King’s Speech

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, let me start by congratulating my noble friend Lady Smith on her maiden speech. It was great, and I am absolutely delighted that is she is back; we have missed her. I am also excited to see my great and noble friend Lady Merron in office, and look forward to supporting her on the mental health Bill. I want to take a moment also to pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for her diligent work as a Minister. She modelled the behaviours of public service that we now want to see across the new Government.

I should remind the House of my education interests in the register: in the context of this debate, my membership of the Pearson qualifications committee and chairing the board of STEM Learning are particularly relevant. I want to focus today on skills more than schools.

I am excited, if a little daunted, by the scale and ambition of this legislative programme in the King’s Speech, particularly in the context of the opportunity mission. Some believe that we create opportunity by keeping government out of people’s way. We now have a Government with a lived experience who know that swathes of people are denied opportunity by obstacles that government must actively address and then support people to get on. This is government more as a gardener planting seeds and supporting growth rather than as an absentee landlord.

This is how I see Skills England. Economic growth is dependent on more private enterprise, investors, products and consumers, but we cannot just leave them to it and hope that something turns up. The volume of skills-shortage vacancies doubled in the five years to 2022. We need a new, powerful organisation that brings together employers and unions, combined authorities and national government to ensure that the economy has the skills we need to grow, and in the places and sectors we most need, using the new, more flexible growth and skills levy.

How else, for example, will we develop the skills to fuel green growth? Young people, especially girls, care deeply about green issues, but, according to Prince’s Trust research, are turned off by green jobs, so we need to start in schools with shifting perception and experience of STEM subjects and skills, and then creating coherent pathways from there.

Thirty years ago, 90% of children studied design and technology to 16. This is the subject in the national curriculum to excite young people about applied learning from science and maths, yet we now have less than a fifth studying it in key stage 4. Many schools no longer have the teachers or the facilities for D&T. This has to change if we are to give young people opportunities in the future economy.

I urge my noble friend the Minister to urgently review both T-levels and apprenticeships, and in the meantime fund current qualifications such as BTECs, which more than 150,000 young people are studying with success. My noble friend started the development of 14-19 diplomas. I took over from her and was appalled that they were then cancelled in 2010. We should not do the same to T-levels, but, at present, they are bloated to study and assess, and need trimming before they will be taken up at scale.

For adults, we must build on the delegation of skills funding to combined mayoral authorities so that they can work on their more local industrial strategies with confidence. But that must all be in the context of national standards, growth plans and qualifications set by Skills England.

Finally, I want briefly to touch on issues of workforce and technology. In both health and education, we have systems that are broken but have been sustained by the commitment and dedication of wonderful professional staff. On Monday, I checked with my wife’s oncologist on how she felt when the Secretary of State was quoted as saying the NHS was broken. She replied that it was difficult. We must ensure that the change that people voted for on 4 July reflects the values of the public sector workforce, carries them with us and is at a manageable pace.

Staff can also be helped by technology—despite what is going on today with the Windows update. My wife is through the curative and now in the preventive treatment for breast cancer. Her whole patient experience is shared on an app, but while the data is shared with us, it is not shared with her GP or the local A&E at Lewisham. Our experience at the local hospital when my wife had sepsis was the most scared I have ever been. The danger she was in could have been largely prevented if our NHS systems talked to each other at a basic level of data sharing.

The same is true in education. The measures in the children’s well-being Bill will help, but so will the measures in the digital information and smart data Bill to allow better integration of public service data so that teachers can get a clearer picture of the complexity of the lives of the children they serve.

I am excited by the new Government, who face a daunting task. This legislative programme is ambitious, but I am excited for us to get stuck into it and help rebuild our public services, funded by a growing economy.

Educational Technology

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses. I do not think that there was a word that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said that I did not agree with. I declare my interests at the outset: I, too, am a political adviser to AI in Education; I chair a multi-academy trust, E-ACT; I am a director of Suklaa, whose clients include Iris Software and Goodnotes; I am a director of Macat; and I chair the boards at Century Tech and EDUCATE Ventures Research. I am very proud that the last two are headed up by two great experts around AI and education, Professor Rose Luckin and Priya Lakhani.

I am a long-term evangelist for the use of technology in education, as well as change in education and our school system, but I recognise the efficacy problem that the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Morgan, talked about. I signed off, and was responsible as a Minister for, the harnessing technology grants—rather a lot of money was spent on rather a lot of whiteboards. I am not sure that they made a massive difference when we did not accompany that investment with the training of teachers to transform their pedagogy to go with it, and we need to learn from that.

It is also fair to reflect that, with the current orthodoxy of the curriculum—what we require of young people and how they take tests writing on paper with pens in large sports halls every summer—perhaps we do not need technology. It may well be that, given that that system has not really changed for the last 50 to 70 years, we know how to teach it. If we think that that is right and we should preserve the status quo for ever, then perhaps we do not need technology. But I happen to believe, particularly with the workforce crisis that we face in our schools, and the changing environment externally that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, talked about, that we need to change.

