people are told, despite the fact that they might face unemployment, that university is not for them. The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, who chairs the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, raised a Question in this House about inequalities arising from overseas students coming to this country in large numbers. The Minister was honest, as she always is, and brave enough to say that there is no evidence whatever of that happening—and, of course, it is not. The number of overseas students, who now include EU students, has actually dropped, marginally. As university income has fallen and the challenges of research funding have grown, it is not surprising that universities have sought to attract overseas students to allow cross-subsidisation into crucial research, which we applaud all the time, such as into better vaccines and engineering for the future things that will transform our country, including on net zero. Yet in the next breath we condemn the idea of going out there and attracting students.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer said yesterday:

“Outside the US, we have the most respected universities”—[Official Report, Commons, 6/3/24; col. 843.]


in the world. They are respected by the rest of the world but not enough by people in this country. It is bizarre to hear the Chancellor applauding our universities and then hear his colleagues going around rubbishing them. It is absurd that you can put out through the Sunday Times, a highly respected historic investigatory newspaper, the notion that students from abroad were squeezing out domestic students and their applications, and for a presenter on GB News, Katherine Forster, to say that it made her blood boil. She is a really good example of why we need more people in higher education—they might actually be able to evaluate facts and make a critical thinking exercise on what they read or, in the case of GB News, what they see in their own programmes. They might, seriously, be able to lift their horizons of what we need to do for the future.

At my own university is the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and its work on small modular reactors and the energy needs of the future. It has not just pure science and engineering but the social science and humanities which we will need for the creative economy of the future, which so many universities are applying themselves to. Universities bring a massive input to local economies, as anchor institutions and the real levelling up, with £272 million going into Sheffield Central alone. Why? It is because we have two universities. The average across each constituency in the UK is £58 million, which is still an enormous contribution to the well-being of local people and our future.

What do we need to do? Universities need to be rigorous in their quality and aspiration. Linking up further education and higher education is a no-brainer. Ensuring that we take overseas students out of the migration statistics is a no-brainer, as it would stop silly arguments. We should ensure that we can reshape our longitudinal studies to get a real understanding of what students from higher education are actually doing in local communities, whether they are part-time or self-employed. Let us have a commission on the funding of higher education for the future—that has lost its way at the moment. Above all, we should ensure that quality research, world-class teaching and the importance of valuing our universities are put front and centre. Stop knocking what is such a valuable asset to our country; let us invest in a world of tomorrow.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a very wise tradition that those who have moved take-note Motions do not make another speech at the end, but I shall just take one minute, if your Lordships do not mind, to thank the noble Baroness for, as ever, a thoughtful and comprehensive response to what has been an excellent debate. I thank everyone who has taken part for their generosity and for their wisdom, including those with whom I disagreed. The great thing about a seminar of this sort is that the spirit of Socrates still shines through. I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire: when the scientist challenged the idea of social sciences having a value, did he not wonder what he might have said to his colleagues who were teaching classics?

I was really pleased that the Minister got an honorary degree from Bath. “Don’t throw the baby out” is the message that we crave this afternoon.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, and I were contemporaries at the University of Sheffield politics department. I spent too much of my time, perhaps, marching against apartheid, while he spent far too much of his time in the library.

To conclude, I want to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that the dog has kept his breakfast in on this occasion. I think that was a measure of the quality of the debate. The quality of education is crucial to all of us. If there are problems, we can fix them, but, above all, we should tell the rest of the world, as the Chancellor endeavoured to do yesterday, that the higher education sector in Britain is open for business, is the best in the world and will give a very warm welcome to any student who wants to come here.

Motion agreed.

Skill Shortages in Business and Industry

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sure the noble Lord will agree that many young people are attracted to working in areas that will address climate change, environmental issues and sustainability, but they might not always make the association with those engineering roles as opposed to some others. We are working with business through our Green Jobs Delivery Group, and with the Green Apprenticeships and Technical Education Advisory Panel, making sure that our standards map on to those occupations and that that is backed by great careers advice for young people.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, last week, the Labour Force Survey had a set of statistics that I find staggering—namely, that 850,000 16 to 25 year-olds are not in education, employment or training. Do the Government have any plans, perhaps next week, to give flexibility to the apprenticeship levy, so that we can train and employ these young people?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

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