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.

Schools: Gender-questioning Children

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree with my noble friend. Again, the guidance is clear that schools should not agree to support any degree of social transition for a primary school child unless it is explicitly required to safeguard and promote their welfare.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I commend the approach of my noble friend on the Front Bench, and I have some sympathy with the Government. In 2000, when we issued the first ever Sex and Relationship Education Guidance, it caused all kinds of division. I hope the Minister agrees—and this applies to politics more broadly— that we must try to come to a consensus and find agreement, rather than following the terrible current trend of looking at what divides us.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I agree entirely with the noble Lord.

Home and Online Schooling

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, there is surely another key element in the increase in home tuition: the aftermath of Covid and home working. Is it not true that we need a rapid increase in the availability of child and adolescent mental health services and direct support for parents who need help to get their children back into school?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not disagree that the aftermath of Covid has impacted not just home education but perhaps more particularly the wider issues that we have debated in your Lordships’ House related to attendance at school. The noble Lord is aware that we are expanding mental health support teams across schools and recruiting additional educational psychologists to support children.

Schools: Absenteeism

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As ever, my noble friend asks a very important question. If we look at the reasons underpinning persistent absence, the majority of persistent absence is authorised, with higher than normal levels of sickness particularly in the last autumn term. We are also aware of suggestions that parental attitudes towards sickness have changed, with parents keeping children home when previously they might have sent them into school and, of course, high levels of reported anxiety. However, we are also actively exploring the matter of those children who perhaps missed so much education during the pandemic that their level of reading, for example, is not sufficient to engage properly with the curriculum. That is also something that we are keen to address as quickly as possible.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young, and to support his Question. I think the answer just given by the Minister is very insightful. I want to ask her a question that might be from the side. Could we get a message across to parents, particularly those who have started to believe that working from home is the norm, that when they get up, they have to get their children to school?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I know that the noble Lord will know that the relationship with parents is incredibly important. He is right: it seems clearer, now more than ever, that there needs to be great communication with parents and a high level of trust. We have prepared materials to support parents getting their children into school. The Secretary of State has just written to all responsible bodies, local authorities and trusts about this importance, including highlighting really good, clear communication with parents.