I am guided by the work back in the late 1990s of Professor Ruben Puentedura from Boston who talked about his SAMR model—that is, substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition. It is only when you get to the modification or redefinition of pedagogy that you achieve proper gains with the application of technology in education.

Currently we have a curriculum problem for the reasons outlined by the noble Baroness. We have an opportunity for change enabled by technology assisting teachers, and technology is making that change inevitable and essential. In order to realise that opportunity, we have to be mindful of some of the problems of safety, data and privacy, the digital divide—the divide around access to devices and data—and the confidence of teachers and learners to be able to use technology and of parents to be able to support their children during homework using technology. We have to be mindful of all those things, but they should not be an obstacle to progress.

There are alternative visions. There is a dystopian vision where technology replaces teachers and young people are isolated, learning on screens, cramming for tests of knowledge and ultimately falling behind machines because they leave school unable to compete with highly intelligent machines and their ability to regurgitate knowledge far more accurately than humans ever could. At the same time, in that dystopian world, we would have all the problems of data privacy and privatisation that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talked about.

The utopian vision is of technology as a co-pilot to teachers, keeping them informed about the differences in their class, the scaffolding gaps in the knowledge of their children and the skills that those children need as technology helps them to interpret how their children are doing. This vision includes the opportunity for flipped learning so that the instructional knowledge-based elements of the learning can be done at home using technology so that school is a human place of social interaction and group work with the application of knowledge in an exciting way that teachers at the moment are not equipped and trained to be able to do. With the application of technology, there is an opportunity to do that and to develop a more rounded curriculum powered by novel forms of assessment with portfolios as endpoint qualifications that can deliver higher education entrance in a way that is a transformation from where we are at the moment and, to my mind, hugely exciting.

Artificial intelligence represents an opportunity. There are opportunities for tools for workload and workflow and pedagogic tools around adaptive learning, formative assessment on the fly and being able to deliver project-based learning in a way that is currently practically really hard for teachers but could be made a lot easier, thereby engaging all learners with relevant knowledge and skills in a way that is currently inconceivable.

However, we have to be mindful of the risks. I am interested in data trusts for public services and in whether we can set up trusts in statute not only for the NHS but for education so that we can own and control the use of children’s data, navigate which commercial partners we might want to use and get some return on the AI that that data is being used to train so that we can use that to help to fund our education system if that intellectual property is then exploited overseas.

The Minister will not be surprised that I question why we are investing £2 million of public money in Oak National Academy without procurement for it to do AI development, rather than using the private sector and others or even going through any kind of procurement to see how we might do that. Generally, I would love to see Oak repurposed into a modern-day version of BECTA that could properly advise the system on the safety, efficacy and workload implications of technology and generate the best-value procurement possible.

Edtech is a great opportunity. The need for change is pressing. We should chase after the utopian vision, with technology for good being embedded in what we do our schools.

Access to Musical Education in School

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 18th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is great to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and like others I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Boateng for securing, and the way he introduced, this debate.

The evidence of unequal access to music education is clear. My daughter, Ruth, had private instrument lessons and now her production of “La Traviata” opens on the ENO stage next week. Our 12 year-old, Coco, has private piano lessons and is learning the power of practice as she struggles on through her grade 7, but their privilege in having parents who can afford tuition is clear.

I recently read an excellent book by Jude Rogers, entitled The Sound of Being Human. In it, she quotes the cognitive psychologist, Professor Daniel Levitin. He points out that the earliest human-made artefacts were musical instruments, including a 60,000 year-old bone flute found in Slovenia. Singing around a campfire helped early humans to stay awake and ward off predators, but it also helped us develop co-operation and turn-taking, strengthening human group dynamics. Not only does Levitin find that music is at the very core of being human but he finds that it is absolutely core to the brain development of children. It encourages different parts of the brain to work together in an integrated way, and the curiosity that in turn allows the development of language is formed from there. Three separate parts of the brain are connected by conversation through music: the most advanced with the most mechanical, connecting our most primitive with our most advanced selves.

The science around how music triggers subconscious memory is also well known. The neuroscience is clear. Music must be a core subject, especially in early years education. So how is it going? Like the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I have been reading last month’s Ofsted report on music education in England, which was published with the headline:

“Music teaching too variable in quality and often not given enough time”.


The report says:

“The inequalities in provision that we highlighted in our last subject report … persist. There remains a divide between the opportunities for children and young people whose families can afford to pay for music tuition and for those who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds”.


We have also heard today about the decline in GCSE and A-level music entries since the EBacc was introduced 13 years ago. Yet, in the last 20 years, vocational music qualifications taken in schools have rocketed.

