Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

47: Clause 17, page 20, line 22, at end insert—
“(e) the mental health and wellbeing of persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution is supported.”Member’s explanatory statement
To ensure that the Office for Students has a sufficiently powerful lever to enforce its policies on student support, mental health and suicide.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the origins of this, for me, lie 10 years ago, when one of my work colleagues was rung by a friend of her son to say, “I think you need to come down to Cardiff.” That was the first she knew about her son being suicidal. Fortunately, it all ended well, but there are many other such stories that have ended badly.

The universal point in this is that the universities really have not looked after their students well enough. We get platitudes from them, every now and again, about what they will do, but they do not even follow the basic medical procedures of who to contact if they are really worried about someone. Nor do they, in their substance, take care of students in the way that we as parents might hope.

I tried, a few years ago, to see if universities would switch a bit in the American direction and pay close attention to what teachers said about students in their applications. The answer came back: “No, we cannot do that; we never get to know our students well enough in the three years they are with us to judge whether what a teacher said was right, so there is no way that we can build up a system of reputation and ability to judge teachers’ comments in the way that American universities do.” This is changing, and it is changing because of the Office for Students.

The Office for Students has produced an extremely good paper on what it expects universities to do on mental health. It is getting a real grip on access, saying that it is not only about how many disadvantaged people you let in but how you look after them while they are there. The fact that so many of them are dropping out is down to the universities. Universities must not blame what came before or do as the Government did last week and try to blame the examinations that students took before: these are your students; you have admitted them, so you look after them—we expect you to make a success of them. That is an enormously important change, and I really want the Office for Students to be in a position where it can enforce the ambitions that I just set out and make sure that universities come up to the mark.

Reading the underlying legislation, I was not at all sure that that was the case, which is why I put down these amendments. I am assured, in correspondence with my noble friend the Minister, that this is the case and the OfS has the powers it needs. I very much hope that that is what I will hear from the lips of my noble friend, when she comes to reply on this amendment.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, obviously the House is deeply sympathetic to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

I want to extend those points. The biggest cause of mental health stress for students over the past 18 months has of course been Covid. Over the past two years, a substantial part of their courses has not been physical; indeed, in many cases, they have had almost no contact at all with fellow students. Obviously, in a public health emergency, that situation was substantially unavoidable, although some universities dealt with the situation better than others. It is clear that there was a difficulty in students being able to meet in large groups and have physical contact. However, that is no longer the case.

I know—because they have been taken up with me personally, as I am sure is true of other noble Lords—that there are concerns about continuing restrictions on students meeting and face-to-face tuition. To me, such restrictions seem totally without justification now; if I may put it somewhat undiplomatically, they may be suited more to the convenience of university administrators and lecturers than to the well-being of their students. I know that the Government have been robust in their statements about the importance of returning to the full educational experience in universities, but this is clearly an ongoing issue. I think that the House would welcome a robust assurance from the Minister that universities should now be expected to return to offering the full educational experience; the Office for Students should also be making this clear to them.

On a related point, I find it extraordinary, given the serious diminution in teaching and learning that many students have experienced over the past two years, that universities have still charged them full fees. I was the guy who persuaded Tony Blair to introduce fees in the first place, so I have nothing against fees—we need properly funded universities and properly paid academics —but it is supposed to be something for something. The reason for paying the fees is to get the full educational experience. Indeed, part of the justification for the fees was that they would enhance the educational experience; we wanted universities to be able to staff up properly and offer proper facilities.

The other half of that contract applies too. Where students have not been able to gain the full experience and the quality of teaching and learning to which they are entitled in return for their fees of more than £9,000, the universities should have discounted those fees. I am surprised that the Government did not apply more pressure to them to do so; I assume the reason is that the Treasury was worried that, if the Government applied pressure on universities to discount fees, the universities would come and ask for the money. I have a feeling that what happened here was a kind of Faustian pact: the Government did not pressure universities because they did not want the consequential action of the universities asking them for money. But actually, it would be perfectly possible for universities, like almost every other enterprise in the country, to realign their outlays with their income and themselves take on the consequences of a reduction in fees. The idea that state funding is the only alternative to fee funding is wrong.

If I may say so—I have said this a lot over the past two years, but it still needs to be said—vice-chancellors are, for the most part, grossly overpaid. One of the less satisfactory outcomes of the fee reform, in particular the trebling of fees to £9,000, was vice-chancellors doubling their own incomes and creating a whole swathe of bureaucrats in universities. I went through the figures and was amazed at the swathes of bureaucrats in universities—all paid more than £100,000, and many of them paid more than £150,000—while none of the junior lecturers or PHD students gets any of this largesse. Apart from a few offers of short-term reductions in salaries, I have not noticed any university vice-chancellors taking this opportunity to apply proper scrutiny to the size and salaries of their senior management teams or, dare I say it, leading by example and cutting their own pay as part of a deal to cut student fees in response to the terrible experience that so many students have had to go through during the pandemic.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I shall be delighted to write.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for my noble friend’s answer, which included just the words that I was after—that the Government are sure that the Office for Students has the powers that it needs to make progress in this area. I am very happy to leave it at that, given the record of the Office for Students to date.

I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the determination that disadvantaged students should not be disadvantaged further by the systems that we put in place. I think that is entirely possible. I hope that we will see from the OfS a system of better admissions, so that universities put some real effort into understanding how best to detect and attract those disadvantaged students who will do well at university; that this is a collaborative effort, a proper national research effort to solve this national problem; and that they will similarly collaborate on how best to look after those students once they reach university. They should expect them to need additional support because, after all, they are disadvantaged. In both those areas, I feel that the Office for Students is determined to see progress. I am confident that with that determination over the next few years we will see it.

I also hope to see some real diversity of thought as well as intake in our universities. I will know that we have achieved it when an Oxford college asks the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to be its next master.

Amendment 47 withdrawn.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Can the Minister tell us, so that we can be sure that we are not completely wasting our time this afternoon, how many of these £3,000 incentive payments were made in respect of apprentices under the Chancellor’s Budget this year for new apprentices? That is the acid test that things are going in the right direction, because the great and depressing feature of this Bill is that, with the best will in the world—and all of us here have the best intentions—we are presiding over an increasingly failing state and state-led apprenticeship system which will further widen the gap between the opportunities that graduates have in our economy and those of non-graduates, and nothing that has been said so far during the Bill’s passage gives any confidence whatever that this situation is not going to worsen.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 11, which I have put my name to, and regret that the rules on Report do not allow the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to launch into his exposition of it before the end, unless he wants to rise now.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. I did intend to speak before the end of the debate.

I will speak to Amendment 11, which has cross-party support and has also been endorsed by the Local Government Association and the Association of Colleges. We support the Government’s ambition to give local employers a strong role in the skills system through local skills improvement plans, but we believe that it should be done as part of an integrated place-based approach to deliver sustained outcomes for local people and local businesses.

I cannot understand the Government’s determination to exclude major players in the localities where the employer representative bodies are based. There needs to be a much more clearly defined and significant role for local and mayoral combined authorities, as well as colleges and other training providers. There has to be an appreciation of differing labour markets, and the way they have developed and are likely to develop. Surely that is best understood at local and regional level. I suggest, as I did in Committee, that it is impossible to prescribe the skills needed for the whole of England from DfE headquarters, yet that is what the Bill’s measures effectively currently propose.

There has been a change since then because we now have a new Secretary of State, who, we are led to believe, has less centralising tendencies than his predecessor. Making the role of local authorities, MCAs, colleges and training providers clear and more effective would be a positive sign by the new Minister to that effect.

To achieve the best outcomes in every area, local authorities and providers should be named as a core and strategic partner in the LSIP process alongside employer representative bodies. To that end, Amendment 11 would provide for ERBs to develop LSIPs—sorry about all these contractions—in partnership with local authorities, mayoral combined authorities and further education providers to ensure that they reflect the needs of learners, employers and, as I said, the local community. Adults and young people have the right to expect access to quality education and training opportunities provided by a joined-up, place-based employment, skills and careers system. Integration at the local level will be vital to support the skills talent pipeline and to join up those skills and occupational pathways of progression.

Amendment 11 would also require local skills improvement plans to consider social and economic development strategies in the local area and long-term national needs that may not apply to local employers. Unless local authorities have a meaningful role in the development and approval of LSIPs there is a risk that these reforms could create further fragmentation within the skills system, which may result in further education providers being subject to different skills plans, disruption of progression pathways for learners and a lack of local democratic accountability, which I do not think we should lose sight of.

I can tell the Minister that local and combined authorities are ambitious to do more to join up local provision to create integrated skills and employment offers tailored to the needs of local economies and residents. This amendment would make use of local government’s expertise to deliver the best outcomes for every community.

Finally, Amendment 11 would require LSIPs to identify actions that relevant providers and other local bodies can take regarding any post-16 technical education or training that they provide. This is drafted to avoid being too prescriptive but would allow LSIPs to work closely with other agencies, including Jobcentre Plus and careers advisory services. As Amendment 12 from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, says, bodies providing careers information, advice and guidance, and independent training are also crucial to the development and success of a local skills improvement plan.

I want to mention the LSIP trailblazers. Less than 24 hours ago, the Minister circulated to noble Lords a 20-page draft guide for employers on LSIP trailblazers. This was promised by her predecessor in Committee 12 weeks ago, so I have to ask why we received it quite literally at the 11th hour, which was not helpful. I do not claim to have gone through it in depth, partly because I was still trying to digest the 69 pages of additional policy notes I found on the DfE website last week that had not been drawn to our attention—yes, I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. There are ways in which communication of some of these papers could be improved, not least in their timing.

Colleges and employer representative bodies in the recently announced successful LSIP trailblazers and strategic development fund pilots will be considering how best they can work in partnership and how they can work with other key partners. There is considerable scope for the sector to lead the way in building new linkages between colleges, universities, schools and other providers; strengthening relationships with mayoral combined authorities and local government; and embedding the voice of students, staff and the wider community in all of this, in so doing demonstrating and strengthening the new environment that they want to operate in. The Government should do everything that they can to facilitate that. It would be to everybody’s benefit.

I am very sympathetic to Amendments 10 and 66 in the name of my noble friend Lady Whitaker, who is yet to speak to them, which aim to ensure that the DfE has a plan for closing the attainment gap and that employer representative bodies have regard to it. The latest annual report from the Education Policy Institute found that the gap between what poorer pupils and their richer peers achieve at school had stopped closing even before the disruption of the pandemic. Disadvantaged pupils in England are now 18 months of learning behind their peers by the time they finish their GCSEs—a huge gap, but the same as five years ago. Disparities at primary school age are also widening for the first time since 2007.

