Education and Society

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I have spent much of my life in public speaking, in a university context. If you were lucky or you did a good job, students would look up at you. Recently, that has all changed. Now, you look at a lecture audience and half of them are looking down at their devices. I noticed that the most reverend Primate was, if I can put it this way, fiddling with his iPhone quite a bit in the last few minutes.

That sounds like a trivial observation, but this is fundamental. We are on the edge of the some of the biggest changes that have ever transformed human society, which are happening much more quickly and much more globally than ever before. [Interruption.] I hear that I have some help from the outside world, it must be said. Those changes are driven by the digital revolution. I was pleased that the most reverend Primate placed so much emphasis on that. If we cannot compete in this area, all levels of education will be dead in the water, internationally. [Interruption.] There is some continuing disturbance outside.

Without being too didactic about it, it is important to understand what the digital revolution is. It is not the internet, nor robotics, nor supercomputing power—it is all of those things, bound up together in a huge rush of change going through our lives.

That is already transforming universities. One of the most notable examples is the emergence of so-called MOOCs—mass online open courses. They are amazing. There is one at Harvard-MIT and one, Coursera, at Stanford. They reach millions of people across the world, who can take part in seminars. You can take part in an online seminar with students from Africa while sitting in London, for example. Those courses are free. There is a huge tension between the emergence of free mass courses such as those and the huge fees charged in full-time higher education. That tension will be very difficult to resolve. My noble friend Lord Adonis was quite right to draw attention to it. To me, the issue is not vice-chancellors’ salaries, which is marginal, but the wholesale marketisation of higher education, with a time bomb of student debt and no thought to the future or to the transformation of labour markets, which, if I get time in my six minutes, I will briefly mention.

What is happening in universities is also happening in schools. Schools are going to change just as dramatically as businesses have changed over the past 15 to 20 years. I will quickly mention some changes that are already happening. First, traditional-style teaching, with the teacher standing in front of the class disciplining children sitting at desks, still exists and will go on, but alongside it and even more important these days is children huddled around computers in groups. It is no longer a simple didactic model with a teacher. The teacher is no longer a repository of all knowledge because all of human knowledge is in the device you have in your pocket or hidden away under the desk. Already the structure of schools is changing.

Secondly, we have radically different models emerging around the world—even though they are in the early days, they are in some sense the future—of collaborative education. For example, in the US you have the home-schooling movement. There are 2 million children in the US schooled at home. It is not legal here, but it is there. It is growing apace. It is mostly done digitally and in collaboration with schools. The idea that school is a fixed place will tend to break down, just as has happened with the workplace. It is already happening in education across the world, even if we are just in the early phases.

Thirdly, as other noble Lords have mentioned, the digital revolution has a very dark side. It has to be a fundamental part of primary and secondary education to allow children to deal with this dark side. I do not know whether noble Lords know this, but it came up in our AI select committee—at least I mentioned it and someone went to look it up on the internet. You can buy an infant’s potty with a bracket on it where you can put an iPad for a newly born infant. [Laughter.] That is supposed to get a laugh, but it is really frightening. A neuroscientist described the effect of iPhones and iPads as crack cocaine for children. They are so addictive and compulsive. All human knowledge, bad and good, is there. This is a huge challenge for education. It must start early on with parents, but it must be embedded in primary school education too.

Finally, we have to look again at the usual things said about lifelong learning, which are a bit crass and simple. Digital skills are not really relevant; they are relevant to people working in the digital industries, but mostly this will be a process of deskilling, as happened in other areas. Unlearning is just as important as learning. We therefore need a completely different model of what the unfolding of a child’s or an adult’s life will be in this imminent future—in fact, it is already here.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I support these amendments, in particular for the reasons stated by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, regarding mature learners. However, there are of course many other reasons to expect that part-time learning will be a larger part of the higher education system in future. One other reason is distance learning—so-called MOOCs, and so on—which will have an important role in vocational training, as they stand alone and can be done well by mature, motivated students. However, I also emphasise that part-time learning is essential if you want to have greater open opportunity.

One of the bad features of present higher education is that if someone has been unlucky in their early education, having gone to a poor sixth form or having had family problems, they will not get over the bar at age 18 for admission to a strong university and a strong course. In the present system they do not have a very good second chance. It needs to be made easier for them to do part-time learning—at the Open University and so on—and to gain credits, so that they can qualify for admission to a university on the basis of credits accumulated perhaps elsewhere.

This is something we can learn from the University of California system, in which only a proportion of those who are at Berkeley come straight from high school. Many come through junior college or part-time learning. We need to open up and make things more flexible, which is just another of the ways in which part-time learning will be of growing importance. That is why it is crucial that it should not be in any sense regarded as an afterthought tacked on to the main part of the Bill, and why it is welcome that these amendments will increase the prominence and the dimensions of part-time and lifelong learning in this clause.

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and will elaborate on what I said at Second Reading about the likely impact of the digital revolution on higher education, which will potentially be absolutely fundamental and possibly as great as it has been in any other area of society and the economy.

Traditionally, part-time and distance learning have been seen as a kind of adjunct to “proper” university education, which is full-time and campus-based. That separation is likely to break down more and more radically, and in the near future rather than the distant one. Indeed, the whole structure of higher education could become fundamentally transformed. Somebody must track these trends and try to work out their implications.