I remind the House of my education interests, especially as a member of Pearson’s qualification committee. Has any thought been given to the impact on vocational music if the Government proceed with defunding BTECs to prioritise money for T-levels, which contain no music, as we have heard, and will have to be significantly reformed if they are to be a part of the advanced BS that the Prime Minister proposes? The decline in the music teaching workforce is also deeply worrying. Two years ago, we were recruiting into initial teacher training at 71% of target, and last year at 64%. If the National Foundation for Educational Research is correct, just 31% of target will be met this year. What is the evidence that a £10,000 bursary is enough?

In closing, I ask the Minister to reflect with her colleagues on the need for a change of approach. I am pleased that the Prime Minister wants a more balanced post-16 curriculum, but we need the same rebalancing throughout the secondary curriculum. We need a change to the accountability system of the EBacc and Progress 8 to give much-needed oxygen for the creative subjects. As the minister knows, AI is marching on apace. Our current curriculum is equipping our children to be outcompeted by technology. Our competitive advantage against machines is to be better humans. What better way to prepare our children for their human future than by ensuring that they have a strong music education?

Life Skills and Citizenship

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by reminding noble Lords of my education interests in the register, in particular as chair of the E-ACT multi-academy trust and as a director of Suklaa Ltd. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for how she opened the debate, although I say to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that I think I disagreed with pretty much everything that he said.

We must start by recognising the capacity limits in the time that children spend in classrooms. The curriculum is already overwhelming for teachers and learners and, if we are to add more to it, it has to be at the expense of something that we are willing to take away. The conundrum, however, is that children are leaving school ill prepared to prosper in a complex, dynamic world—surely, then, we should make more room for life skills and citizenship education. Some argue for adding it to PSHE, which is too often where citizenship is also taught now. When I was Schools Minister, I added financial literacy to the subject, and I welcome the inclusion of relationship and sex education, but that part of the timetable is now full.

I argue that the conundrum can be resolved through rebalancing the curriculum. Our “knowledge-rich” curriculum, the EBacc and the nature of Ofsted inspections combine to deliver a highly academic diet in primary and secondary schools. There is so much detailed content crammed in that, as the Institute of Physics told your Lordships’ Education for 11–16 Year Olds Committee, there is no space to teach “the big ideas”. If we stripped out a lot of the minutiae of the curriculum, we could free teachers to be more relevant and engaging and include life skills and citizenship across the curriculum. This was the vision of my Private Member’s Bill in the last Session. I wanted a new aim for the national curriculum, instilling

“an ethos and ability to care for oneself, others and the natural environment, for present and future generations”.

More knowledge is not power; it is boring. But powerful knowledge is exciting and empowering. It must be relevant to the here and now, deliver life skills and make us successful sustainable citizens, and it will follow when we deliver a broader and more balanced curriculum.

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I completely agree with my noble friend. We are most concerned to minimise online teaching and remote learning. Our children have been out of the classroom enough with Covid, and this House knows the seriousness of issues with attendance. We all know that this is the moment in the year when we want children in the classroom—on 4 September, or maybe 5 September if there is an inset day.

In relation to online teaching, perhaps it will reassure my noble friend if I say that we have already worked with 52 schools and mitigated over the last few months, before this change in policy when we identified a critical grade. The average number of days lost for those children was six. Six days is a lot. For some children it was more and for some it was none.

In the vast majority of those cases, the whole school does not have RAAC across all its roofs and floors; it is typically in a small area of the school. I bumped into someone this afternoon who was talking about their secondary school. They are able to reorganise the space in their school. They will miss one day of school tomorrow and then all the children will be back on Wednesday. That is in a big secondary school.

On my noble friend’s second point, in those first 52 cases, we are so grateful to other local schools, some of which have spare space and have bent over backwards to make sure that children do not miss a single day more than they need to.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, the safety of children in our schools is being compromised not just by RAAC construction. I remind the House of my interests, in particular as an adviser to Charter School Capital and as chair of the E-ACT multi-academy trust. In the trust, there is a secondary school with CLASP construction, meaning it has no foundations, has asbestos and desperately needs replacing. Another has external concrete cladding that is falling off, so we are spending over £50,000 a year just on scaffolding to catch it before it hurts anyone. When will the Government implement a comprehensive condition survey, not just for RAAC schools, and match it with proper investment to ensure the education budget is spent on education and not just on patching and mending the crumbling school estate?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord that the Government made a full survey of the school estate. We carried out the first one I think between 2017 and 2019 and we are in the middle of the second one at the moment. That looks at the condition grade across schools. I have the figures in front of me: in the first survey, 95% of individual condition grades—which literally look at the window frames; I am not sure about door handles but the walls, the roofs, et cetera—were graded as good or satisfactory, and 2.4% were poor or bad: 2.1% were poor and 0.3% were bad.