However, a plan will not be worth the paper it is written on unless it includes substantive proposals backed by funding. Noble Lords will be well aware that the Government’s education recovery plan has been roundly criticised as insufficient, including by Tory Members of Parliament and the Government’s own, now departed, Education Recovery Commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, who said that it did not come close to what was needed. I do not expect the Minister to answer me on that point now, but it is an issue that had an impact on Oral Questions earlier today and which must be taken forward and dealt with if the full effects of the pandemic are to be dealt with. I like to think that we might see a much-needed policy change shortly in the spending review, although, like other noble Lords, I obviously will not hold my breath.

Finally, the development of local skills improvement plans must be inclusive by demonstrating an awareness of and commitment to equality and diversity. It is crucial that those with learning and other disabilities can benefit from the measures in the Bill and that support for schemes that help, especially supported internships, are on the face of the Bill. It requires a focus on making all the so-called three ships—traineeships, supported internships and apprenticeships—more accessible and widely available, opening up pathways into long-term employment for people with a learning disability. Apprenticeships need to be made more flexible; this should be included as part of reforms to the post-16 education offer. Additionally, we want to see more of a commitment to people with education, health and care plans, as well as those who have disabilities but do not qualify for such care plans. Leaving these groups out will only further entrench the current barriers that people with learning disabilities face in finding sustainable paid employment.

There is much for the Minister to respond to in this group of amendments. I do not expect her to respond to all of it in detail but it would helpful if she could follow up on some of my points by letter after the debate. However, let me be clear: we want both employer representative bodies and local skills improvement plans to be successful but we believe that, as it stands, the Bill will limit what can be achieved. There are so many people and organisations with much to offer. They should be encouraged to play their part fully in developing skills for the future.

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After seven years of conditional funding, there is ample need for a review to see how the current policies are fitting, or not fitting, students for work. For many years this significant proportion—the missing third—has been most damagingly neglected. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will pick up where I left off on Amendment 11 and also speak to my Amendment 20. I welcome my noble friend to the Front Bench. There was a period when she was my Whip; she probably thought that she had finally escaped having to deal with me, but now she is back, front and centre of my interests.

I apologise that my first action will be to vote with the noble Lord, Lord Watson, if he pushes his amendment. Like him, I absolutely support the objectives of the Bill, but I will vote with him because I am really unhappy and unclear about it in its current state. I want us to be able to continue this conversation as the Bill winds its way through the Commons. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, the key element of this discussion—the local skills improvement plan trailblazers document—arrived today, at least for me, and I have not managed to look at it properly. There is a lot there that needs attention.

I thoroughly support the idea of local employer involvement in skills provision. For a long time, local employers have complained to me that their local colleges and other providers are not doing the courses they need: the engineering kit that the FE college has is 20 years out of date, and graduates have to be completely retrained if they enter engineering; the building courses do not align with the methods used at the moment; nothing is available for the local foundry; and so on. The need for local employers to be involved in local skills provision is very clear to me.

However, to get successful employer engagement you need both status and longevity. You are asking employers to get senior, good and effective members of staff to spend time on collaborative bodies and arriving at results. They need to do that over a period of years to build up relationships and understanding with each other, among the employer community as much as with education providers. That takes time and an attitude to these bodies that is not, “Oh, we’ve had this for five years—let’s throw it out of the window and start again”. Starting again takes you back to zero.

If I have understood the document right, the trailblazers will exist only for a year or two. Why will any sensible employer spend time trying to make something right when it will be torn up after two or three years? There will be a few, but there will not be the comprehensive effort that would be made if the Government gave themselves a bit more time and, when they know what they want to do, set out to provide employers with something that has a hope of lasting 10 or 20 years.

We have a new ministry for levelling up, which gives it an opportunity to make a decision about what is happening to local enterprise partnerships. These are a source of relationships, understanding and established ways of doing things which might well be drawn on to make a success of local skills improvement plans, but they appear to be ignored entirely. Why? Let us have some coherence in this across government. This is already at least the second way in which the Department for Education is proposing to consult employers; it already has a reasonably well-established network in IfATE, but it does not appear to be tying that in at all to what is happening with local skills improvement plans. There are also networks based in BEIS and in the Department for Work and Pensions. There needs to be more thought and coherence before we set out on this, so that we can really make a success of the idea.

If I read this document right, there is a budget of £4 million for the seven trailblazers, so that is about half a million quid each. In our local area, this is the whole of Sussex, and because of the way Sussex has evolved, the Sussex Chamber of Commerce knows very little about what happens down at the town level. There is almost no relationship between the Sussex chamber and Eastbourne; Eastbourne is dealt with by the Eastbourne Chamber of Commerce. There is also very little relationship between the Sussex Chamber of Commerce and that huge employer of people in Sussex: London. So you are asking this body to build from nothing a knowledge of the skills needs of a very large area—four or five million people’s worth, if you embrace the south of London—on a budget of half a million quid. It is a comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that there is no possible way they will have money to pay consultants; they will be really pushed to do this on a few local people. It does not seem to be a recipe for success.

To pick a quote from the document, these partnerships are supposed to look at

“opportunities created by emerging technologies, cleaner growth and new global markets.”

How can you do that based in Sussex, for goodness’ sake? You are not exactly at the middle of any of these industries. Where is the source of knowledge and information to enable them to do that? That sort of thing requires national co-ordination and there is no sign in this plan of how that national understanding will develop.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, you need an organisation which is looking ahead; ideally, 10 years ahead—though it is getting pretty speculative—but certainly five years. If you talk, as I do, to the jobs board providers, they will say, by and large, that employers look at what they want today and, if you push them hard, they will look a year or so ahead. Local employers do not have that understanding of where their whole industry is going; they have to deal with the problems of today. You need to build in something which is looking further ahead, and there is no reason to try to do that locally. Also, there is a lot of commonality between local problems: the problems we face in Sussex will be replicated in East Anglia, the north-east and elsewhere, one way or another. We do not want to have to create individual, from-the-ground-up solutions to each of these problems; we want to have a mechanism for sharing the problems and approaches and putting the best solutions forward, rather than just creating new things locally. Again, I do not see a sign of that in the Bill.

The system of careers advice for children at school set up by this Government in the Careers and Enterprise Company, of which I have a high opinion, is based on their relationship with local enterprise partnerships. What is proposed under this new system to enable them to continue the rollout of local career hubs? Again, I do not see anything. Where in this structure do we encounter the interests of students? Somewhere in Eastbourne is the engineer that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, wants. Under the LSIP, as described here, the only training available for us will be for hoteliers—that is the main business in Eastbourne. There is no engineering contractor, let alone a nuclear industry. There is not much IT at the moment; there is no obvious source of green growth jobs within our patch. Where is this understanding to come from? Why should our children be restricted in their opportunities to what happens to be available in Sussex? An awful lot of people who live in Sussex work in London. How is the source of demand and need to be factored into the local skills improvement plan in Sussex?

I hope that when the Bill comes back to us from the Commons we will end up with a nationally coherent, long-living system of involving local employers and other sources of information in producing a structure of training that works for local people and local industries. What the noble Lord, Lord Watson, suggests is the right way to do it. As for Boris—if I am allowed that shorthand for my right honourable friend the Prime Minister—he was talking about that last time I read one of his speeches regarding raising the leaders of counties to the same status as local mayors and giving them the same sort of powers and ambit. We will see how that direction works out but at least the understanding is there. A lot of support is available at county level, including a lot of knowledge, skills and people in the workforce, which would really support an enterprise like a local skills improvement partnership. If the two aspects are embedded together, they are likely to work together and benefit from each other. In terms of sending a message to our colleagues in the Commons, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, does that pretty well.

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 13, 16 and 19, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who is unable to be present because of his other engagements. Along with others, I welcome the Minister to her new role and join others in offering appreciation to her predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge. I should also say, as a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Environment and Climate Change, how much I welcome government Amendment 6, and I add my support to Amendment 64.

The context of my remarks is a general welcome for the Bill and recognition of its role in helping to meet the Government’s ambition on FE and skills. However, there is almost no specific reference to SEND provision in the Bill, despite the significant role that FE plays in provision for students with additional needs or disabilities. Noble Lords will know that around 202,000 students have special educational needs in further education, of whom 90% attend general FE colleges and make up almost one in six of all enrolments. Within those, almost a quarter of students are aged 16 to 18. In contrast to the school sector, there is a small number of specialist institutions. That situation makes a profound difference to the scale and range of support needed in general FE and sixth-form colleges.

During Second Reading, the Minister gave assurances that the overall legislative framework, notably the Equality Act and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, provided sufficiently rigorous safeguards for ensuring that the needs of SEN students were met. It was also most helpful to see the updated policy note and to hear the further assurances from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chisholm and Lady Barran, at their meeting with my right reverend friend the Bishop of Durham last week. The Government’s high aspirations for students with learning needs and disabilities is clear, and we warmly welcome that ambition.

However, the evidence from the Special Educational Consortium and Natspec, which are key voices promoting the rights of disabled children and young people, those with special educational needs and specialist further education, is that far more explicit duties should be incorporated into the Bill to ensure that high ambitions and good intentions are subsequently consistently turned into effective action.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

27: Clause 7, page 7, line 32, at end insert—
“(c) must specify a range of qualifications with a teaching and learning requirement equivalent to one GCSE (at level 2) and one A level (at level 3) which allow students to combine academic and vocational education.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, there are a number of other amendments in this group. I very much hope that we will pursue one or more of them to a Division if we do not get some very clear reassurances from my noble friend, because it is my conviction that BTECs should continue to be widely available for some good long time yet at least, and that the Government’s suggestion that we should quickly move to a system of A-levels and T-levels only is profoundly mistaken. I have a number of reasons for this.

First, BTECs are respected. When it comes to educational qualifications, respect is hard to gain. BTECs are respected by universities, employers and parents, and not just parents of disadvantaged children. My daughter took a BTEC, her friend took three, and my cousin took three. They are something, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, that I would happily advise a child to take. They are a well-respected qualification and to dispose of them in haste and short order is profoundly un-Conservative. I very much hope that my new colleagues in the department will share that view.