In the US, 4 million undergraduates in 2016 took at least one course online—one-quarter of the total undergraduate body, and that is expected to grow to one-half within the next five years. It has been said—Americans have a way with words—that this has produced “bricks for the rich and clicks for the poor”. However, if that division is a fundamental one, it is rapidly dissolving, as digital learning increasingly becomes part of the day-to-day experience in the top-level universities.

Something huge is going on here; it is “don’t know” territory, but it will be radical. Can the Minister say how, in this Bill, the Government propose to track these trends and work out their implications for students, many of whom pay £50,000 for an experience which may become to some extent obsolete? We do not know how far the campus-based university will survive, but it will be radically transformed.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I associate myself with these amendments and support what has been said so far. I particularly support what my noble friend Lord Blunkett said—I worked with him as a Minister in the Department for Education and Employment, as it then was—and what my noble friend Lady Bakewell said. I was the master of Birkbeck for nearly a decade, and from that experience I will say something about mature students who study part-time. These people give up a huge amount of their leisure time; they sacrifice all that to work and study at the same time. Incidentally, Birkbeck is coming up to its 200th anniversary. It was set up as a working men’s institute for men who worked by day and studied by night. It has continued in that way, but adding women in the 1830s.

We have to get away from the notion that university and higher education is primarily about full-time study. There may be a somewhat higher proportion of students studying full time. But, as my noble friend Lord Giddens has just said, things are changing and we are going to see far more part-time students in the coming years, partly because some students will not want to take on the enormous debt involved today in undertaking an undergraduate programme but also because the changes in the wider environment will require them to return to part-time higher education to improve their knowledge and update their skills. Only if they do that will they be able to truly contribute to the knowledge economy.

My noble friend Lord Winston referred to part-time students being between the ages of 30 and 60. I did a little preparation before I went to Birkbeck. I went to the University of Toronto—the Canadian university that specialises in part-time and mature students—and was told that the oldest student there was 92. I asked whether I could meet her. They said they were terribly sorry but she was travelling in Europe—so I did not get that opportunity. So I say to noble Lords, “It’s never too late, so think about it”.

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[Lord Willetts]

It is certainly the case that mainstreaming can be a euphemism for a solitary and nasty death, delivered invisibly. A lot of programmes get mainstreamed and it is a euphemism for their disappearance. My view is that when the Office for Students has the kind of ambitious responsibilities for the student experience envisaged in the Bill, it is reasonable to expect participation—in the sense that it is used in these clauses —to be a responsibility for the OfS as a whole. I would argue that that is a better way of ensuring that the noble Baroness’s concerns are met than narrowing it down to one specific function within one part of OfS.

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I am afraid that my comments on fair access reflect my general worries about the Bill, which in some respects seems like a dinosaur that has lumbered into the room. It seems to have no relationship structured into it in relation to the tremendous changes that we face in this disruptive period, which are bound to invade education and will crucially affect social mobility.

Fair participation is about social mobility. If the Committee will forgive me being a bit didactic, almost all mobility in the 20th century was what sociologists call absolute mobility. It was made possible by the decline of manual work and the creation of white-collar and professional jobs. As my noble friend Lord Winston mentioned, we have to take really seriously the possibility that this process will actually go into reverse for the next generation, and potentially in a relatively short time, as supercomputers, robotics and other aspects of the transformation of labour markets invade professions. What happened to manual work in a previous generation is almost certain to happen to large segments of professional work over the next 15 to 20 years.

This means that the so-called graduate premium, on the basis of which younger people are encouraged to amass huge levels of debt, reflects the market conditions of two or three decades ago. Somebody must think about the crunches ahead in the relationship between education, social mobility and massive technological innovation. Will that be one of those two offices, and how will it set about it? Why is there not more emphasis on planning in relation to the trends and transformations that we as an economy and a society face?

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope that we are not going to lose the main point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. In light of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, I refer back to what the Minister, Jo Johnson, said to the Public Bill Committee about delegation by the OfS to the Director for Fair Access and Participation. He said:

“We envisage that in practice that will mean that the other OfS members will agree a broad remit with the future director for fair access and participation and that the DFAP will report back to them on those activities. As such, the DFAP would have responsibility for those important access and participation activities, including—critically—agreeing the access and participation plan on a day-to-day basis with higher education institutions”.—[Official Report, Commons, Higher Education and Research Bill Committee, 8/9/16; col. 136.]

That seems to me to deal effectively with both those points, although I would welcome the Minister confirming that.

But in looking at that, I do not want us to lose sight of the practicalities of the negotiating position on the ground. There have been two very distinguished directors of OFFA—Sir Martin Harris and the current, excellent director, Les Ebdon—and the current director has made it very clear that having the independence to engage in negotiations free from conflicts of interest has been crucial in securing high levels of commitment by institutions to date and a key factor in OFFA’s success. We need to capture that particular element of the role, and I hope that when the Minister replies he can reassure us that the amendments he has down will accede to and confirm that point, so that this will be very clear to the rest of the Committee.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, before I address this group of amendments, I wish to respond to the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, to whom I listened carefully. We have worked well together in the dim and distant past on one or two major Bills. I echo his thoughts in saying that that worked well. I hope that we will continue to work well together during the passage of this Bill. However, I remind him that this is only day 2 in Committee. I also remind him and the Committee that my aim at this stage of the Bill—I hope that I have expressed this—is to listen very closely and carefully to all the views expressed and to reflect on them. I hope the Committee will take the general spirit of what I am saying in the right way, to the extent that I have already written some letters of clarification following Monday’s debate, which have already been passed to noble Lords. I hope that we can continue in that spirit. I hope that reassures the noble Lord that the Government are taking seriously the points that have been raised. I address the amendments in this group in that spirit of listening.