The noble Lord will also know that all our funding to schools for condition is prioritised based on condition need. He also knows that if there is an urgent request we will always consider it. We have already identified some the of so-called system builds, such as Laingspan and Intergrid. Almost all of that has been completely resolved and plans are in place for all of it to be removed. We have a programme of surveys starting later this year looking at the remaining construction types to understand them better and understand whether they might pose a risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

On the first part of the noble Baroness’s question, we set out the expectations for responsible bodies. I think it is safe to say that the local authorities are pretty clear what their responsibilities are. In relation to academy trusts, those responsibilities are set out in the Academy Trust Handbook. We actually strengthened, clarified and reinforced the language around that before we knew about the three schools; we did that earlier in the summer with a new updated version. This was just to make sure—reflecting the noble Baroness’s point—that there was absolutely no doubt about the practical steps that should reasonably be expected for responsible bodies to take.

I am glad of the opportunity to say that our condition data collection survey, which I referred to, is not in any way a blurring of the lines of responsibility between responsible bodies and the department. However, it allows us both to plan the quantum of funding that we need to give to those responsible bodies to maintain their buildings and to identify areas where there is greater deterioration or less. So we have a broad overview of the school estate, but that should not blur any lines in relation to responsibility.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, does that inform the quantum of money that the department gets from the Treasury, or does it just inform the quantum that is distributed among responsible bodies once the Treasury has decided what to give to the department?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

It certainly informs the second although, as the noble Lord knows, larger academy trusts and local authorities have discretion to judge within their own school estate how they want to use that money. A number of things inform our discussions with the Treasury, of which the condition data survey is one, but it is definitely not the only thing.

Higher Education: Financial Pressures

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

To move that this House takes note of the financial pressures on Higher Education and the impact on (1) local communities, (2) the United Kingdom’s science and innovation exports, and (3) the impact on delivering the Turing Scheme.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate. The Minister is taking her seat, and she knows that I am a bit of a schools policy obsessive, so I come to this area of education somewhat afresh—and I am pretty alarmed by what I have found.

I must start by underscoring that higher education is critical to Britain. For individual learners hoping to prosper in the future labour market, we know that, as technology and the greening of the economy deskills and demands new skills, future prospects will require higher levels of learning for more people. Employers are desperate for talent with strong cognitive and collaborative ability, and are relying on a thriving higher education sector to deliver that. For university towns and cities, the sector creates and sustains-high quality jobs. Many are anchor institutions for the local economy. They bring large numbers of students to pay rent and spend money in that economy. Universities are major property owners and developers, and their research translates into spin-outs, start-ups and consultancies. Nationally, we have a persistent problem in the economy of low productivity that needs more of these highly educated individuals who can work well with both technology and each other. Britain also needs to continue to be at the forefront of applying academic research to maintain any competitive advantage we have left post Brexit. In export terms, international students alone generated £19.5 billion in export earnings in 2020.

According to Universities UK, the sector contributes £95 billion to the economy and supports 815,000 jobs. We are the third most popular destination for international students globally and we have the highest degree completion rates in the OECD. Then last week, I woke up to the news that Cambridge University, my alma mater, alone contributes £30 billion a year to the UK economy. I have also just been reading about the impact of the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre in Manchester and the potential of the venture science doctorate being developed by Deep Science Ventures.

A healthy, vibrant higher education sector is essential as this country seeks to grow and thrive. That is why I was so alarmed to see news from places such as Norwich and Wolverhampton, and then to read last year’s National Audit Office report and the response from the Public Accounts Committee. This paints a picture of serious financial stress in the sector. The report found that the number of higher education providers with in-year deficits has risen from 1% to 15% in the last five years and that 20 have been in deficit for at least three years. In 2020-21, 43 out of 254 higher education institutions were reporting deficits and the net operating cashflow of the sector had halved. These problems cover the full range of types of higher education institution, suggesting a set of systemic issues that cannot be written off as a hangover from Covid. So what is going on?

Put simply, it appears that the university business model is teetering. Universities rely on four sources of income: government funding, tuition fees, research grants and other income such as property investments, IP exploitation, conferences and endowments. These are just the kinds of things that allow the rich, such as Oxford and Cambridge, to get richer while the rest struggle. The balance between tuition fee income from UK students and UK government funding has shifted significantly in the last decade, and this is the core of the problem. In 2010, funding from government was close to three times the level of tuition fee income. Ten years later, following the raising of tuition fees to over £9,000 and cuts in government funding, fee income was almost 2.7 times the level of government funding—an almost straight swap. This reliance on fees for half of income is so important in understanding the problems.