I am very grateful to the department for sharing its reasoning with us. Broadly, as I understand it—my noble friend will doubtless correct me if I am wrong—it is that, looking at the people who take BTECs and comparing them with similar people who take A-levels, the people who take BTECs have a higher drop-out rate at university, and those who stay at university go on to learn less than equivalent pupils who take A-levels. That analysis is deeply statistically unsound. I will explain why.

A definitive and careful choice is made by a pupil and the people advising them as to whether they should go down the A-level or BTEC route. It is not a question of random allocation. Unless you really analyse what is going on in that process of differentiation, you absolutely cannot legitimately statistically compare the subsequent path of the two groups. You can remark on and look at them, but to compare them and say that one is therefore better than the other is not something you can do because you do not have the data to understand what that process of differentiation was. They are two different groups. They are swallows and crows—both birds, but to compare them is just to describe. It is not something you can draw conclusions from.

Nor is that the only point at which these two streams have different processes applied to them. When it comes to applying to university, they receive advice as to which course they should take at which university. The quality of that advice might well differ markedly for people taking BTECs as opposed to people taking A-levels. It certainly differs markedly between institutions. When, a few years ago, I was working with HESA statistics it was quite remarkable how drop-outs focused on the products of particular institutions rather than particular types of students or courses they were going for. So there is a second point at which this stream is different, which destroys the ability to compare.

Then there is what happens at universities. Universities are supposed, under their access policies, to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is quite clear that they have not been doing this properly. I am delighted that the OfS is picking them up on this, but universities have not been looking at how they make the best of a student and give them the best possible outcome. They have been providing them with a relatively standard product and seeing how they get on with it.

Students who take BTECs are likely to have a different set of requirements in terms of teaching and support from students who take A-levels, so the differentiation may be entirely down to the practices of universities in not supporting BTEC students properly. That means that you cannot tell what is going on. The department is using this data to evince the reasons for its proposals on BTECs, but the data applies to the old pattern BTECs only—those that existed before the 2016 reforms. The new BTECs were specifically designed to deal with the worries people had about how BTEC students were doing at university. All the changes made to BTECs in the first teaching in 2016 were directed at helping students do better at university, but there is as yet no data available on how those students do at university. There were big changes—it is a different qualification in many ways—but the Government are treating it as if they can apply the data from the old qualification.

There is then another set of data which the Government do not seem to have applied themselves to: the data that comes before the surge in popularity of BTECs. The data for disadvantaged students in 2013-15 shows that almost all of them took A-levels and there was a huge rate of dropout, because these were not suitable for them. Go on a few years and there was a much lower school dropout rate because BTECs were holding these students in school. That does not seem to have been taken into the Government’s calculations. The department talks of getting these students back to doing A-levels, but we used to do that, and it had terrible results. Why does it want to do that again?

I am somewhat in despair at the quality of the DfE’s analysis of why it wants to do away with BTECs quickly. However, its analysis does suggest a test; it suggests that we should look at how new qualifications do when they have run their course and students have got to the point of being in employment. We can then judge how well they are doing. If we look at 2019-21 as the sample cohort for the new BTECs, we should have a reasonable idea of that by 2027. We should have a reasonable idea of how well T-levels are doing by 2029 or 2030.

That gives us a timescale for when we will have legitimate data to compare how T-levels and BTECs have done, if the Government are doing proper research—I do not know that they are—on how decisions are taken as to which qualification is provided, how pupils with the qualifications are supported at university and on careers advice given to different groups of students. All of that is necessary to take a justified decision about which set of qualifications should be provided.

I hope I am right in quoting the Government as saying that T-levels are the best option for 16 to 19 year-olds. How can they possibly know that? These qualifications have only just been created—they are newborn. The emperor’s second wife always wants to kill the older children. It is a natural thing, but we really should not allow that. We ought to insist on a proper period of comparison to find out how they work out. I think the answer will turn out to be that we need not two qualifications but three: A, B and T. We want parity of esteem. If the system has just A-levels and T-levels, we will lose parity of esteem.

I would never, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, advise a child to do a T-level unless they were so clearly committed—at age 16—to the narrow scope of that T-level that they could legitimately take such a decision. There are not many 16 year-olds who are so clear and focused that they can reasonably take that decision. It is really hard to commit yourself to a single, narrow line which leads you away from the generality of university and towards a specific career. There are children for whom this will work, but there are fewer of them than the Government think, and there are an awful lot who need to be kept more general.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Perhaps the noble Lord will allow me to proceed.

Amendment 30 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, seeks to confirm that the decision to withdraw approval from a technical qualification may be subject to judicial review. I assure your Lordships that the institute is a public authority and its decisions can be reviewed by the courts in the same way as the decisions of any other public authority.

Amendment 32 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, would require the institute to publish in advance the criteria which must be met before withdrawing approval of a technical education qualification. It is absolutely right that the institute should publish information so that awarding bodies know in advance the matters the institute will take into account. The Bill already provides for this in new Section A2D6(4).

As I said, approval will be withdrawn when a qualification no longer meets the criteria against which it was approved; for example, where it fails to keep pace with the relevant occupational standard, which will evolve with industrial advances. Specifying criteria that must be met for withdrawal—in addition to criteria that must continue to be met for a qualification to retain approval—would result in duplication and will remove the flexibility the institute requires to meet employer needs.

A number of questions were asked regarding the impact of T-levels on social mobility. Again, if I may, I will set out our position in more detail. However, I would like to be clear that the Government are absolutely committed to levelling up. Social mobility is clearly an integral part of this and education, skills and careers are vital to making a success of those efforts. We believe that T-levels represent a much-needed step change in the quality of the technical offer. As we have heard, they have the endorsement of employers, and alongside T-levels we have introduced the T-level transition programme to support students who are not yet ready to start a T-level at 16 but who have the potential to progress to one. We have also introduced flexibility for SEND learners across all elements of the T-level programme.

In conclusion, our reforms to post-16 qualifications aim to ensure that we will have a system where the choices are clear and learners can be assured that every option is of high quality, whether it supports progression to higher education or to skilled employment. Extending the role of the institute will make certain that the majority of technical qualifications available in England are based on employer-led occupational standards and deliver the skills outcomes that employers need. Given this, I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment, and that other noble Lords will not feel it necessary to move theirs.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that comprehensive reply. I will start by agreeing with her final words. Let us have qualifications that are clear, where every option is high quality, with employer-led standards and the skills outcomes that employers need. However, whatever language my noble friend dresses this up in, she is saying that the Government intend to abolish BTECs well in advance of having any information to show that T-levels deliver what we all hope they will deliver. Given in particular the effects that my noble friend Lord Baker has outlined on the children we ought to be having most care for—so ought the Government—I very much hope that one of my noble friends, or more of my noble friends than the noble Lord opposite, will choose to move their amendments. As far as my amendment is concerned, I prefer that in the name of my noble friend Lord Baker, so I hope he will consider moving it. However, I will certainly vote for some of the amendments in this group if they are moved to a Division. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 27 withdrawn.

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th April 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“436AA Duty of local authorities to collect and share information where the proprietor of a school has received written notification from parents that a pupil is receiving elective home education.(1) A local authority must make a return to the Department for Education in such form and at such intervals as may be specified on children removed from roll at each school in its area where the proprietor has received written notification from parents that one or more pupils are receiving elective home education.(2) A return made under subsection (1) must include information as to whether the children concerned have Education and Health Care Plans.(3) A local authority must record and keep up to date the names and addresses of all such children and of their parents.(4) When so requested by the Department for Education or on their behalf, a local authority must write to some or all of such parents as are specified in subsection (3) in such form as the Department may specify.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, there has been considerable noise in the press and elsewhere about off-rolling: the idea that schools are pushing the parents of troublesome pupils into home education. Looking at the statistics for Northamptonshire, which I happen to have, there does appear to be some evidence of a move in that direction. During the 2016-17 academic year, 1,182 pupils in Northamptonshire were known to be home educated, and by the end of the year it was 784, which is double the rate of two years previously. The pattern of home education in that county is a level of about 60 pupils per national curriculum year—that is, from the beginning, so those are presumably the dedicated home educators. Then, from year 4 to year 10, the rate of home education picks up rapidly. By the time you get to year 10, 180 pupils are being home educated. A chunk of those—about an eighth—had exclusion problems before being home educated and about one-third are children who have had some contact with social services. The analysis by school shows that some schools are notably excluding very few pupils relative to others and sending a lot to home education. There seems to be evidence that some schools are making it a practice to tip children into home education.

That is not, in itself, a wrong thing. In the circumstances of an individual child, family and school, home education may be the best alternative. Some children who have been suffering in school will flourish in home education. You just do not know, without going into the details, whether this is malpractice or good practice. In too many places in this country, the alternative to home education is exclusion, and the pathway from exclusion is into desolation. We ought to provide, but do not, a strong system of alternative education for children who are persistently excluded.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord think that a better solution might be if schools did not exclude pupils in the first place?

[Lord Lucas]

I am sorry, but I did not hear the noble Lord.

[Lord Adonis]

Does the noble Lord think that, rather than parents being obliged to home educate their children because of the danger of exclusion, a better solution would be to be much more restrictive about exclusions in the first place and not to allow them except in extremis? In that way, we would not have this huge extension of home education that is taking place at the moment, which is a covert form of excluding pupils from school.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, that is quite possible, but schools and parents can deal only with the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is the parents’ duty, in particular, to make the best of what they can. I agree that we ought to emphasise much more looking after those children who find school hard to deal with and bringing them through to success. There is a lot to do in that area and, as the noble Lord and I know from our long careers in this place, it has proved difficult to successive Governments. But that does not mean that we should not try. I believe that we are having another go at it and I commend the Government for that. In the local circumstances of an individual school, it may be best to encourage home education.

Home education is something that we should be prepared to support. It seems to me very strange that the Government’s attitude to children who have had such difficulty with the state schools they have access to that their parents have been forced to take them home is to immediately cut off funding and support. That seems a weird way of treating those who are finding life hardest in school. Throughout today, I shall be urging the Government to look at this from the point of view of supporting home education. Why, when a child moves into home education, does the money just disappear? Why does it not move to the local authority, or at least a decent proportion of it, so that the local authority can continue to support the education of that child, particularly in circumstances where it is clear that this is a matter not of some middle-class choice but of the best interest of the child?

The amendment is pretty technical. It is aimed at making sure there is a flow of information to Ofsted that will enable it, when it inspects a school, to understand what the school is doing, and whether the moves to home education have been well advised or whether they are a covert form of exclusion. Ofsted tells me that it currently cannot get at the data. When it visits a school, it knows that children have moved into home education, but it has no way of finding out why that has happened. There is no record, information or contact with the parents involved. It just has to accept the school’s explanation. I would like to see circumstances where Ofsted has access to proper information so it can properly evaluate what a school is doing.