I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss the vital role of the new Director for Fair Access and Participation, and, importantly, how he will operate within the Office for Students. I share noble Lords’ desire to ensure that this role is appropriately defined in legislation, given the fundamental importance of improving widening access and participation in higher education. I pick up an interesting point that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, raised about access statistics. It is interesting to note that the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going into higher education is up from 13.6% in 2009-10 to 19.5% this year, which is a record high. In our latest guidance to the Director of Fair Access dated February last year, we acknowledge that selective institutions, including Oxbridge and the Russell group, already do much to widen access. However, we are convinced that more could, and should, be done, and have asked the Director of Fair Access to push hard to see that more progress is made.

While it has always been our clear intention that the OfS would give responsibility for activities in this area to the Director for Fair Access and Participation, we listened to persuasive arguments that this should be set out more clearly in legislation. We have now tabled a number of amendments to make this clearer on the face of the Bill. To confirm the point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay, these government amendments seek to clarify that the director will be responsible for overseeing the OfS’s performance on access and participation and reporting on that performance to the OfS board. In other words, it is the role of the DFAP to ensure that these obligations are met. In addition, our amendments confirm that the director is responsible for performing the access and participation functions, plus any other functions which are formally delegated by the OfS. Amendment 16 makes it clear that the director will report to the OfS board on performance in this vital area.

In addition, we are ensuring that the legislation makes it clear that if, for any reason, the OfS does not delegate the access and participation functions, it must set out in its annual report both the reasons why and the length of time that these functions were not delegated. This signifies that we envisage this function not being delegated to the DFAP to be very much the exception and not the rule.

My noble friend Lord Willetts mentioned Professor Les Ebdon, the current Director of Fair Access, who has welcomed these amendments, saying:

“These changes will be crucial in helping the Government to find a high calibre Director for Fair Access and Participation, who can challenge universities and colleges to make further, faster progress towards their targets, while acting as a high profile champion for fair access issues”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, made the point that the director must be a senior person with a high profile in the sector and a senior level of respect and credibility, and she is right. We will launch a recruitment process for the director shortly. We agree that it must indeed be a senior figure who commands respect in the sector. I also assure noble Lords that there are arrangements to call providers to account where they are considered to be failing to meet their access and participation plans. Sanctions include the power for the OfS to refuse to renew an access and participation plan, to impose monetary penalties and, in extreme cases, to suspend or deregister providers.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Blackstone, raised issues about the DFAP’s reporting requirements. I reassure the Committee that the work of the DFAP will not be separate from the work of the OfS, so its work will be reported to Parliament as part of the OfS’s overall accountability requirements. It would not be consistent with integrating the role into the OfS to require separate reporting from a single member of the OfS when the organisation would be governed collectively by all members. Clause 36 allows the Secretary of State to direct the Office for Students to provide reports on issues relating to equality of opportunity in access and participation.

I listened carefully to the interesting remarks of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about bright pupils from low-income backgrounds who may become great scientists. I am happy to write to him on that, and we also agree that this is an important issue.

The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, asked what advice the Government are taking from providers that have a good record on access and participation. Again, I reassure her that the Green Paper that preceded the Bill received over 600 responses, including from institutions with good track records on access and participation. This has been supplemented with follow-up meetings, and ongoing engagement with the sector directly and through HEFCE and OFFA.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked what we would do to support care leavers to enter higher education—again, another good point. Care leavers are a target group in the Director of Fair Access’s guidance to universities in writing their access agreements. Support for care leavers and access agreements has grown considerably over the years, and around 80% of access agreements include specific action to support care leavers.

The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, asked about a student’s progression both during and after their time at university. It is right that the access and participation statements cover the whole student life cycle for students from disadvantaged backgrounds; that is our intention in extending the coverage of access and participation plans from just access. Access is meaningful only if entrants go on to complete their studies—which is rather obvious—and progress to a good job or to further study.

With those responses in mind, I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw Amendment 14, and I will move the government amendments.

[Lord Giddens]

Will anybody be responsible for monitoring wider trends in labour markets in the context of higher education and integrating that with issues of access? If you do not do that, access is relatively meaningless. You cannot simply leave it to the Treasury. Which office will do that? Where is the forward planning in all this?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I understand that the Director for Fair Access and Participation will have the right to find these statistics, which will assist him in his role. I cannot envisage a situation where he would not wish to be aware of the bigger picture to carry out his role effectively.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, as a former director of the London School of Economics, I think it is perhaps appropriate for me to speak next. I have to say that I do not wholly disagree with all of what the noble Lord, Lord Myners, said. I disagree on the fundamental point of principle, but the criticism he offered was entirely appropriate. In contrast to him, I strongly support this amendment. In the Second Reading debate, I was highly critical of aspects of this Bill. My objections were not motivated by some sort of stick-in-the-mud desire to resist change and innovation. On the contrary, in some ways the Bill is, in my eyes, too conservative—with a little ‘c’, of course.