For good reason, the Government have capped fees since 2017 and they are now fixed until at least 2024. But galloping inflation means that, in real terms, the fee of £9,250 is now worth just £6,585 and government funding has not then filled the gap. Ours is the lowest level of government funding for universities in the OECD, hence the financial pressures. Teaching domestic students is now done at a loss, so recruiting more UK students to fill the gap does not necessarily help. That has led some to rely on international students; income from this source has been growing rapidly, by around 12% per year—but I do not believe that this can continue for ever. Students pay the highest fees in the OECD and are starting to get less in return. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that spending on students fell by 18% in real terms in the last 10 years, as universities try to make savings.

I take over as chair of the Council of British International Schools in May. Four hundred schools around the world are members, educating over 165,000 students, and their recent survey was revealing. It found that 96% of their pupils go on to university: 44% of them in the UK, 19% in their host country and the remainder shopping around globally. What is striking is that the UK is becoming less attractive, with 29% of schools reporting it as a decreasing choice of destination for their students. Why is that?

When asked, the students give a variety of reasons. For 65%, it is the cost; 35% mention Brexit; and 26% mention the cost of the visas and the post-study work entitlement. What a massive lost opportunity. Public First recently did some work for Universities UK and found that 64% of the public believed that the UK should host the same number of—or more—international students. Given that the continued growth of overseas students is crucial to relieving the financial pressures on universities that I have set out, can the Minister update us, in her response, on whether the Government plan further restrictions on international students? Can she confirm the Government’s commitment to the graduate visa route and whether they remain committed to their international education strategy? The Turing scheme is a relative success and nurtures an important global mindset by facilitating international student exchange. Therefore, it makes no sense for us not to do our utmost to reciprocate by hosting more students in this country.

Alongside the increasing income from students, it is reasonable to ask whether there is more that universities should and could do in terms of savings. There are problems here with the impact on staff leading to further industrial action, but there are also questions of what that means for students themselves. Students are already struggling with the cost of living crisis and a student maintenance package that is the lowest in seven years. They are borrowing money, half of which will never be repaid. Teaching has been cut and accommodation is hard to find for too many. Post Covid, many students are struggling with mental health problems and have lost out on teaching contact time due to strikes, so dropout rates have increased, further hitting university finances. This is especially important for our public services. Of the MillionPlus members, 66% of university graduates work in the public sector, and they tell us that applications for nursing are down by over 18%, when we need an increase of 20% to meet our targets. As the Minister knows, there is a similar story for teachers, where applications from those wanting to enter teacher training are down by over 15% and are much worse in priority secondary school subjects. I do not believe that further savings that impact on the student experience are sustainable.

The other pressure on our university system comes in the critical area of research. The research function of British universities punches well above its weight. We have one of the lowest levels of investment in the OECD, yet the academic impact of our work is ranked the highest in the G7. Funding is based both on overall university performance and on grant funding for specific projects. However, it is not designed to recover the full cost of undertaking the research. In 2020, only 71% of research costs were recovered, which means using income from teaching funding and elsewhere to fill the gap. I have already discussed the problems in that area. Clearly, the lack of access to the €84 billion Horizon scheme has added to these problems as one of the self-inflicted harms of the Brexit deal with the EU. I am delighted that the Windsor agreement allows that to be reopened. Can the Minister update the House on the progress of those negotiations?

All of that said, the state of university finances looks a bit of a mess. Government policy deliberately shifted universities to a reliance on fee income. The reality of that creating unsustainable levels of debt has meant capping that source, so this vital sector is now in some trouble. We need innovation and change; there is no easy solution. Having seen the economic reality of gambling with our money, thanks to Liz Truss, we also know that there is no magic money tree. While we are waiting for change across our education ecosystem to create something fit for purpose for people and the economy, we also need an answer to give confidence to the sector. We have seen, through councils such as Croydon and Thurrock, that, when push comes to shove, the Treasury will intervene to stop our local authorities from going belly-up. I hope that I have made the case that our universities are too important for us to allow them to be vulnerable.

The Government did the right thing in protecting customers in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month. Can the Minister assure us that, somewhere between the Office for Students, the Department for Education and the Treasury, someone is working on a plan B so that students and staff at our universities will be assured that they will not be left high and dry, as the business model for our universities looks like it might be running out of road? I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate; I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I have learned a lot—it is not my natural home as a policy area—particularly about the ups and downs of the Turing scheme. I make special mention of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Austin, and his comments about the importance of universities for community generation. Also, this was the first time I have heard my noble friend Lady Twycross speak from the Front Bench. Clearly, it is her natural home, so I look forward to more of the same from her.

It is good to hear that across the House we are proud of our higher education sector. We want to allow it to continue to pursue excellence, as well as community renewal, and that requires a solid financial foundation. I noticed that in her fine speech, the Minister talked about the seven-year freeze in tuition fees allowing the sector to remain financially stable. I gently put it to her that, having shifted to half the income for the sector being reliant on tuition fees, to then have a seven-year freeze at a time of double-digit inflation is not the best recipe for financial stability.