I particularly commend to the House the practice of the Magnus Church of England Academy in Newark. Its attitude to pupils who get into trouble is that it retains ownership of them. Even if they end up in the local PRU, Magnus keeps them on roll. It accepts the responsibility for the rest of their education. It accepts that they have gone to the PRU because that is the best choice for the child and that the results they achieve through that method will belong to the school. We should impose that attitude on all schools. I do not think that we should allow schools, whether by way of exclusion or off-rolling, to throw children away, to absolve themselves of responsibility for them. Children should stay on schools’ registers for the purposes of performance tables until the next point of measurement —key stage 2, 4 or 5—so that the decision the school takes about where a child goes, if they leave the school, is one for which the school will be held accountable. That would be the right way to move in this direction to produce data and evidence so that we can watch how these decisions are taken. That seems vital.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Agnew of Oulton) (Con)]

My Lords, on 24 November at Second Reading I made it clear that we understood the concerns that have led the noble Lord, Lord Soley, to bring this Bill forward. That remains the position. We are interested in it and welcome the debate it has engendered in this House and elsewhere, but the position remains that the Government are not formally supporting it. I made a commitment to consult on drafts of revised departmental guidance, and that consultation started on 10 April. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, the guidance looks at specific issues such as the role of safeguarding by local authorities and whether that extends to this area.

We know that there are concerns about the efficacy of the current framework and the lack of hard information about numbers to address the actual needs of children being educated at home. Indeed, at Second Reading noble Lords spoke about the need for more evidence. We know that involved in this is the potential of increasing exclusions or, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to it, “off-rolling”. I would welcome a meeting with him and other noble Peers on that subject, but we should not get it too tangled up in the simpler issue of the Soley Private Member’s Bill. This is why we published a call for evidence on 10 April. This seeks information and comment about a wide range of issues within the broad headings of registration, monitoring and support for home education.

I take this opportunity to reassure my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that we support home education that is done well. We want to find ways to support families that are achieving this. I am very conscious of the amount of work needed to educate a child properly at home. It is entirely consistent with our aim of ensuring that every child has a good education within a diverse system that allows for maximum parental choice. We should aim to help good home education, but also to ensure that poor home education is dealt with quickly. To address the queries of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about the Government’s position, the consultation is open until 2 July and we hope for responses from a wide spectrum of families, local authorities and others. This will give us a much firmer basis for considering whether any changes are needed. In the meantime, I shall listen to today’s proceedings with interest and note the points raised. It is of course open to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, not to progress his Bill further until the Government’s consultation has concluded.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very encouraged by that reply from my noble friend, particularly his last sentence. I very much hope that the Government are thinking of taking advantage of the Bill to take forward the results of the consultation when they are available. In that context, I think the noble Lord, Lord Soley, need not worry about the Bill failing if we run out of time today. Today is about talking to the Government, even though they do not answer much: it is about getting them to listen to us, as an input to the consultation and to inform their intentions for the future of the Bill more generally. I very much hope that if we run out of time today we may find space on a subsequent Friday to complete its passage before the Government have to let us know their opinions, which will presumably, with luck, be in September or October. Without government support, the Bill will fail; with government support there will not be any problems, so I hope that although we will not waste time today, we will none the less make sure that the Government have heard our opinion on things.

On the interesting suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, I think Skillforce would find very good relationships, certainly in some areas, between local authorities and home educators, which would give wide access to the home educating community. It is not true in every area, but there are some where you will get pretty complete coverage from what is there already.

I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, is a Member of this House. Every time I listen to him, he adds to my understanding of the world. I am just an observer of home education; I honour him as someone who has done it. I do not think I would ever have the strength of character and energy to finish that. I am entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in tackling this problem in the round and very happy to line up behind him in any meeting or effort. These children are our children; they are part of our community and we absolutely ought to treat them that way. It hurts us all that we do not. I am going to pursue the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, on the matter of his daughter. I have a project running in Eastbourne which would benefit from her advice.

There is much to be done here but, generally, I am delighted by the reaction to this amendment. I hope the Government will see it as an example of how the Bill might be used to address the wider problems. It trespasses into the whole area of safeguarding, trafficking, abuse and radicalisation, which concern us all so much. That is not the same as home education but the two get mixed up. There are educational concerns but enforcing educational orthodoxy ought not to be seen as a way of tackling safeguarding concerns. They are separate. Both need to be addressed but we need to think of them separately, particularly in the context of home education. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

5: Clause 1, page 1, line 9, after “receiving” insert “full time”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the function of the amendments in this group is, I hope, to demonstrate to the Government that they can use the Bill to clear up some of the uncertainties that have bedevilled the administration of home education regulation for local authorities. You get so many different interpretations and understandings of what particular terms mean because they are not defined in legislation and not well-defined in practice. If we are to get consistent and good practice across the nation, people need to understand what we are talking about. What is home education and how do we define “full-time”? These things matter and I hope that, as a result of the Government’s consultation, we can move towards a system where everybody is clear what we are talking about.

Local authorities tend to be understaffed and the staff in this area are often inexperienced or subsidiary to quite fierce people in the enforcement and safeguarding divisions. It can be difficult for them to maintain things that, when they are brought back to government, are absolutely clear. My noble friend Lord Agnew has made it clear in his consultation, which has been a great help. But clarity is to be aimed for and I have tabled these amendments just to show that the clerks would allow them, and that the Bill would accommodate them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner]

I hesitate to stop progress and I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading because I was otherwise detained then. As the Minister knows, for some time my concern has been—I think this was a concern of previous Ministers in the department—the overlap between home education used inappropriately, unregistered schools and unregulated madrassas. I am normally an enthusiast for definitions in legislation because they introduce clarity. On this, I am a bit less certain. I am not clear—I would very much welcome the views of the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Soley, here—about whether this set of amendments, excluding Amendment 28, would make it easier for someone who had a child who was flitting between home education, an unregistered school and a madrassa to use this definition to carry on doing that, because they did not meet the requirement of the length for “home education”. I wonder whether there would be an escape route for people doing that if we accepted this precise definition, but I would very much welcome the views of the noble Lords on that issue.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, these definitions are by way of illustration only, and I entirely accept the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, asked.

The group of amendments that includes Amendment 12 takes another look at this. I am very much in favour of the Government taking advantage of the Bill to make clear their power to stick their nose into any and all educational situations and arrangements that might give them safeguarding or radicalisation concerns. There should not be any hesitation by local authorities in getting to know what is going on somewhere where they do not know what is going on. I would very much like the final version of the Bill to deal with that, but I will come on to that more under Amendment 12. I utterly support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said.

Amendment 5 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for putting his name to this amendment. This is the only other amendment I have put down, which shows how perfect my Bill was in the first instance. Mind you, what I have been writing at home is another matter. This amendment relates to an important issue. It goes to the heart of what I have been saying for some time, which is that we do not offer enough support to people who are home educating, whether they are doing it very well, not so well or, in some cases, very badly. This amendment places a duty upon the local authority,

“to provide advice and information to a parent of a child receiving elective home education if that parent requests such advice or information in relation to their obligations under this section”.

I was tempted to put in the word “support” as well. I have used “advice and information” largely because in a Private Member’s Bill there would be all sorts of problems about financing that and where the money came from, and there is a problem of local authority resources generally. However, I emphasise that this is a direction in which we have to move. If we are serious about helping people who are home educating and the children in that group, we need to put some money, resources and thought into it. At the moment, that is not there. Imagine, for example, a parent who is doing a remarkably good job home educating generally, but who suddenly spots that the child is quite good at, for example, chemistry but has very little access to a chemistry lab. If advice and information was available, it could enable that parent to be directed to an area where they might be able to get it. In the long run, I would like to make that option much more possible. There are many other examples—music, mathematics or whatever—where children have a particular skill that the parent cannot meet in home education.

That is my reason for this amendment, but there is another reason, which is very important. When I launched this Bill, inevitably I got attacked from all sides, as one does, but particularly from home educators who thought I was intent on destroying the family. They referred to me as Mao Tse-Tung in drag. I am not Mao Tse-Tung in drag and I am not about destroying the family, although sometimes I feel like destroying various families, but we will not go into that in any great detail. That is my background as an MP in certain areas, I guess. There is real concern among some parents who are doing this that there is a constant attempt to take away the right to home educate. It has never been my view that we should do that. I have always made it clear that I regard it as a right. It is a complex area where you have to balance the rights of the parent with the rights of the child, which is an area which causes parents concern.

By putting this wording into the Bill, it says to parents who are anxious about this that they have a legal right to home educate. It recognises in a legislative form that there is a right to home educate. I do that because of the concern of some people who are determined to believe at almost any cost that there is a killer on the loose about to devastate every family in the land. I am not. It is working quite well. If people want to see some of the discussion on this, the interviews I did around the country last week on Skype for Business are now on the Lords of the Blog site. They are all there, and many parents were worried about this.

So I ask the House to accept this amendment for two reasons. First, it requires advice and information to be given by local authorities to parents who request it and opens the door to longer-term support. I hope that in the consultation period and the discussions with the Government we will build up a proper support system for parents who are home educating. Secondly, it puts in legislative form the right to home educate. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I understand the limitations of a Private Member’s Bill. The noble Lord has done extremely well to stretch it as far as he can to get here. I say to the Minister that we really must look at proper support. To return to what I said on the first amendment, looking at the data from Northamptonshire, by the end of schooling three-quarters of children being home educated have got there not through the initial choice of their parents but because they have failed out of school. Our reaction to children for whom schooling has proved impossible to maintain for whatever reason—depriving them of all funding—is, frankly, perverse and wrong. We really ought to look at saying that these parents have taken on the burden, but they need help and we can provide it. It is probably a great deal cheaper.

From talking to home educators, I think we could probably manage special needs provision on about one-quarter of the budget that it takes to provide it through the state because the parents are doing so much of what needs to be done, but they need outside help. Even if it is fairly straightforward—just behavioural issues, not some abstruse special educational need—parents need help. They may not be good enough at teaching mathematics. They may know that. They might really like to drop their child into maths classes or literacy classes or give them a chance to play games with other children, not just with home-educated children, or get them access to the swimming pool, the library or the other things that happen occasionally in good local authorities. They should be there and be supportive.

