Part-time and Continuing Education and the Open University
Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Baroness Bakewell
Baroness Bakewell (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to rise to open this debate. Right now, in Westminster Abbey, a service is being held to mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS, an institution created under the outstanding post-war Labour Government of Clement Attlee. I am delighted to introduce a debate on another Labour achievement: the Open University, founded in the 1960s by the then Education Minister Jennie Lee— incidentally, the wife of Aneurin Bevan, creator of the NHS. The OU’s purpose was to promote greater equality of opportunity and widen access to the highest standards of education, endorsing those same values of civic life and mutual responsibility as the NHS. Like the NHS, cherished as it is, the OU also has current problems that threaten its survival. Next year it will be 50 years old.
In 2023, five years from now, another educational institution will celebrate its bicentenary. Birkbeck, of which I am proud to be president, was created in 1823 when philanthropist George Birkbeck pioneered a pattern of education by which working men—and it was working men in those days—could study while also earning a living. It was a system of part-time study that would lead to degree qualifications. To this day, it shares with the OU a commitment to part-time education, tutor-marked coursework and extended study that leads to full university degrees of international standing. There are of course other universities across the country that provide mature and lifelong learning as part of their student offer; several have over 30% of their students studying part-time. They too recognise the direction that future education provision should take and are keen to see it thrive. They too are confronted by problems. I would not trouble noble Lords with a history lesson that had no significance for today. I raise this debate because the needs are pressing, the system is in crisis and the Government have now the chance to address this in its policy review.
First then, are the needs. As a member of the Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, I was made keenly aware of how much change to the labour market lies ahead. Many existing jobs will go, many jobs will be enhanced by AI and many new, as yet unknown jobs will be created. The one constant is change—ongoing change to the labour market and to the lives of individuals. The Government will need to plan for the negative effects of AI, and to plan to maximise benefits from it. New skills will be needed; retraining will become the norm; and individuals will need to expect shifting patterns of employment, portfolio careers and mid-life career changes. Retraining, as the Select Committee emphasised in its report, will become a lifelong necessity. The Government agree: at the inaugural meeting of the National Retraining Scheme, earlier this year, the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, declared that,
“we need everyone, regardless of their age, to be able to gain the skills they need to make the most of the opportunities that lie ahead”.
Such ideas are endorsed on every hand from every discipline. Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology at Oxford University, in evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Intergenerational Fairness and Provision, declared that, with longer life expectancy, there is a need for longer working lives that has to be supported by a move to lifetime education.
Thus, we have the state affairs and the need. Now the crisis, for crisis there surely is: a catastrophic fall in numbers of part-time and mature students. The OU has been hit especially hard, its numbers falling by 30% between 2010-11 and 2015-16. Numbers at Birkbeck have suffered too. The numbers for part-time study are falling everywhere. Social mobility has crashed. The decline in mature students has disproportionately hit certain important courses. Between 2009-10 and 2016-17 the number of part-time mature nursing students fell by 49%.
Institutions have been tracking the reasons and it is quite clear that this steep decline was triggered when the Government raised the cap on part-time fees to £6,750 a year. Their effort to address the crisis by improving financial support for some part-time students through the introduction of maintenance loans has not gone nearly far enough. Restrictions on maintenance loans to certain subjects—the STEM subjects—leaves the humanities beleaguered.
Government policy increasingly sees higher education as a marketplace where students shop for qualifications rather than as centres of learning, broadening student horizons across the whole range of human knowledge. Into this marketplace have come new for-profit universities, some only recently granted degree-giving powers. They offer students long-distance learning towards degrees in the most popular subjects. The insights of face-to-face learning are undervalued and under threat.
Other considerations also explain the collapse. There is no longer a pool of young people denied tertiary education: sixth-form take-up of university places is at an all-time high. Then there is austerity. Mature part-time students faced with the continuing levels of austerity have become debt averse. Many have mortgages to pay and young family commitments. With such responsibilities, taking on further loans is a push too far.
That the Government are aware of all that is evident in their establishment of a post-18 review, which we all welcome. It has now completed its consultations and is expected to report later this year. This is a major opportunity and one that must not be missed. The Higher Education and Research Act and the creation of the Office for Students have ushered in a new era. A Lords amendment to that legislation established that the Office for Students has a specific legal duty to consider different forms of learning, including part-time study and distance learning. It must now deliver on that commitment. I ask the Minister to ensure that the post-18 review addresses a major review of student finance and that it considers different policy responses for different types of students. It must reappraise the availability of maintenance grants and the restrictions on maintenance loans, and it must further relax restrictions on equivalent or lower qualifications, ELQs. I ask, above all, that it prioritises mature students and lifelong learning—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I am listening very carefully to the noble Baroness’s speech and I agree with much of it, but she has been quite partisan in her comments. Will she acknowledge that the ELQ rule was brought in by a Labour Government and that it has been a major factor in the decline of part-time education?
Baroness Bakewell
I think that it is a contributory factor. I certainly do not deny it being brought in but I am constantly interested in revising the existing situation to make it better. That is why I raised it.
Above all, the Government should prioritise mature students and lifelong learning as the key to the country’s economic future and continuing prosperity. The needs are critical but the means are there. I am delighted to see so many speakers of experience and authority in this debate, and I am glad that they are here, even though the time for the debate has been cut short. I urge the Government to rescue a sector of education that has served, and continues to serve, students of all ages and backgrounds. I beg to move.