I accept and endorse the need for an overall legislative framework for higher education. We need to clear up inconsistencies and ambiguities in the existing system and, far more importantly, embrace the deep transformations beginning to affect both teaching and research. At the same time, however, as other speakers have rightly said, we must be careful not to undermine the very qualities that have propelled higher education in this country to the very top globally.

In amending the Bill—and there is no doubt in my mind that substantial emendation is necessary—we must ensure that we avoid the huge problems created in the US around deregulated for-profit institutions. They have a place but they are not the future. As in almost every other sphere, higher education is likely to be transformed in a radical way by the digital revolution—and, in my view, in very short order. This is a revolution of unparalleled pace and scope. Much more potent models for exploring what is to come include edX, linked to Harvard and MIT, and Udacity, which had its origins at Stamford. We should be investing in analogues, and some of that has to be public investment.

As the amendment makes clear, a university is not just a knowledge provider but an active creator of knowledge and ideas—even the noble Lord, Lord Myners, stressed that point. That relates to what teachers do, because research and teaching are part and parcel of a combined enterprise in a university. Disciplined research and the active protection of academic freedom are crucial to this task. In my eyes, it would be a major step forward to have these principles spelled out in binding fashion, as this amendment does. The amendment, in fact, looks to have a great deal of support across the House, and I hope that it will not be treated in partisan terms. Perhaps the Minister will be moved to accept it without driving the matter to a vote. Many other pieces of what could turn out to be a very difficult jigsaw puzzle for the Government would fall into place were he to do so.

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, I declared my interest at Second Reading. I am the most junior member of the club of chancellors mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Myners, as the newly appointed chancellor of the University of Reading. I have a number of concerns about the Bill and without making a Second Reading speech again, I shall look to the Government to strengthen protections against interference with autonomy.

These are not theoretical objections. In this House, we are all in danger of falling into our anecdotage, but I will give just one. I was once the holder of a similar office to the Minister who is so courteously handling this Bill. My Secretary of State was my late friend and former colleague Sir Keith Joseph. The Secretary of State became incensed by the economics teaching at the Open University, so his junior Ministers, Rhodes Boyson and myself, were given the books to read. This had rather extraordinary results. The Open University’s reply to what Sir Keith saw as unfortunate bias in its teaching was made much worse by its defence that there was a book by Mr Peter Walker that in its view provided balance, which did not necessarily help Sir Keith. This was slightly comic and Sir Keith was a man of immense courtesy and deep understanding of the autonomy of the institution, and nothing much further came of it. But in crude hands and in different worlds it could have done. I shall therefore be looking through the course of this Bill to various things that will help us to strengthen autonomy.

My interest in this first clause is whether a definition helps us. Do we need a definition to say what it is we are helping to provide special protection for? I am made a little nervous by my noble friend Lord Willetts’s comments because the reason that things have not been defined in Bills over the years is the danger of a definition excluding things by accident. Very often when we draw a line we find that we have produced a new boundary and that it is better to leave some things a little greyer. In the 19th century, universities probably meant places where there were multiplicities of departments, but we know of very good liberal arts universities in the United States that do not teach science and are perfectly properly described as universities. Other examples were given by my noble friend Lord Willetts.

I am nervous about the clause as it is defined at the moment, but am interested in the Minister’s response. If he can say that he will take it away and think of this problem of definition, I would be happy with that. As drafted, it is not perfect. It would be odd for any small and perhaps specialised university of great distinction in certain areas that the behemoth of the regulator could demand that it was failing because it was not helping overseas markets or something or other, so there is a danger here. I want definitions to be defended. I do not think that we have it quite in this clause, but my support or not for the clause will somewhat depend on the spirit in which the Minister replies and whether he will agree to take this away and work at it to see if something a little more workable can be discovered.

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[Lord Giddens]

Caltech has a range of other departments, including philosophy, history, social sciences and English.

[Lord Bilimoria]

I was stressing that it focuses on technology—that is its strength and why it wins all those Nobel prizes—but I acknowledge what the noble Lord says.

I go back to areas of specialisation and the purpose of universities. The mindset of certain people, including in this country, is, “You should study at university what you can apply in a job thereafter”—that is, a sort of vocational mindset. Our universities are not what that is about. My oldest son is reading theology at Cambridge. I do not think that he is going to become a priest, but if he wants to, that is up to him. I do not think that that will happen—he will probably become a management consultant—but what he will learn in that environment is phenomenal. He gets one-to-one supervisions with world leaders in his subject. Not every university does that or can afford to do it, but he has that ability. I consulted Cambridge on this. It said that it recognises the importance of diversity in research and teaching and that the success of global competitiveness of the UK’s universities relies on the core principles of sustainability, diversity and—here is the crux of it—institutional autonomy. That is what worries so many of us about this Bill and why this proposed new clause, right up-front, is so important. It is the spirit of it that I completely support.