I urge the Government to consider the idea that a budget should be given to local authorities to provide educational assistance to home-educated children. The Government are saving so much by these children coming out of school: £5,000 per year per child. The Government should not pocket the whole of that. There is no reason to. The Government should recognise that they have a continuing duty actively to support these children.

Having that fund and local authorities having that duty would produce a supportive attitude and a real reason for parents to engage with the local authority. It means that, rather than being hidden from sight, the vast majority of these children will be seen because they will be engaging in an activity sponsored by the local authority. They will be seen by independent professionals in doing that. There will be very good visibility and the whole problem of how we know that these children are being properly educated becomes easy to solve. It is solved as a side effect of educating them. That surely must be the best way to approach this.

Supportive means actively supporting their education, not just directing what it should be. There is a wide range of good practice out there that we could borrow from and, with good funding, produce something that results in a very large proportion of home-educating parents actively wishing to register. Most of them are not state phobic. Most of them just think the state has done a very bad job for them, and they do not trust some of the individuals involved. If we get to a position where the state is providing a range of helpful services, and there is a decent budget behind that, we would solve most of the problems covered in the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

7: Clause 1, page 1, leave out lines 11 and 12

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is to enable some discussion on the subject of registration. I am entirely comfortable with the idea that local authorities, with all their responsibilities, should know where the children that they are responsible for are—where they can reach them and how they can begin to establish that they are, within the duties of the local authority, well looked after.

If we are going to do that, we really ought to have a system that is comprehensive. We do not really have a grip on children who are registered with an independent school. They are not part of the national pupil census. Why not? What is happening in the whole of alternative education? What is happening with children who are just told to stay home, who are held at home waiting for the school of their choice, who are moving between this country and another one that they have a connection with, or are in some other way adrift from the ordinary ways of a local authority keeping tabs on children? If we think it is important that there is a register—various noble Lords have made the case that it is, and I agree with them—then it should be a register of children. Some of that is done already because we know that they are at schools within the local authority or connected with it so that the local authority can get data about them, but it ought to be a comprehensive exercise.

We should not just pick on home education—or, rather, those parents who choose to declare themselves as home educators—because the people who will register are probably not the ones who are causing us trouble. The ones who might cause us trouble are the ones who are not registered, or the ones that schools have chosen to abandon and their parents are really not capable of picking up. I do not think registration just for home education answers the case. I hope the Minister, in all that he is thinking through, when he comes to registration will look at the wider question of how local authorities are supposed to have proper information on which children they are supposed to be paying attention to.

There are data sources that we should be making good use of. Most children, one way or another, will be registered with medical authorities. Many of them will have other contacts with the state through child allowances and so on. There ought to be an integration of that information so that the local authority has a picture of who is there. There has to be a sensible way of dealing with parents moving from one place to another without making it immensely difficult, uncertain and bureaucratic. I do not think there is any sign that that has yet been thought through.

We have a good pupil census that operates in schools, which might well provide the basis for a complete child census. It might give us a very interesting picture on children who go missing. I have not seen anything that I know to be an accurate number, but there appears to be quite a high number of such children and we ought to be paying attention to them. They are children who are really at risk, in capitals, but we do not seem to have good enough systems for picking up on that and being able to investigate where they last were and what has happened.

We want to produce a system that is good value for money. I come back to what I said on the last amendment: all this works much better if we give parents a real incentive to sign up, and all justice says that that is what we should be doing anyway. We as a country should be part of educating these children. It is not like sending your child away to prep school, nor is it just choosing a school outside the state system; this is choosing to educate them yourself and taking on that burden. The state has every right and duty to offer assistance in that, and I hope that will be a consequence of the review that my noble friend is undertaking. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington]

Very briefly, just to comment on the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, it would be interesting to get some feedback either now or later on why other mediums of passing on information are used. I work in a world where I am not comfortable with information coming in paper form—or, indeed, with any written text—but I have found coping strategies to deal with it. However, a film does not have the stigma of something scary. You can open it up and it is a very good way forward; it can contain quite a lot of information. No matter what else we do, I suggest that somebody takes that idea and keeps it in mind. You should use this medium more often, because it is a great way of getting across the essence of what you are doing. I hope that other people will use it more, and the Government will do it and find ways to explain that it is available. The most disastrous situation is that you get a series of texts telling you where on the web you can find the film explaining the text. It happens.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very attracted by the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. It is a very good approach. I urge on my noble friend the Minister, if they are going down this road, that they should make at least the core of it a national film—because why do we want widely different practice towards home educators and attitudes towards home education across the country? I do not think that we do. It is a common problem and there will always be a local gloss on it—particular local facilities and local people and services that need to be drawn attention to. But the basic message that the noble Baroness outlines ought to be something we deliver consistently and across the country, and it should link through to the obligation to provide advice, which the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, addressed. That is obviously important. We are dealing with particular sets of circumstances—we are dealing with parents who are not expert in the system. Absolutely, they need showing the way through.

Something we might well combine with this educational, supportive attitude to people who are entering into home education is keeping their place open at the school they are thinking of leaving. That can be a really difficult thing. It seals them into home education and seals them off from ways back into the state system if, by coming off-roll in the school and entering into home education, they lose their right to get back into that school. I really do not think it should be such a cliff edge; we should provide a continuing right of the parent to get back. After all, in most cases, the school will still receive funding for the balance of the year for their place, and it absolutely should not be closed off to them. We need time to allow parents to make an informed decision. Many will already have satisfied themselves that they want to do it, but others this is happening to rather willy-nilly, and they ought to have available to them advice, support and time for proper consideration.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for touching on the subject of flexi-schooling in his amendment. That is a very interesting way forward. I was encouraged by what the Government said in their consultation, in that it seemed to open up the idea that they might support it. There are some necessary changes to be made, and it ought to be easy for a school to indicate in their returns that a child is being flexi-schooled. At the moment, there is no code that they can use for that purpose; in one way or another, they have to tell an untruth—either they have to say that a child is full time or that the child is absent with leave, whatever else the case might be. There ought to be a way. It signals, as the earlier amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Solely, signalled, the acceptability of flexi-schooling if the Government make provision for it in their coding systems. We shall come on to my views on that in a later amendment.

The noble Lord, Lord Warner, says that we absolutely need registration. I think that we need registration if it is going to achieve something. In all the collection of children whom we do not know about, the children who are being home educated are probably the least vulnerable. By singling them out we are saying, “In some way we think you are the worst—in some way we think you require special attention. In some way, we do not trust you above all others. You are much worse than those who have just been left to wander the streets”.

[Lord Warner]

Can I just explain my position on this? I speak as someone who spent six years as a director of social services safeguarding children, and I came to an eternal truth at the end of that. The more that children are outside any kind of supervision, the more vulnerable they are to abuse. It is actually a truth that has been validated in many hundreds if not thousands of cases. We know nothing about the children who are in home education, but the fact is that those numbers have grown very rapidly over the last few years. I am not making any kind of allegation that children who are home schooled are being abused, but in those circumstances, we need to get a better fix on this subject —not just for educational reasons but, I would suggest, for safeguarding reasons as well. That is not the purpose of the Bill, but it is an assistance in the safeguarding area as well. That is why it ought to be a very clear statutory requirement to register home education, which the Bill as drafted provides for.

[Lord Bird]

Maybe this is not the place to broaden the discussion about home education, but it is so interesting. The late Tony Benn put his children through a wonderful school called Holland Park comprehensive, and the moment they left school they were then ferried to extra maths, extra history and extra this and that, and were taken to their grandfather’s at the weekend to read all his books. There is a concept that we are all involved in the home education of our children, if we follow Tony Benn—and we have a duty. I am a bit worried that we are narrowing down home education to just this period, and I would like it to be broadened out. As far as I am concerned, when you are a parent, you are an educator, and you should be given the chance to create as many opportunities as possible.

The noble Lord talked about what happens when children are let outside of control, but the problem is that sometimes when they are in control they are abused—they are not developed properly. One reason why people like me back home education is that it gives you the chance to bring out of your children things that would never come out, even in the best school in the country.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, to pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, a local authority that has a decent history of being collaborative with home education knows a great deal about people who home educate because it interacts with them, provides facilities and services to them and talks to them—not to everybody, but the core of home education will be known. The local authorities that have trouble are generally those which have adopted bullying attitudes to home education and then get widely mistrusted.

The solution to this problem lies mainly in institutionalising an attitude of support and providing the funding to enable that support to be good and consistent. Under those circumstances, if you are really offering something—not just the possibility of being criticised and attacked and having people trying to remove your right to home educate—then registration serves a purpose. It serves a much better purpose, however, if it is part of a consistent attempt by government to keep in touch with everybody, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, says, those who are least cared about and least supervised, of whom the home educators are at the best behaved end.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

9: Clause 1, page 1, line 14, at end insert—
“( ) An assessment under subsection (3) shall not require or imply a requirement for any particular curriculum, method of teaching or order of educational development.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, assessment is a serious problem if it is overemphasised in this context. Of the population of children who are home educated, those who have been taken out of school are, almost by definition, divergent. If they were ordinary mainstream children behaving in a mainstream way, there would probably have never arisen any impetus to get them out of school. They come out of school because some problem has arisen; it usually means that there is something—it can be any of a whole range of things—about the child that puts them at the fringes of the national distribution. Those who have come out into home education or are in it for philosophical reasons develop divergence, because they are no longer constrained by the needs of a curriculum that is designed to make schooling possible.

There are all sorts of things about the way we choose to school children that are dictated by the need to have schools that can run with a curriculum that broadly keeps pace with itself across different schools and with a way of doing things that enables a school to understand where it is supposed to be and for us to judge whether it is doing well. There are all sorts of restrictions that do not need to apply to a home-educated child. You will often find children who are streets ahead in some particular area of interests—at age nine or 10 they are doing an Open University course in astrophysics, or whatever it might be. You will also find children who have entirely neglected some aspect of their education until they find a need for it and then they catch up. It becomes a very divergent, varied pattern of achievement.

There is not any sensible way to assess this in a light-touch way by some sort of standard assessment. Assessments are designed to evaluate what is happening in school, where there are a lot of children and statistics are in your favour; the oddities even out and you get some sort of pattern emerging that tells you how the school is doing as a whole. Even then, there are problems, as we have with Progress 8 at the moment, where the system means that the outliers have far too much influence on the average. If you draw Progress 8 out as a bell graph, however, you can see where the weight of a school is and can make a reasonable judgment on the quality of education being provided there. You cannot do that when looking at an individual child, not simply and not just by putting them through a SATs test. You need far more information. If a parent gets to a point where they are arguing with a local authority about a school attendance order and getting the independent advice needed to establish where their child is and what they have achieved, that could cost a couple of thousand quid. This is an immense resource to apply just to check where a child is. It is entirely pointless and destructive to emphasise assessment carried out by those sorts of means.