However, with that note of caution—I do not want to depress anyone—it is still a vibrant sector and is still hugely important, and we are all committed to helping it.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

With the permission of the House, I quoted one figure incorrectly and would just like to set the record straight. I said that, according to the HESA data, the increase in the number of low or unknown tariff higher education institutions that were in deficit in 2016-17 was 11 and in 2020-21 it was 21. I quoted earlier the number of institutions, which rose from 47 in 2016-17 to 70 in 2021. I would just like to get that right and not have to put it in yet another letter.

Oak National Academy

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as a director of CENTURY Tech and of Suklaa. I also thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for securing this debate and opening it in the way he did. I must also pay tribute to the founders of Oak for quickly establishing a useful set of resources during the early stages of the pandemic. Their success in attracting large amounts of public money has also been impressive; their continued success in doing so with limited process and scrutiny is of course extraordinary.

Five years ago, I was part of the executive team at Tes Global selling our large education business from one owner to another. I fielded countless questions about the impact on our recruitment business of the DfE setting up a rival recruitment platform. I did my best to reassure them that the teacher vacancy service would be a waste of public money because, however good the product, the Government do not understand the behaviours in the market. I am happy to have subsequently been proven right but, meanwhile, the DfE actions spooked investors and cost us millions in lost value. I now hear from similar investors who are assessing a British digital publisher of educational resources that is up for sale. What will be the impact of the DfE pouring £43 million into Oak? Why have the Government acquired a publisher? Are they going to start buying other publishers? I can reassure them on most points, but it is an added uncertainty that will cost another British business.

This is at the heart of my concern about the establishment of Oak as an arm’s-length body. It will damage the ability to grow of British businesses which need significant overseas investment, but which will be put off by this inexplicable intervention. I know this is not the intention of government or the people at the top of Oak; it is an unintended consequence of blundering into a successful, functioning market.

The reality is that there are plenty of high-quality educational resources being published all the time for teachers in England. Plenty are free and some are charged for. When I managed Tes resources, we regularly had over 1 million downloads every day by teachers of content created by other teachers. We made very little money from it but teachers loved us for it because we saved them huge amounts of time. There are many more—from Twinkl to more video-based offerings from the likes of Oak, to more personalised AI-powered resources that also include assessment, like CENTURY. These digital publishers then also compete with more traditional textbook publishers. There is lots of quality and lots of provision—why intervene? There are three possible reasons: to make it easier for teachers to find what they want; to further improve quality or value; or to increase central control over what resources are used.

I am not against an arm’s-length body for curriculum resources—one that specifies standards, agrees with the sector an API to improve the interoperability of resources from different publishers, and ensures that copyright and data protection are fully respected. These would all be valuable and appropriate functions for a government intervention to improve the functioning of the market. It could even call itself Oak for old time’s sake; it might even hold the old Oak content on its platform. But the takeover of Oak by government is about control. Why else would the DfE acquire an educational publisher? It has its own narrow view of what a good lesson should look like in pursuit of its narrow vision of a knowledge-rich curriculum. It wants to dictate to teaching professionals, not to respect their judgment in their contexts. And it wants to impose this through its new teacher training reforms, its prescription of the curriculum and this influence on pedagogy. This arm’s-length body is bad value for money, bad for education and bad for growth in education business.

Young People: Skills (Youth Unemployment Committee Report)

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, because in many ways he always allows me to act as good cop. I remind your Lordships of my educational interests in the register, and I very much endorse the thanks given to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, his committee and to all the staff who worked on this excellent report.

Back in 2009—which these days is prehistory—I was appointed the Minister of State attending Cabinet for Education and Welfare Reform. That was the title, but it was clear that Gordon Brown as Prime Minister basically wanted me to be the Minister for youth unemployment. It was post crash and he, like many of us, was concerned about the scarring effect of long-term unemployment on young people. When I arrived, the Permanent Secretary said to me, “It is inevitable that youth unemployment will continue to rise. You’ve got to face up to the fact that those scarring effects and social problems are just going to happen.” I am happy to say that we managed to get youth unemployment down during the time I was there, from 664,000 to 625,000; it did not do us any good in the election, but there you go. That was thanks to the Future Jobs Fund, which was then imitated in a much paler form by Kickstart when the Covid crisis then hit. However, I will not get bogged down in the detail comparing them and why I think the Future Jobs Fund was a much better scheme.

The reason why I wanted to recall all that is because it was quite a culture shock going into that job, having been Schools Minister for three years. I had been trotting out the rhetoric about how brilliant all our schools were and what a great job we were doing, and then I saw and met the young people who were at the wrong end of the school system and had not been well served by it. As Schools Minister, I was the Minister who made being NEET technically illegal because I conceived of and took through the legislation to raise the participation age to 18. Indeed, that was a success statistically, in that we moved from 15% NEET down to 10% NEET in that time, but the reality for the minority who continue to be failed by our school system is pretty bleak. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, underscored that.