The pro-vice-chancellor for education at Cambridge, Graham Virgo, has spoken about the last part of the amendment, which is about being a critic and conscience of society. To narrow down the definition just to teaching and research will be to miss the opportunity to improve our universities and to miss the point. Professor Virgo pointed by way of example to the New Zealand Education Act 1989, which had five criteria for defining a university. The fifth of those was for an institution to accept a role as a critic and conscience of society. That is so important and it is why the amendment sets right up-front the essence of what universities should strive to be about, so that we do not go down the wrong track in this once-in-many-decades opportunity to improve our already fantastic, best-of-the-best, proud, jewel-in-the-crown universities.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Giddens Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare interests as a former head of the London School of Economics, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a professor at the University of California, the last of these being relevant to some of the things I want to say. Apropos what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, I once had the whole UCLA basketball team in my class. They were all about seven feet, six inches tall and they came in and demanded that they all got “A”s. Who was I to quarrel with that?

Speaking as someone who has worked in a variety of universities here and abroad, I believe this Bill to be deeply flawed. It embraces sweeping privatisation at a time when such an approach has become widely discredited. Direct state support for universities is being cut to a minimum. So far as I can trace, it will be at the lowest level of any country in the industrialised world.

The United States is a global leader in higher education—the global leader, I think. I presume that, in preparing their proposals, the Government have sought to learn from the American experience. If so, they have drawn quite the wrong conclusions. I hope that I will get my own little gold medal if, in true didactic fashion, I make three points about universities in the US.

First, many of the for-profit institutions in that country are in deep trouble—indeed, the experiment there has become something of a disaster area. We should learn from what went wrong rather than plunging in willy-nilly as the Government propose. Greater regulation of new entrants than is contained in the Bill is essential.

Secondly, in the US, public universities retain a fundamental presence in higher education and some are at the very top—the aforementioned University of California is perhaps the leading example. By contrast, in the UK, or at least England and Wales, the very notion of higher education as a public good is being undermined, as other speakers have said. This Bill pushes that process much further.

Thirdly, private universities in America have a long history of philanthropy and many have large endowments. The resources thus accumulated protect against external changes and shocks, as well as generating proactive investment. There is nothing comparable in this country, because fundraising is a much more recent endeavour. Universities in this country are far more vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace. The time bomb of student debt is likely to be even more devastating here than it already is in the United States.

If the Bill were simply a full-out embrace of market principles, it would at least have the virtue of consistency. It is actually a bizarre mixture of open markets and arcane bureaucracy—110 pages of rules and regulations. Cumbersome bureaucratic language is everywhere. Why “higher education providers” rather than “colleges and universities”? Are graduates supposed to ask each other, “What higher education provider did you go to and pay £50,000 for the privilege?”? At the same time, again as other speakers have said, the Bill introduces direct state control over aspects of university life where institutions have to be autonomous, touching especially on key principles of academic freedom.

The Government declare that they will allow “higher education providers” to fail. As a consequence of the reforms of the past few years, which will now be pushed much further, some top universities are highly leveraged and hence distinctly vulnerable. Would the Government stand idly by if, let us say, a member of the Russell group collapsed? I want a straightforward yes or no answer to that question from the Minister. It is a crucial one as otherwise basic questions of moral hazard arise.

Everyone can agree that teaching quality in universities should be constantly upgraded and improved. Students should have more say in how universities are run, but how will the Government respond to the real concerns universities and student bodies have about the Bill’s proposals? The TEF gives the state powers it never had before in what is nominally supposed to be a free market. Standardised metrics for teaching assessment simply will not work across the whole range of universities. Noble Lords must force the Government to think again on this issue. It is quite wrong to link the capacity to raise tuition fees to such a system. What will work in certain kinds of university simply will not work in others. This is much too crude a scheme.

The Bill has not even caught up with the political stance of the very Government introducing it. An industrial strategy has been mentioned by the Minister, but I do not see where it is in the Bill. Where is the forward planning? Where is the regional policy, since universities everywhere have a civic role in their regions and localities?

Then there is Brexit—something that as yet has no content and will not do so for many months, perhaps years. I cannot emphasise too much that universities face huge uncertainties over this period and must do a great deal of proactive work to cope with them. Why compound these uncertainties by proceeding with the Bill at such a juncture? Minister Jo Johnson is standing by the Bar and will nod if this is correct, but he apparently said that the Bill will provide a life raft while negotiations with the rest of the EU are going on. Life rafts tend to sink when confronted with rough seas.

Brexit: Impact on Universities and Scientific Research

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Soley on securing this debate and introducing it so ably. I cannot measure up to the list of interests that the right reverend Prelate declared, but I declare an interest as former director of the London School of Economics and formerly a professor in Cambridge for quite a few years.

The issues facing universities are extraordinarily complex. They show in one particular institutional setting the scale of the task the country has taken on following the referendum. So far there is no Brexit, simply a decision to leave the European Union. If the Government have a plan, only they know what it is. The wider economic implications at this point are, therefore, to my mind imponderable.

My first main point is that those responsible for running our universities must engage in scenario thinking that runs well beyond higher education. For better or worse—and in my eyes it is certainly worse—this Government have decided to turn universities into commercial organisations, driven by consumer choice. They will be as vulnerable to a downturn in the economy as any other form of business enterprise.

