Universities

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to add my words to my noble friend for giving us this opportunity to look over a sector of national life that is so vital.

I begin by mentioning just two words: “Robbins report”. It in a sense shaped the architecture of much of what happened subsequently in the development of higher education in this country. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, whose speech on the 50th anniversary of the report reminded us that perhaps Robbins brought to a proper conclusion what was begun in the Butler Education Act 1944. Since I am the beneficiary of the latter for my secondary schooling and the former for my higher education—or part of it, as I will explain—it is a good place to start for me.

I ask your Lordships to exercise their imagination and see a very raw graduate aged 22, exactly 60 years ago, taking a train—when there was still a train—from Carmarthen to Aberystwyth and stopping at Lampeter on the way. I had just been appointed as an assistant lecturer at St David’s College in Lampeter. I did not want to go. I was doing a PhD and my professor told me I had to, because at that time, Lampeter was being merged with the University of Wales as a fifth college—Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor, Aberystwyth and Lampeter—but could do so only under the aegis of one of the existing colleges. Aberystwyth, fiercely Presbyterian, did not want anything quite so Anglican, so it was cosmopolitan Cardiff that wanted to do the deal.

I was sent to be the assistant lecturer. My subject area was medieval English from “Beowulf” to Chaucer, the history of the English language, pre-Shakespearean drama, and all that kind of thing—gifts that noble Lords would never imagine from hearing other outbursts on my part in your Lordships’ House.

I pause there for a while for two reasons. First, I am absolutely certain that I would not be standing in your Lordships’ House—with all the caveats and mitigations that have been mentioned in the debate—if I had been of university age now. I could not have gone; it could not have been entertained. The poverty from which I came would not have been helped with a bursary, or anything like that. The pressure of home was to have a 15 or 16 year-old boy out working, instead of going off on these fancy educational things about which parents knew absolutely nothing. Little coteries of people would come to persuade my mother, a single parent—we lived in destitution—that it mattered that I went on to do O-levels. They said, “Give him a chance”, and when I did well, that the A-levels were now the next thing I should aim at. Each time, she had to be persuaded, and each time, she did not know how to put food on the table or how to clothe us for school.

From my pastoral work ever since, I can detect large numbers of young people who are trapped in precisely the same way and who will never even entertain the idea, even if we hold out carrots before them. I was just fortunate to have been born when I was. That is the first thing.

I look at this issue through the eyes of students, because most of my life I have not run things, as most Members of this House have done; I have simply gone into people’s homes and dealt with them in their time of crisis and helped with all the pastoral matters. Out of that, I have formed my opinions from the ground up, instead of from the top down.

My second point is that I doubt whether I would easily find a place that wanted a teacher of medieval English now—it is one of the subjects that is been sacrificed. Much more recently, I played a significant part, although not a leading part, in the formation of the University of Roehampton, which brought together four former teacher training colleges: the Roman Catholic Digby Stuart College, the Methodist Southlands College, an Anglican college and a humanist college. We got our degree-granting powers from the Privy Council and all the rest of it. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, mentioned the phrase “liberal arts”, and I am astonished that teacher training colleges—which were, in essence, liberal arts colleges—are now sacrificing jobs in the humanities and liberal arts for the sake of the disciplines and studies that quantifiably can be shown to get you a job in the kind of world we now live in. I promise noble Lords that real attributes that earn real money are to be found in people who can put two proper sentences together, can hold their own in an argument, can read a book, can form a study group and can see, in those aspects of life, things of importance.

I must finish because I have reached my time, but the House must have the impression that I could go on for a very long time. I will say one last thing, if noble Lords will be patient with me. This morning, I heard from the university in Lampeter that it will finish teaching and that it will have no courses after this year. It is for that reason that, although I am usually well co-ordinated, I have put on my Lampeter colours tie to protest the very idea of losing a brilliant piece of educational work, all on the altar of what is called “progress”.

Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My heart has been warmed by the illustration just offered by the noble Lord, Lord Maude, and others like it could be multiplied and accumulated. However, on the other side we can find stories that say exactly the opposite and make the opposite case. Not always do private schools favour places in disadvantaged localities in the way that he has described—would that they did.

I passed the 11-plus at the age of 10, but a year later my brother failed, so we lived in two different universes: we had friends who were not the same friends; we dressed differently; he left school at 15, and I had a Rolls-Royce education. However, at the end of the grammar school—which for me was a godsend; it made me—my headmaster took me into his study and said he was forming an Oxbridge class but was not putting me in it, even though he thought I was clever enough, on the grounds that I would not be able to cope with Cambridge socially. It was the right decision and I have never held it against him, but it made me determined to spend the rest of my life, as much as I could in the sphere of education, trying to ensure that educational advantage was offered equally to all, not simply on the basis of money.