This report goes to the right things: the skills gap and the school curriculum. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about the curriculum, the need for a much better, all-age careers service, fully staffed by proper professionals who can help people of every age, the need for FE funding and apprenticeships for young people in particular and the problem of Whitehall silos. When I was at DWP I was trying to work with the Skills Minister, who I got on really well with. We both wanted to join up the skills system and the unemployment support system, yet the silos of Whitehall frustrated us.

It is really important that the recommendations in this report are listened to by government, but I will use the remaining time I have to say that I also want to see a mindset change. The reason why we wanted to raise the participation age was to create a mindset change which said that it is intolerable that there are people not in education, employment or training at the ages of 16 to 19. My 11 year-old at home, who has just started year 7 this term, will leave statutory education in 2030. She will then probably have a working life of 50 to 60 years, so she will be in the labour market until something like 2080 or 2090. We have to think about whether, in the remainder of her secondary school experience that she has already started, we are preparing her for the way the world—her world—will change between now and 2090.

We have to think about the need for a greener economy and the sorts of green growth and investment that has just been talked about in the previous debate in this Room. We have to think about STEM skills, but also the craft skills for a retrofit economy, which in many ways is what we need in order to make existing resources go further.

AI machines will be doing much more of the work during the rest of this century, which means we need an education system that helps my daughter compete as a better human, not as a better machine. The danger of our current curriculum is that it is training our children to be machines that will be outcompeted by better machines. We need to be more human, more caring and more curious. We will have an ageing population during our lifetime which simply cannot afford to carry a large number of young people who become long-term unemployed and a drain on the welfare state.

We need to start from there—from a vision of what sort of world this century will create for the people who are currently in school—and work backwards. What will the adult skill system be like? Will it allow people to constantly retrain, change careers and have a proper love of learning and ability to self-direct their learning? What changes do we need in our higher and further education systems so that they work better together in all parts of the country, not just in those where the universities are currently located?

What are the qualification and curriculum needs? I recently went into an E-ACT school in Daventry with a motor vehicle workshop. I asked about the qualifications that are being studied, and none of them include a specification for hybrid cars. Yet, as we just heard in the previous debate, we will not be selling internal combustion engine cars by the time the kids working on those cars enter the labour market. It is shocking that we do not have a skill system that anticipates the future. It looks at what we might need now and the skills gaps now, and tries to fill those with qualifications, but that is inadequate. We need now to be looking to a much more dynamic, future-looking, whole-system change, so that we can urgently achieve the green growth and the much more human-centred society that this country, including my 11 year-old at home, is growing up into.

Education Technology: Oak National Academy

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer your Lordships to my interests in the register, particularly as a member of the board at Century Tech. The Government are splurging £43 million on Oak, which is used by only just over 5% of England’s teachers but which allows Ministers, in the words of Jon Coles, the chief executive of one of the largest MATs, to promote their own preferred curriculum model. I now regularly hear from private equity investors that they are put off investing in education resources in this country because of the distortion caused by the Government clumsily entering the market at scale. Please can the noble Baroness tell the House what competitor analysis the department has undergone and why it thinks this significant investment will aid growth and choice for teachers?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I have to say it sticks in my throat to have private equity investors who are responsible for considerable distortions in the children’s home market lecturing the Government on distortions in the edtech market. More importantly, the Government are not distorting the curriculum. The Government are striving—I know that the noble Lord knows that this is true—to have the best curriculum for children. We know that teachers will make the best judgment on what curriculum their students need. That is why, apart from the curriculum from Oak’s own partners, which will be on the platform, it will also showcase more than 80 other curriculum models for providers so that teachers can make those comparisons.

Times Education Commission Report

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. I applaud him for securing the debate and for his introduction. I declare my education interests in the register, particularly my interest as a co-owner of Suklaa, which has a number of education clients. I am also a board member of Century Tech and an adviser to Nord Anglia Education, and I chair the E-ACT multi-academy trust, among other things.

In my view, there can never be a more important time for us to thoroughly re-examine education and what we are doing with our school system in particular. This is a time when the brittleness of our resilience is being tested—the resilience of the planet, the economy and our political system. A lot of change is going on, and it would be easy to find ourselves with an absence of hope. There is one public service that is about the future: education. When we talk about a national education service in our policy conversations, in many ways our vision is for a national hope service.

I hugely applaud the Times for making the decision to resource and commission this really thorough and excellent piece of work. I pay tribute to the four Members of your Lordships’ House who served on that commission. I look forward to the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Rees, and it is good to see the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, in his place listening to the debate. I was also pleased to see that the chair of the Select Committee, Robert Halfon from the other place, was part of this commission.