Moreover, from this juncture onwards there will not be a stable external environment against which universities will operate within the wider framework of the EU. The other member states, and those who run their universities, will be taking reactive decisions well before any concrete deal is reached between Britain and the rest of the European Union. This includes students and potential students, researchers and other staff, as well as those actually in charge of higher education institutions. The Government can try to give guarantees and smooth out anxieties, but everyone can see that those guarantees will be vulnerable should there be a wider deterioration in the UK’s economic situation. What appears to be the Government’s position—that nothing will change up to the point at which the UK actually leaves the EU—seems to me naive in the extreme.

All of this will take place against the backdrop of the higher education Bill, due to come before the Lords shortly. It loads up universities with a tangle of new bureaucratic rules, supposedly in the interests of improving teaching standards, and introduces a further set of uncertainties to join the much more wide-ranging ones created by Brexit. This clumsy Bill is the last thing universities need at the moment and, when the time comes, I hope that other noble Lords will join me in opposing large chunks of it.

The Government can and are seeking to introduce at least some guarantees that existing structures will remain in place for the time being. However, they cannot control what overseas Governments and institutions think, and they will be proactive. Research reported by Times Higher Education indicates that there are already visible consequences. Researchers spoken to indicated that applications to Horizon 2020 for funding had already been thrown into doubt, as continental colleagues worried about the impact of including British researchers in their project applications.

The response that it will be business as usual until the UK actually leaves the EU will not do, for the reasons I have already stressed. Both the Government and university leaders will have to think more imaginatively to blunt the reputational effects of impending Brexit, as well as the real losses in student recruitment and research capacity likely to take place. Of course, there is always the banal response that the UK will open itself up to the wider world as it turns away from the rest of the EU. But proximity is often important in research collaboration, and so is an established and regularly funded way of stimulating and backing research projects.

At this point, we just do not know what kind of deal the UK will be able to do with the 27 other EU nations. There is a huge difference between staying in the single market, which is surely impossible if EU migration is to be curtailed, and opting for a limited trade deal. In the second case, the UK will definitely be an outsider in Europe, peering in. Universities may have become like businesses, but they cannot react with the speed that orthodox companies do to changing economic fortunes. Beyond limited financial guarantees, how will the Government help universities to plan ahead?

I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said. Some structure must be in place—not a temporary consultation, but an enduring structure linking government with universities to plan ahead in a macro context, not just the context of the university system itself.

Grammar Schools

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I am almost tempted to join the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, in defending grammar schools, since everyone is so busy dumping all over them—but I am not really able to do so, although I shall develop a different line of argument from that which most noble Lords have adopted so far.

In early September this year, the PM gave a speech on schools and meritocracy. That speech paved the way for her proposal to introduce a raft of new grammar schools. Whoever put the speech together seems to have thought that if you stick the word “great” in front of every policy idea, it makes it so. The PM asserted repeatedly that the Government will create a “great meritocracy” in the UK. She even ended with the proclamation that Britain will be,

“set on the path to being the great meritocracy of the world”.

That is not even particularly grammatical, if I might say so.

Michael Young coined the term meritocracy precisely to ridicule the tripartite system, with its effect of leaving those who failed the 11-plus with an abiding sense of failure. We all have our personal stories. I somehow passed the 11-plus and went to a grammar school—and who was sitting along the corridor from me but my noble friend Lord Puttnam, who was busy humming the tune that later became the song of “Chariots of Fire”? That is a moment of great distinction—and here we both are, together after all these years.

According to the Prime Minister, things will be very different this time, since grammar schools are seen as part of a diverse school system. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, made that point. But the effects on the majority in any given part of the country who fail to get in will surely be similar. The point of the great meritocracy is supposedly to promote social mobility, but I see no sign that the Government understand what that notion means. Sociologists distinguish two forms of social mobility, which we call absolute and relative. That does not sound too attractive in the context, but it is crucial for anyone in understanding what possibilities there are for improving social mobility. It is a crucial distinction.

Absolute mobility refers to mobility chances created by positive structural change. In Britain, over the past several decades, there was a great deal of social mobility. Virtually all of it, however, was absolute mobility: the result of opportunities opened up by the expansion of white-collar and professional jobs and the corresponding decline of manual ones. Those in my generation were beneficiaries of this process.

It is crucial to understand that relative mobility, where some are able to move up because others do less well than their parents, was rare, and remains so today. For the up-and-coming generation, the situation in future—over the next three decades or so—will be very different from the experience of people sitting here. Rather than expanding, a range of core white-collar and professional jobs look set to disappear over the next couple of decades. The problems here are huge.

Against such a backdrop, there are only two possible strategies for increasing social mobility, and both would have to be deployed to get any significant effect. First, large-scale social spending, way beyond anything in existence at the moment, would be needed to improve the life chances of those from poorer backgrounds. Secondly, in current circumstances, for children of the less privileged to move up, put bluntly, others from more privileged backgrounds must move down. The Government would have actively and systematically to attack the privileges of those at the top. Private tuition, the dominance of private schools and personal connections transmitted from generation to generation are all ways in which those advantages will be sustained.

As virtually all noble Lords have said, the plan to create a new wave of grammar schools will exacerbate the situation rather than transform it. In education, as elsewhere, we should be looking not backwards but towards the gigantic changes impacting on our lives today. The digital revolution is set to transform education in the classroom just as radically as it is affecting other areas of life. Properly harnessed, it offers opportunities for the radical levelling up of education at all levels. At the moment, it does not seem to figure in government thinking at all.