I am not even talking about hugely super-rich people. My three children were educated in private Methodist schools: The Leys in Cambridge and Kingswood School. I spent 38 years in school governance, if you add it all up, and the last 20 years as chair of the trustees of the Central Foundation Schools of London, with a school in Islington and another in Tower Hamlets—I know these places to my fingertips. But they are part of the Dulwich foundation. They are beneficiaries. They get a huge amount of money that helps to pay for a teacher and helps with language-learning skills, sport and pastoral work. We appreciate the 5% that we get in each of our two schools from the total disbursement. However, the total disbursement is £7.5 million, and 85% of that £7.5 million goes towards the three public schools at Dulwich. When you look at this year’s A-level results this year and see what our little schools in London got, and compare that to what the rest of the foundation got, you are left with one conclusion: we must build an educational sector that is far more open.

We talk about choice. The people I am thinking about, the 2,500 pupils in our two schools, have no choice. We talk about people doing two or three jobs, but hundreds and hundreds of people in the inner city do two or three jobs with no access whatever to these privileged places. We must be careful about how we lampoon each other.

When I was a governor at Kingswood School, I said, “I can only think of the privileges of this school if you have a social policy that seeks to spread its benefits as widely as you can”. Then, at the Central Foundation Boys’ School in London, we had a boy with three A* grades who had work experience at three stock exchanges—Tokyo, London and New York—and was captain of the football team. He was fantastic, but he was refused at Cambridge because he had not studied the right kind of mathematics at A-level.

We are grossly saddled with disadvantage, and we need to do something about it. If the VAT project does not do it—and I am prepared to admit that doing that so suddenly presents real problems—at the same time, let us not think we have solved any problems by dealing critically with what is on the table now. The battle will remain, and I am committed to fighting it to my dying breath.

King’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my voice of congratulation to my noble friend the Minister not only on her appointment but on the fact that she has made her maiden speech. I look forward to the punchy and forthright way in which policies that have been delivered and proposals that have been fleshed out in the King’s Speech turn themselves into pieces of law that will give us a different sense of direction, and possibly, when implemented, a sense of accomplishment too. So congratulations and thank you for that good start.

I refer to the mention in the King’s Speech of a general term, “raise educational standards”, and to “children’s wellbeing”, and I wish to focus my little intervention there. I look forward to seeing how those things spell out.

I have been reading the recent Better Schools—The Future of the Country report by an educationalist called Tim Clark, in which he focuses down on pupils with SEND—specialist educational needs and disabilities. He writes as follows:

“Particularly concerning is that pupils with SEND are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds and ‘that the discrepancies between and advantaged backgrounds have increased 2010-2020’”.


A variant of that remark, regretting the gap between the haves and the have-nots, appears again and again in one report after another, and has indeed been part of a speech before mine in this debate. There is a bigger battle to be fought than we have time for here today about what to do about the social tendencies that are forcing people away from each other and dividing our communities, and causing those who are disadvantaged to suffer disproportionately. I thought that was worth mentioning, although it is a little tangential to the thrust of the debate.

This debate is taking place while the first report from the Covid inquiry is filling our newspapers. In that report, it is correctly pointed out that 235,000 people died from Covid. All of us regret the particularly high number of people whose deaths occurred in care homes and in the care sector, but we simply have to mention alongside that—as future reports certainly will—the effect of the pandemic on those who lost so much in our schools throughout that period.

I was involved for 20 years with two high schools in inner London, one in Islington and the other in Tower Hamlets, and I spent 12 years as chair of the trustees for those two schools. We noted with great regret how teachers left because Covid had so struck the atmosphere and the possibilities. Ever since, levels of truancy have risen, as the noble Lord on the Lib Dem Benches said, and we continue to witness higher levels of bad behaviour in our classrooms. My question simply has to be this: how do we keep that in focus and not simply think that that was then? There are young people who will be blighted by those years for the rest of their lives and who deserve our attention.

How is it that the charitable foundation that underwrites some of the costs of the schools with which I have been involved spends 12.5% of its distributable income on schools in the state sector, and 65% on the three prestigious public schools that are part of the same foundation? I think it proper to note the economic consequences of some of this Government’s proposals on those in the private sector, but we must not forget that there is tons of charitable money out there that is simply not getting to the poorest people, even when the charities were set up to focus on the poorest people in their own age.

So, with 14 seconds left and the good will of my Chief Whip, which it is very necessary for me to retain, I draw my remarks to a close. There were other things I wanted to say—there were rich things I wanted to say—but, at this stage, the smile on the Minister’s face suffices for my present needs.