The assessment to aim for is of professionals having contact with the child—a good school teacher or someone with a decent level of experience who can say, “Yes, I can see how this child is getting on; I can see that they are well educated and that their attitudes are right. I don’t have any problem”. Much the most effective way of organising assessment is to promote contact between professionals and the home-educated children, and to do that by offering all sorts of support so that home-educating parents will find a need for at least some of it. That way, you do not incur much additional cost on assessment; you are providing money for education. To run this sort of assessment process in a way that is fair to the children and the parents would cost a vast amount of money and all it would be spent on is assessment. To run an assessment system that costs much less risks, because you are dealing with children who are way off centre, a vast amount of unfairness for children and parents. It really does not work as a standard assessment system, and I do not think that we should pretend that it does. Good local authorities employ professional people and trust their judgment; that is what we should be looking at. Local authorities that perform less well hire inexperienced people who do not feel confident in their own judgment and therefore run standard forms of assessment. They have no business drawing conclusions from it, but do anyway and then harry the parents as a result. We have to be really careful about what we are asking for by way of assessment.

There is a quite a good exposition of this in the draft guidance that the Government have produced. They do not require any detailed form of assessment. We need to move to a position, however, where we are quite clearly, and in words that local authorities can trust, supporting their professional judgment. Yes, they will get it wrong sometimes—everybody does, including all professionals. But that is fundamentally the best and most sensible thing we can do, and we should make that level of support the default in everything we do.

In assessment we should provide the means to deal with children who have been traumatised by school or who are otherwise emotionally damaged. One should not just take it as read; if it is said that a child will be scarred by meeting a stranger from the local authority, that is not satisfactory evidence on its own. However, we ought to recognise that there are such children, and there ought to be an easy mechanism for a parent to establish that theirs is one such. Frankly, it ought to be part of the support given to them by the National Health Service; if a child has got itself into that sort of position, there ought to be professionals who can back up that judgment. It certainly should not be a local authority’s unfettered right to send some relatively untrained person—certainly untrained in mental health—barging into a delicate situation. However, we need to provide for such situations in what we do.

We ought to take into account in assessment specific respect for parents’ wishes, not as an absolute but as a matter of ordinary courtesy. There are different ways of doing these things, and we ought to adapt to the parents’ way of doing things if we can. The attitude ought to be that it is a collaborative effort, not an imposed effort. We should recognise that assessment is a reflection of the duties imposed on parents by the founding Act and that we ought to tie things into that explicitly and directly. We ought to make sure that where parents are subject to assessment by other agencies, particularly with regard to things like special needs, that assessment can serve both purposes, and should make sure that it is not duplicated.

We also need to understand that in making an assessment, the local authority may need access to information which is sensitive in the family context. There may be absent parents who still have rights of care and access, who should not be able to see things that fall outside their rights and responsibilities. They should not automatically have rights to see all the data that is accumulated as a result of an assessment. This needs to be handled within context.

I feel that we need to look at assessment carefully and that we should not, as the Bill does at the moment, say that you should have “supervised instruction” in numeracy and literacy. Things do not work that way in home education, and they do not have to. What matters is the outcome and not the process, and that we should base our assessments on professional judgment, obtained in the best possible circumstances, and reserving methods of compulsion and intrusion for instances where the local authority has got to the point where it has real concerns. I beg to move.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I have a degree of sympathy with this set of amendments. As the noble Lord suggested, some of the problems I see with Clause 2 might be addressed here in some way.

The noble Lord spoke about different types or facets of assessment getting in the way of each other, and that happens. Somebody who has failed at school because of a special educational need often acquires psychological problems—the two of them fit into each other. There is usually not just one thing—it is a package or a spiral, although whether it goes up depends on what is happening. Therefore they have to be taken into account together.

It is essential that we do not get overly prescriptive about people with different learning patterns or needs. If you are to deal with people whose learning patterns and possibilities are different, they will need a different approach, and unless that is taken on board, you will guarantee a degree of failure. The unfortunate thing about schools at the moment is that they are slightly overregulated, which means that you make the possibility —indeed, the probability—of failure higher in certain cases. I therefore hope that the Government and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, are careful to take this on board. If you get prescriptive, you will get it wrong, because you are guaranteeing that your prescription does not fit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendments 16A and 19A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. We cannot ignore the risks associated with this, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, which is why Amendment 16A is important. It is also important that, if there is evidence that a child is going to an unregistered school, someone should be notified of that so that action can be taken.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, to pick up on the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, it seems sensible that a local authority should be able to know whether a parent who is home educating would pass the DBS test. However, we have to recognise that we let these people be parents. There is no bar on somebody who has committed one of these crimes having children and bringing them up. So far as I know, local authorities have no special responsibility to supervise their activities at home as parents or to otherwise inspect them. Would the noble Lord feel comfortable if we were to impose, as a matter of course, a requirement that everyone who has a conviction that might bar them from working with children should be inspected before they are allowed to have children?

At what point does being comfortable with them bringing up their own children make one uncomfortable with them educating their own children? Why does that give the noble Lord cause for concern? If these children are seen as a matter of course in the way that they would be at school because the local authority provides a proper level of support and is therefore content that the education is proceeding happily—

[Lord Storey]

Does the noble Lord not accept that anybody working closely or intimately with children, whether in a school setting, a semi-school setting, a youth club, the Scouts or the Brownies, should be safeguard-checked?

[Lord Lucas]

I am entirely comfortable with that and I have been through the process myself in the context of working with children. However, we do not require this of parents. As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, pointed out, parents do a lot of educating outside school hours anyway. I do not see—

[Lord Warner]

Perhaps I may clarify that. Amendment 16A refers to “other adults”; it does not say “the parent”. I gently suggest to the noble Lord that if you leave your child unsupervised with a childminder for a number of hours in the day, the sensible thing is to check whether the childminder has been safeguard-checked. I suggest to the noble Lord that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, is simply saying that, if in home education you find another adult who does some teaching, probably in an unsupervised way either in the home or elsewhere, they should be safeguard-checked. That seems a sensible arrangement that many thousands of parents go through all the time when their children are looked after by somebody else.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I appreciate that we are near a borderline and that this is a matter for discussion, but a lot of the people whom a home educator leaves their children with are other home educators, as it is a way of sharing the burden. On many occasions I have sent my child off to spend a play day or night in the company of a friend’s child without having the parents checked to see whether they have any relevant convictions. One should be conscious that this is an area where we are quite comfortable to rely on personal judgment. It tends to be when you are putting your child in the company of strangers that you want to know that they have been properly checked, particularly those who are part of an institution where they might expect to deal with children on a regular basis. I am very comfortable with that system but I do not think we should start letting that intrude into personal decisions about with which of one’s friends one should let one’s child spend time overnight in their house or spend time with their children being educated by the parent.

A border seems to be being drawn here on the basis that in some way home educators are worse or more risky than the rest of us. Not only is there no evidence for that but it is entirely unjustified to say it. I keep feeling that people say it because they are different: “They are not people like us and therefore we’re suspicious”. I hope that in many aspects that is something that we can educate ourselves out of—we should not allow ourselves to slip in that direction. Therefore, I feel that the noble Lord’s amendment goes too far, although I understand what he says about it. However, I do not think that it fits with the general pattern of home education.

We will come to the subject of unregistered schools in a later group, and that seems a substantial problem to address. Effectively there are institutions run by strangers that purport to provide education. Children are dropped off and collected later and, because the institutions are not registered or formally classified as schools or other institutions, there may be no DBS or any other checks on them. That is a problem that the Department for Education needs to deal with. We know that there are a lot of such places and that they need attention, but we do not seem to have given ourselves the tools to deal with them.

However, I do not think we should trespass on the privately run institutions, where parents are permitted to drop their children off with friends and acquaintances to receive a bit of education. We all do that at the weekend but we do not for a moment consider that formal checks have to be made. We should recognise the difference between the need to check in the public realm and there being no need to check in the private realm. We should draw a rational and natural division between the two and not let the checks of the public realm bleed into the private. I do not think that that would work. We should trust parents to educate children in the same way as we trust them to bring them up outside school hours and we should be comfortable with the processes around that.

Coming back to the main amendment, I am comforted by what the Minister effectively says in the draft guidance that he has published about how a local authority should establish whether a parent is providing a proper education for their children. I again urge him to accept that this will all work much better if he can find a way of providing a proper level of support. Then, in almost all cases, that assessment can be carried out in the natural way—in the same way as it is carried out by a teacher, observing a child over a period of time and forming a professional judgment.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, the noble Lord has made some very valid points but I am concerned by the length at which he is speaking. The Committee would much appreciate being able to finish Committee stage today. If he could possibly curtail his remarks, the Committee would very much appreciate that.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I do not think that with the point that we have got to there is any great danger of running over the time. I am taking a bit of time on this group because it is the last important and substantive group. There is only one other point that I wish to make at length and that is on flexi-schooling, but I will not speak about that at great length and I do not think that it is contentious. However, I believe that the whole business of assessment is a point of great concern for home educators. Many of them undertake education in their own way. Helping them with that—giving them support, direction and information so that they do it better—seems to be an entirely good idea. However, trying to corral them into a system of education which has largely evolved to make schools work but which is not followed in many schools of which we approve, as well as a lot of schools abroad, seems to be entirely inappropriate. Therefore, if we are to have something that works, and if we are to support and accept home education, we have to be very careful what we say on assessment. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 9 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

12: Clause 1, page 1, line 19, at end insert “and the setting or settings where the child receives all or part of their education”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the amendments in this group are an attempt to show the Government that this is a Bill they can use to get a grip on settings in which education is provided. We seem to have a considerable range of problems, particularly with regard to radicalisation and the failure to educate people fully and in citizenship in some of the settings that our young people are allowed to attend. It seems that we do not have the power or the ability to deal with that effectively. This group of amendments is very much directed at showing the Government that this is a Bill they can use to achieve that. I will leave it at that. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, if Amendment 12 is agreed to, there will be consequential arrangements in respect of Amendment 13.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I think we are a long way short of having time problems—we have 45 minutes for the last group.