That celebrated thinker, Woody Allen, remarked that confidence is what you have before you understand the problem. In the case of promoting greater social mobility, that is exactly the position in which the Government find themselves today.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I should like to comment on some implications of the digital revolution for healthcare and medicine, and I would like to ask the Minister to take some of these implications on board for future policy.

We are living through a period of probably the greatest technological innovation in human history, including even the original Industrial Revolution. It is driven by the digital revolution. When the telephone was invented, it took 75 years to reach 50 million people. The first iPhone was produced only in 2007. There are already close to 1 billion iPhones and something like 3 billion smartphones in the world, and there are as many mobile phones as there are people in the world. There has never before been a period of innovation of this speed, intensity and global scope.

The digital revolution is often misunderstood because it is identified with the internet. The advance of the internet is quite incredible because it has conquered the world in a period of less than 20 years. But the driving force of the digital revolution is the relationship between the internet, supercomputers and robotics. In studying these phenomena, I have come to see supercomputers as the prime driving force.

Supercomputers can already do many things that we cannot. The IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion in 1997. Most people can understand that—after all, chess is a sort of mathematical enterprise. Much more interestingly, though, much more recently another IBM supercomputer called Watson beat the two world champions at “Jeopardy!”. “Jeopardy!” is an ordinary language and general knowledge game. No one anticipated, even a few years ago, that computers would be able to do that. Supercomputers can compose poetry at least on a par with many human authors, and can compose music. This is a true revolution that has massive consequences for many areas of our lives. The iPhone you have in your pocket is more powerful than a supercomputer of only about 15 years ago. This had quite a big impact on the election, I think, because when you have an iPhone in your pocket you feel empowered, and indeed you are: you can get information on people whenever you want it, and you live a kind of just-in-time life. That is one of the reasons for the lateness of the result of the election and the fact that it was not anticipated.

My main point is that this is going to have unprecedented consequences for breakthroughs in medicine, and these must be incorporated in avant garde government policy. There are three reasons for this. The first is that for the first time in history, scientists can communicate with one another directly across the world in a way that was not possible before. There are vast volumes of accessible medical information on massive online sites that can drive medical advances in a way that was simply not possible until this generation. The second reason is that radical advances propelled by the computing capacity of supercomputers are simply unlocking areas of medicine that we had no idea we could conquer: you can decouple genetic chains, for example, and there have been massive advances in stem cell research. Many people will have seen material in the newspapers recently about breakthroughs in cancer. This is the cutting edge of advances that will become much more profound, and we must embody them in policy. The third reason is the breakthroughs everywhere in monitoring self-care and preventive medicine.

I wonder whether the Minister has read the book by Eric Topol, the celebrated American heart surgeon, called The Patient Will See You Now, which was a New York Times bestseller. We know what ordinarily happens when we go to A&E: we get there, we wait for five or six hours and they say, “The doctor will see you now”. The point of the title The Patient Will See You Now is that we will see a period of radical empowerment of patients through a diversity of digital technologies. This is not the future but the present, and there are many examples of how it is already working. We might think it will happen only down the line, but this is a period in which whole industries have been wiped out overnight and the same thing could also happen creatively in most areas of medicine and science. Technology might appear to be, as it were, the antithesis of the human—of living along with other people in a personal and direct fashion—but it is not.

I conclude by mentioning the example of Denmark, which is one of thousands that one could quote from around the world. In Denmark, remote monitoring and video conferencing are playing a huge role in end-of-life care and have transformed it. Over half the deaths in Denmark used to occur in hospital, with many people suffering in isolation. Now 90% of people pass away at home in the company of loved ones, even if some are on the other side of the world. No one working in the health service or in medicine should misunderstand the huge waves of change, which are not in their later stages but in their early stages and will radically transform what hospitals are and what medical care is. Eric Topol says that hospitals will eventually disappear. I do not think that that is a stupid idea; it is down the line.

Can the Minister comment on whether the Alan Turing Institute, which was being set up before the election, will come into being? It will be a cutting-edge institute for advanced maths and algorithms. I think some £42 million was supposedly dedicated by the Government for that institute, and five major British universities will be involved. Can the Minister confirm that that money will be there and the institute will devote a substantial proportion of its work to frontier medical research?

Early Years Intervention

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, when a technical concept in social sciences is imported into political discourse there are often problems. This has happened with the notion of social mobility. We must distinguish between what sociologists call absolute mobility on one hand and relative mobility on the other. Absolute mobility refers to changes in the labour market and occupational system that creates jobs for people to move into. Relative social mobility is the movement of individuals up and down the social scale. In principle, these two things are completely different. If we do not recognise this, we will never get appropriate policy in this area.

Almost all the social mobility experienced between the 1960s and the early 2000s was absolute social mobility; that is, it depended on the expansion of white collar and professional jobs as deindustrialisation took hold. The number of blue collar jobs shrank dramatically. Rates of relative mobility—that is, individuals supplanting others who move up and down—remained low throughout this period and remain very low today. With relative social mobility, it is crucial to understand that for those at the bottom to rise up, others above them must experience downward social mobility. This does not happen very much, because privileged groups are normally able to deploy strategies to ensure that it does not happen and to keep ahead—that has important policy implications that I will come back to.