We should take this really seriously, in part because the commission makes the case for change in education compelling. This country’s school system is high-stakes, with a high level testing and accountability. According to the commission’s report, we have the highest amount of testing of children anywhere in the developed world. We have great professionals working in our schools and, by and large, we have really good schools. We have a system that, in many cases and in many ways, is working really well for the purpose for which it was designed.

Unfortunately, I disagree with that purpose in the current context, because it appears that the system was designed to filter children. It was built during an age of an industrial economy, where swathes of people could leave education without much in the way of qualifications or skills but could still get reasonably rewarding work in factories or by marrying people working in factories. Because we largely now have norm-referenced examinations in our public examination system—we are talking about Ofqual tightening up the grade boundaries again next summer—large numbers of children will fail; that is how the system is designed. Of course, those children most likely to fail in such a system are those born to disadvantage. That is not fair.

I believe in education as something that lifts people up and releases the talents of all children. Having a school system in this country that is obsessed with the academic while neglecting the social, emotional and physical literacy of our children does not serve our nation well. Those who get left behind by the system become a burden on us as taxpayers, because we do not have an economy that is designed to pick up the slack in a modern labour market where people without higher levels of education will struggle to prosper and to get work.

We have some peculiarities in our system: it is remarkably broad within the academic context up to the age of 16, and then it narrows massively between the ages of 16 and 19 with A-levels, for those who pursue that route. This is because, in the end, it is a filtering system for universities. It serves that system pretty well, but it does not serve the rest. We retain a snobbery about the vocational route. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is in his place and, as ever, look forward with great enthusiasm to his contribution. The work he has done on university technical colleges as institutions for 14 to 19 year-olds and trying to break down that snobbishness about the vocational route is to be applauded. Not everyone has been successful in this regard but plenty have, and he has been hampered in his efforts by a system that is not really designed to work with enrolment at 14. This means that he has a disproportionate number of young people coming to UTCs who have not enjoyed success in education, and his institutions then have to deal with them.

I hear complaints every week from employers that our education system is not producing an output that they need. They have to train too many people as they join the workforce in quite basic things, because we are bringing up children with an ingrained fear of failure. If you are in the current work situation, where we need creative, collaborative and problem-solving workers, you have to learn to fail successfully by learning from those failures in order to progress—yet we do not nurture that culture. I hear the same from young people and from parents: that they are impatient to see our education system significantly change.

At its harshest we have those with special educational needs and disabilities on education, health and care plans. We have 4% of our pupil population on EHCPs and, statistically, only 4% of those on an EHCP will get a job. What a waste of talent in our school system that we indulge. I can also talk about the mental health crisis. Within E-ACT, we are responsible for educating 18,000 children. Statistically, 3,000 of those are likely to self-harm during their school career. We have profound problems that we should be talking about, and this commission report and this debate from the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, is our opportunity.

What of the prescription from the commission? We have been waiting for the British baccalaureate for a long time. One of the biggest regrets of those of us who were involved in education during the Blair/Brown years was our failure to adopt the Tomlinson proposals around a post-16 baccalaureate. That was a profound mistake. It is notable that, among the people who have endorsed the commission’s findings are former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major. I also noted that, during the recent Conservative leadership contest, the losing candidate, Rishi Sunak, also advocated something similar to a British baccalaureate. I would hope that, as parties think about this proposal for a much broader post-16 offer that mirrors those of successful economies around the world, they will also want to see things like maths continuing all the way through until 18; again, that is something that we see around the world.

I hugely applaud the commission advocating a significant rebalancing of funding towards the early years. I also applaud what it says around a strategic embedded use of technology, particularly at a time of teacher shortage. It is really important to magnify the impact of great teachers using technology. I applaud very much the sense that our higher education institutions should partner more with further education institutions, so that they can extend their reach into parts that, geographically, they struggle to get to. The notion of electives around access to the creative subjects and to citizenship activity is to be commended. A national well-being survey on an annual basis is of course also to be welcomed.

In many ways, the prescriptions, or the 12-point plan, that the commission report produces—most of which is hard to argue with—should be the stimulant for the debate. The final point in that 12-point plan is a 15-year strategy for education. In a political setting, it is quite unpopular to talk about taking education out of politics; there will be certain things that will just always need to be there, such as funding. The biggest issue facing us at the moment as a multi-academy trust is how on earth we are going to keep the doors open and stay financially solvent if the inflationary pressures coming through the system are not met by some kind of funding for education. Funding will always be a political issue; whether we are successfully recruiting enough teachers of a high enough quality will always be a political issue. But I applaud the notion that, across parties—perhaps this Chamber is a great place to start—we could develop some longer-term consensus on what sort of education we want. Ultimately, I want a system in which every child can thrive, with a diverse curriculum offer and diversity of provision that maximises the opportunity of technology to be able to link institutions and to link learners across the country and the world. It should be a system where every child feels safe and loved and where every child learns to care for themselves, for others and for their natural environment—both for the present and for their future.