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, these are complicated amendments that need to be considered in the process that we have been talking about. However, there is a bit of a time problem, and if you talk to the people who are involved in the Bill that is coming up next, they will tell you that there is definitely a time problem. I understand what the noble Lord is saying in these amendments but, again, they are too complex for a Private Member’s Bill. I know where the noble Lord is coming from: it is about having the discussion and asking the Government to consider and consult on it. I am confident they will do so, as we all need to do. This is a complex, important area, but not one for a Private Member’s Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, if there was a time pressure, my noble friend Lord Cormack would be in his place. If the Whips are concerned about time pressure, perhaps someone might scurry out and get him, otherwise we will have to adjourn before the next debate.

I agree that this group is more directed at showing the Minister what is possible than for discussion today. It is a subject that goes wider than that of the Bill and I am happy to beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 12 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington]

Perhaps I may respond to that. Although I am severely tempted, I shall not call a Division now. If we put in “an appropriate education” we will cover these points. It will be a building block. If we put it in as an absolute—“must”, “shall”, “will”, whatever you want—we will be dancing on the head of a pin. It depends on the context in which you take it. We know that because we have all done it. I have had 30 years of playing with those words. If we do that and keep in the age-related provision—even if we put caveats after it—we will still have the initial provision, which means you will have to have discussions on it.

The Minister is studiously looking at a piece of paper but perhaps I may ask him whether we have a legal definition of ability and—I am looking for the Bill; it is nice to know that long sight comes to rival dyslexia in my life—aptitude. He says that they are important but I do not think aptitude can come in if you have not had a proper assessment in the first place. You cannot assess aptitude if you do not have the right range of environment to find out what it is.

There are all sorts of problems here. If you have another form of words you do not need those three provisions in the clause because the number of people affected by it—20% of the population have special educational needs but you can probably double that for this group to 40%, or maybe only 30%—is enough to colour this legislation’s effectiveness unless there is something in there to say that you are not going to place this stress on them. Dyslexics are the biggest although not the only group—they are not the only pattern but they are the most commonly occurring pattern—and, unless we deal with this issue, the legislation will fail a large group of its clientele. We cannot have that. Other forms of words can go in such as an “appropriate education”.

If there is an appeal, the group that will have the most problems dealing with it will probably be the dyslexics and—guess what?—it runs in families. We will be creating more problems than we need. Just change that and make sure that it is done. I hope the Minister will give us guidance that the Government will not look unfavourably on this. If we do not change this it will create more problems than we need to have. Perhaps the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, will have something more positive to say on that comment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, perhaps I may speak briefly to my amendments in this group. I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and hope that the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and my noble friend the Minister will agree to suspend the Bill between Committee and Report until we have the results of the consultation. We will then be able to see in context what this Bill says because this clause in particular will work much better when we have a more expansive sight of the full-blown draft guidance to go with it. As it is, I have real concerns and I would definitely join the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on Report. To allow legislation like this to go forward beyond Report would be a great mistake because we need to know much more.

In particular, in Amendment 24 I seek to leave out the words “supervised instruction”. It is just not appropriate for many of these children. It is not the way it is done or the way they learn. They may well be learning entirely by themselves, but what matters is that they are learning. Numeracy, literacy and writing are absolutely core and we should not let children come out of home education illiterate, but we ought not to be prescribing the process; we ought to be prescribing the outcome.

In framing the guidance we must have regard to the whole range of support. The fact that support is available makes much clearer guidance possible because we are not trying to push parents back into taking up patently unsatisfactory school provision; rather, we would be giving them a clear and supportive alternative. Under those circumstances, it is reasonable to make demands of them, but it very much depends on that.

Lastly, I want to draw attention to flexi-schooling, which is one of the possible answers to this issue. I had a helpful conversation with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely. The Church of England is willing to be extremely supportive of this proposal. It has a lot of small rural schools and many of them would really like to become involved in the provision of flexi-schooling, which would suit them well. They are small enough to be flexible and they can provide an environment with space and freedom which will suit many children who feel oppressed by a more restricted city school environment. Also, not many of those schools, in particular the good ones, have the time and space available to do things slightly differently for home-educated children. It also fits well with the provision that these rural schools are already making for Travellers and others for whom a non-traditional education pattern works well.

I would really encourage my noble friend the Minister to talk seriously with the Church of England to see what can be done to establish a pattern for the support of flexi-schooling. Indeed, I do not think that much is needed other than the comfort of knowing that it is a form of education of which the Government approve. Frankly, if a child is receiving flexi-schooling for a couple of days a week, all the worries about whether that child is visible would disappear along with knowing about the quality of their education because they would be closely and properly observed by educational professionals. It is a very good solution to many of the problems that this Bill sets out to tackle. It will not apply in every case, but it is a facility that we should encourage.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, it may be helpful if I offer to have a meeting with the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Soley, and indeed with my noble friend Lord Lucas to discuss Amendment 23 in particular. I consider this to be part of our broader call for evidence and feedback on the draft guidance that we have issued.

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I should start with the one thing on which I unequivocally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Soley, which is that we ought to have some evidence. I urge the Minister to set about collecting a decent set of evidence. We do not even know whether overall there is a problem here. Are home-educated children ending their education more or less well educated than children who have been to school? We do not know. Are they more or less likely to be abused? We do not know. There is no data about this, even to identify whether overall we have a problem. Surely we must start with evidence.

We say that we have no information on the number of children being home-educated, yet they manage to come up with a figure in Wales. The Welsh system works well. You do not need extra legislation to find that information; if we want to know the number, just do what the Welsh do. I think we do want to know, so can the Government please organise it? Google certainly knows what home-educated people are up to and the NHS knows where they are. The data is there. Let us find a way of getting that information without putting additional pressures on people who want to live their own lives. Let us move towards getting the data we think we want to have using the data we already have.

There are several stories going around, such as the one concerning Dylan Seabridge in Wales. The Welsh Government were supposed to produce a report but they have never done so. Contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Soley, said, the authorities knew a year in advance that there was a problem—they were notified— and chose to do nothing. About the only thing one knows about him is that he was a child who was a vegetarian and died of scurvy. How is that possible? If you are going to eat an all-vegetable diet, scurvy is about the least likely disease to die of. You cannot build a system for 40,000 people on the basis of an odd case in the backwoods of Wales. We have to know a lot more about what is going on; otherwise, we are in danger of legislating for these people because they do not do as we do and therefore we are frightened of them. We have to be reasonable, inclusive and welcoming.

I would not like to see this Bill leave the House without radical and extensive amendment, because I think it is set the wrong way round. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, said several times that we ought to be helping and doing better. So we ought. If we did that and lived up to our obligations to these parents and children under existing legislation, I do not think we would have a fraction of the worry and problem that we have.

As a Conservative, I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that parents should be responsible for their children’s education. I believe that, by and large, the state does not make better decisions than parents about children. Even if the state knew everything, it still would not make better decisions. I do not much like the Bill as drafted, but there are better ways of doing these things.

A lot of powers are not used because of lack of money or lack of quality staff. That is another thing that we could do better. I do not like the Bill’s proposal for extensive supervision, which would cost a lot of money when that money could be better used. There is not a statistically valid basis for taking decisions about how well an individual child is being educated, particularly when they are pursuing a non-standard course. There is too much statistical noise in trying to take a decision on that basis, which is why Ofsted will not take decisions based on small numbers of pupils—and that is in a pretty standardised, regulated system. If we are to have something that has validity, you are after spending £1,000 a year on inspecting the children. Why not spend £1,000 a year on helping the children, which would mean that the numbers that you need to inspect would be much smaller?

Some people home educate on principle. We should do our best to embrace that. We should not require such people to conform to a state methodology. We need a methodology to run schools. Schools need a methodology because they handle a lot of pupils; they have to put them through parallel lines through the same system or it just does not work. You do not need that in home education. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said quite wrongly that the parents who took their kid out of school for a week—I agree that that does not work with the school system—demonstrated that there was a problem with home education. No. A lot of these children, particularly those whose parents home educate them on principle, spend their education out in museums and on trips, doing and experiencing real things and coming back to sort out the academic side online in the evening. You can do many things in home education that you just cannot do in schools. We should not seek to regulate away that freedom. I would never home educate, because I could not put my life under the strain and stress that it would involve, but where people have done it—and a lot of people have done it well—we should applaud and support it.

Another group of home-educated people are those who have been failed by the state, because their special educational needs have not been well looked after or they have been bullied and their parents have felt that anything was better and decided to take on the strain of educating them at home. Again, our answer should be to support them. We should make sure that the people who decide to home educate are helped with the SEN and that their problems with the schools are sorted out. That is a failure of state; it is not a failure of the people who are home educating.

There are also people who have been rejected by the state education system and illegally off-rolled to improve the school’s result. We have seen that at the top end in St Olave’s. It happens at the bottom end, too, with kids being chucked out of school and told, “Don’t come in, because we don’t want to see you in our results”. The parents are completely unsupported in the resulting home education that they are supposed to provide. They should be brought back into the supported system. However, this is a failure of the state and not of home education provision.

There is a lot of state-sponsored alternative provision at the moment. Who exactly oversees it? What is going on? Again, this is a problem with the state. When it comes to radicalisation, we talk in a blasé way of these 100-plus illegal schools. Why? If they are doing something illegal, we should shut them down. It should not be a problem. Either these schools should reform or they should be shut down. They seem to wander on for years waiting to be told to improve. Schools should not be allowed to carry on when they are illegal and not doing things right. They should be remanaged and stuck in an academy chain. If that is not possible, they should be closed. Why do we allow this? It is a problem of the state, not of home education.

As for home education for attendance order avoidance, the existing powers deal with that perfectly well. Clearly, if a parent is doing that and the school confirms it, the existing powers can be used to get that kid back into school. There is no difficulty whatever with the existing legislation. If we really want to improve things for home education, there is no need to be punitive.

We could look, for example, at Birmingham, which is perhaps not the local authority we would immediately turn to for good practice, but in this area it is doing really well. It is concentrating on drawing home-educated children into its orbit. All the services it offers to children in school are now offered to home-educating parents. It is willing to listen and works in partnership. The result is that most of the home-educated children in Birmingham are known to the local authority and seen regularly in settings to which the authority has access. The worries that people have expressed disappear, just by the authority being helpful. We could do so much more in that area. The money that we would have to spend on the sort of structures in this Bill could provide literacy and numeracy support.