For this reason, interventionist policies, no matter how well intentioned and designed to help individuals in a direct way, whether in early years or not, will never be more than of limited effectiveness. We have an awful lot of evidence on this: it comes especially from the Head Start programme in the United States, which was initiated as long ago as 1965 as part of the war on poverty. I can assure noble Lords that those results are immediately and directly consequential for and relevant to this country. Sure Start here was based on Head Start—one could say that the Americans had a big head start over Sure Start and put a lot more resources into it.

I shall mention three conclusions, based on an awful lot of research—good intentions are not enough in this area. First, amazingly, as a result of many studies, there is no real consensus among academics on how effective the Head Start programme has been. Some studies show improvement in cognitive and behavioural skills; others find no correlation at all. A lot of money has been spent, but the level of feedback and the implicational consequences have been relatively low. It is really important to bear this in mind: as I have said, all policy must be evidence-based; it is not enough to be based just on good intentions.

Secondly, where positive results are found, they tend to fade after a few years. This is known in the literature as Head Start “fade” and is a well established phenomenon. It means that you cannot just depend on early intervention. As at least one noble Lord mentioned, there must be subsequent interventions at other ages for these policies to work. This is clearly, plainly and empirically demonstrated; such policies have to stretch across the school years as a whole.

Thirdly, the old idea that early years are somehow a magic phase of child development, decisive for later years, has to be abandoned, at least in the case of social mobility. They are not. The Government’s social mobility and child poverty strategy is therefore quite inadequate as it is set out.

I have two questions for the Minister. First, active policies are needed to counter the strategies of affluent parents who try to ensure that their advantages are passed on to their children. This is a crucial mechanism whereby relative mobility is kept limited. The Prime Minister referred to such parents as the “sharp-elbowed middle classes”. Dare the Government stand up to the sharp-elbowed middle classes? You will not improve social mobility for people from poor backgrounds unless there is some kind of strategy along these lines.

Secondly and finally, does the Minister agree that active intervention at the level of the labour market will be crucial to ensure that dead-end jobs do not produce an underclass where there is virtually no mobility at all? Inequality always trumps mobility, and it is intervention in the area of absolute mobility that will really make the difference.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I will refer to two groups of experiments. First, in the 1960s, there was a classic neuroscientific experiment where newborn kittens were blindfolded for various lengths of time. After a short time of complete darkness, once the blindfold was removed, there were permanent changes in the visual cortex of the brain. That could not be fully corrected by any subsequent exposure to light. Although I completely agree with my noble friend Lord Giddens about the early years not being a special part, none the less, there are key experiences that we need during development which are not entirely ruled out by the arguments being made.

Secondly, I point out that that is exactly why I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I do not believe that it is as simple as he makes out. This is a very competitive area. I think that I can demonstrate that by the most amazing report done in 2001 by Lars Bygren of Sweden, who looked at a village in the far north of Sweden, near the Gulf of Bothnia. He showed that of males aged nine who were subjected to a good harvest during the period that he studied in the late 1800s and early 1900s, their paternal grandchildren, the sons, had a shorter longevity than any other members of the family. That is an extraordinary finding and suggests that there is programming. At the time, the report was not taken seriously, but since then a number of interesting epigenetic experiments have been carried out which show that many things that we inherit not directly through our DNA but through the way that the genes function make a massive difference.

For example, Gregory Dunn, in Pennsylvania, has recently published a study in which he shows that an obese great-grandmother mouse passes on a trait through only her male children which causes their grandchildren, if they are female, to be obese. Obesity is a very complicated issue. This will apply to all sorts of areas of inheritance—it could well apply to cognition as well. The field of epigenetics is extremely confusing. That is why we need to be very careful not to make snap judgments about the complexity of early childhood learning. That is borne out by all sorts of other experiments which I do not have time to address.

With regard to environment, I am surprised that the millennium cohort study has not been mentioned already; your Lordships will be aware of it, I am sure. It has looked at 19,000 children born since 2000-01. That study, funded by the ESRC, and a very good example of British cohort studies—one of the reasons why we want to support British research—has been a mine for all sorts of overseas investigators in France and elsewhere who have used those data. For example, it looked at parenting, childcare, school choice, behaviour, cognitive development and health. It looked at those children at nine months, three years, five years, seven years and nine years. It bears out some of the things that my noble friend Lord Giddens said. Although there may be serious evidence of undoubted changes in cognition in early years—certainly between three and five—by the age of seven, that can often be adjusted by other factors.

[Lord Giddens]

I point out that we are not a team and it is coincidental that we are sitting next to one another.

[Lord Winston]

I thought that in a time-limited debate the noble Lord would not interrupt me, but I forgive him as he is a noble friend.

My point is that a whole range of claims are made by all sorts of authorities about maternal health and how it affects cognition, breastfeeding, socialisation, social recognition and play. Undoubtedly, when there is severe deprivation—for example, in Romania—there is clear evidence of massive changes. Nelson and his group at Harvard University have shown clearly that good fostering makes a massive difference when a child has been in institutional care for a long period but, sadly, most of those children never recover completely—certainly, in their ability to deal with emotion, stress, some aspects of cognition and so on.

Although I argue that we certainly need to do more about early years learning, it is very important that successive Governments focus this work in the best possible way to have the key access to those most at risk. That is one reason why the Sure Start programme was a good start in trying to do that.