We could provide access to qualifications. There have been complaints about how many GCSEs these kids take. We do not make it easy for these kids to take GCSEs. They might have to travel three hours to find a centre that will allow them to sit exams. Some GCSEs are structured so that it is difficult to take them as external candidates. These are things that we, as a state, could do to improve the situation. In the past, there has been a system of flexi-schooling, where kids can be in school for a couple of days a week and out for the rest. Why have we not supported that? These are all ways in which we can deal with this problem by being supportive.

We would be much better off with a Bill that concentrated on support rather than one that focuses on punishment. There will be some residual problems, but they will be much smaller and easier for local authorities to deal with so that they can focus a clear gaze where it is needed, not over the whole spectrum, which we could better deal with in other ways.

English Baccalaureate: Creative and Technical Subjects

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott for giving us the opportunity of this debate and I declare my interest as editor of the Good Schools Guide and parent of a 14 year-old.

I am unusual in this debate, in that I am a fan of the EBacc. In a fast-changing world, an academic education is as good a foundation as you can offer any child. I share the Government’s estimation that eventually we might be able to offer that to—I say “offer to” rather than “impose on”—90% of children. There is a lot to do to get there but we are doing a lot. A lot of good things are happening in education and I am very cheered by a move to evidence-based practices, but there really is a lot to do. I listened to a 16 year-old today who had just moved from a Kent comprehensive to a Kent grammar. She said to me, “At last, I can ask a question without losing my friends”. When education at that sort of level has a disdain of academic success, I really feel that there is potential to improve.

Because I believe in the EBacc, I am an immense opponent of having more grammar schools. I cannot begin to understand how the Government reconcile their ambitions for the EBacc with the creation of selection for the top 25%. Nor can I understand how they continue with comparable outcomes as a measure at GCSE. What is the point in thinking that you can give 90% of children an academic education if the system of scoring in the exams means not more than 60% can succeed? These dissonances at the heart of the Government’s education policy need sorting out but I still support the EBacc.

Beyond the EBacc, we all need a strong, creative part to our lives. As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, we need what we individually do best to be valued while we are at school. It is an enormous motivator; if you are good at art and art is valued at school, it really helps you to do well in your academic subjects. It gives you confidence and impetus, so we must not lose the breadth and the art content, particularly in 11 to 16 education.

However, we do not deal with it best by fighting over how much more we can stuff into the pie and what we should chuck out. I will go with George W. Bush on this: we must make the pie higher. There are lots of ways of doing this and I will suggest a few to my noble friend. There should be a real, concentrated effort to reduce teacher workload so that they have more space to bring their passions into it. There is an overemphasis on marking but some interesting things are going on: the Michaela school, for instance, is really working to reduce it. We should pick out good practice on how to chuck the time-consuming rubbish out of teaching GCSEs. For instance, there is excellent work going on with the alternative qualifications created by Sevenoaks and Bedales. They show the way and we should pick up on that. There should be much more technology. If we really get assessment techniques so that an essay can be evaluated properly, rather than reducing it to, “Did you introduce these six forms of grammar and five points about the subject?”, that will make a great difference.

We can bring creativity into a lot of subjects which it has been excluded from. If you go to the American School in London, you will find that in the course of its art lessons they cover the physics of light, the chemistry of colour, the biology of sight and the mathematics of perspective. They link across the curriculum; that way, you get creativity running out into the science subjects. Sir Anthony Seldon is quite right that a lot is coming down the line from technology, which we will see in the next 10 years. I have seen my daughter pick up something from YouTube videos in no time at all, while most of the people who give us trouble in hacking scenarios have learned that all online. No teachers have been involved at all; it has been a totally online experience. Bringing that sort of thing into schools will enable more breadth and a greater density of teaching.

On good discipline, there has been a great Twitterstorm about a school in Norfolk that went overboard on that, but there are still too many schools where the discipline does not allow concentrated learning.

Another way is broader university courses. So much of the focus in school comes down to the fact that universities are selecting on just one subject, so GCSEs focus down to A-levels that focus down to university. That is entirely contrary to people’s interest in a varied life. They need to keep a broader base. There needs to be some breadth to university courses. Even if you are studying history, you need a bit of science, arts and business in there somewhere if you are really to flourish afterwards. You ought not to have to pick them up afterwards.

We also need collaboration. There is a marvellous experiment going on in Plymouth that I urge my noble friend to visit. The whole city—businesses, the city authorities, higher education, further education, the university technical college and the schools—has come together to help kids who need to have a space to exercise their programming skills and be valued for them. When you get the whole city working together like that, there is so much more you can do than if you try to break things into little bits. It offers enormous opportunity in science, English and other areas to bring practical experience into GCSE and A-levels and broaden people’s experience. Switzerland does that much better than us. Early involvement with the real world is something to aim for.

We need state school/private school partnerships. I know my noble friend listened to a lecture on those yesterday. If you are looking for access to the arts, as Thomas’s Battersea does, open out your extraordinary facilities to local state schools.

As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, Ofsted is crucial in this. Only it has a mechanism to force schools to keep breadth in 11 to 14 key stage 3. It ought to be communicating much better with parents about what is going on in schools. The whole Ofsted model needs to be revisited so that it is much more ongoing, rather than the just once every five or 10 years we are stuck with at the moment.

We really need to support the Careers & Enterprise Company on the skills passport. It produces a mechanism for things outside the EBacc that are to be valued.

Finally, we need really to focus on the measures we are imposing on schools in league tables. We need to make sure that what they are incentivising is in the interests of the child, not the school. What we have seen revealed in Orpington in the past week or two is not uncommon, and we have to root it out.

Schools Update: National Funding Formula

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, would my noble friend not agree that what the Opposition Front Benches meant to say was that they are immensely grateful to this strong and stable Government for grasping the nettle and making a reform that they jolly well should have made when they were in power?

[Lord Nash]

Well, it is true that we are the first Government who have actually done this. It is not easy and I pay tribute to the officials in the Department for Education. They tell me that they have been working on this for at least 10 years, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, knows, and are personally delighted that it has happened.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. They are very reasonable and it is difficult to find too many reasons for opposing them other than bureaucracy. When you weigh it up, the argument comes down very much on the side of the amendments on this occasion and not on the side of bureaucracy.

This is primarily about delivering good-quality apprenticeships for young people and adults. We all know that one of the challenges is to change the public discourse about apprenticeships and vocational training, and we are going to have to work really hard if that is to happen. When I look back at the reforms in schools over the past two decades, one of the changes that enabled us to have a more effective public discourse and empower people to ask the right questions, both for members of their own family and in general, was the availability of data. I hear good-quality conversations now from parents, teachers and young people about education, and that is because they have the information to ask the questions and have the debate.

However, I do not think it is there with apprenticeships and technical education. We do not have it yet, and we have a responsibility, if this system is to work, to build up the data and language so that the public can have a proper conversation and monitor what is going on with apprenticeships. Certainly in the medium term, this amendment would help deliver that. It would put information in the public domain every year, and in time, if not immediately, that would lead to discussion and debate. That has to be good for raising the profile of this area of education as well as holding the institute to account for what it is delivering.

I accept that entirely, but also want to emphasise a different point. Has the Minister wondered whether this does not in some way reflect the annual HMCI report, which is laid before Parliament and on which there is always a public debate? It gets on the “Today” programme, bits of information get into the newspapers and the media, and it becomes part of the national conversation that we have about schools. So having this information in the public domain is the right thing to do for accountability. But it would also help with the cultural change that we have to bring about to have a public debate about this area of education. This is not unreasonable. I can see that in years to come—say, in five years’ time—we might want to review the minutiae and the details. I do not think we ought to be committed to this for ever and a day, but I cannot see that the value of starting the practice of having an annual report, monitoring progress and building up confidence and awareness, would be outweighed by any bureaucratic burden that it might place on organisations.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just said. As the House knows, I run the Good Schools Guide. We do what we can to spread information about apprenticeships, but that is extremely difficult because the amount of information available is not good. For universities, by comparison, there is one single source of information. Now, I do not wish the Government to hire UCAS to do apprenticeships, because UCAS is an extremely difficult organisation to deal with and does not let data out to anyone, but something like it which was a single point of information would really help schoolkids and schools because ordinary teachers, let alone career teachers, do not have time to learn their way around 150 different university apprenticeships, let alone all the others. They need a coherent source of information. There is a habit among employers of letting information out only in the two weeks when they want to hire apprentices, rather than all around the year when potential apprentices want to be looking. They are not adjusted to that kind of marketing yet; they are recruiting in penny numbers rather than the tens of thousands, as universities are. There are all sorts of reasons why we need more information and support.

If you want to know where children have gone on to from school, schools will give you—at least English schools will; Scottish schools are more tiresome—a long list of university courses that their students have got on to. Nowhere can you find those data for apprenticeships. You can get data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency so you can publish information from there if you want, but there is no equivalent available for apprenticeships. That makes the whole business of upping the status of apprenticeships, and of technical education generally, much harder than it needs to be. So while I hold no brief for the exact drafting of the two Labour amendments, I am very much with the spirit of them.

On the amendment that followed from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, there is scope for upping the prestige of the Institute for Apprenticeships in this way. It gives it that much more visibility in public, that much more right to comment and that much more right to be heard. At a time when there is going to be a lot of change, a lot of difficult decisions taken and a lot of need for what is going on to be in the public eye so that things that are not quite right get caught early and commented on early rather than being relegated to the pages of a few specialist magazines, an increase in prestige, as suggested in this amendment, is an excellent idea.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, we have not had very much information about what the annual statement from the Institute for Apprenticeships will be. As the institute is a quango, it will certainly produce an annual report—there is no question about that—and it is the usual practice of such reports to be debated in one way or another in the House. So we should accept that as a given, as it were.

As to the content of the report, I am encouraged by the fact that the quality of the directors will mean that it is not going to be a soft quango at all; it will be a very tough and well-informed one because they will be very aware of the fact that it is a great new departure in the education system to concentrate on apprentices, and they will want to ensure that the apprentice system that the country develops will be effective for both employers and students. So I expect the Institute for Apprenticeships to take an interest in nearly all the points mentioned in paragraph 1.

Whether that is needed in the Bill, I very much doubt. The best way to do it would probably be for the Secretary of State to formally write a letter to the chief executive of the institute when one is appointed, which I hope will be soon, indicating the range of information that the report should contain. That might be the best way out of it because the nature of the information will change over the years and you do not necessarily want to keep amending this part of the Bill. There are all sorts of other interesting things that the report should contain. I think the time has come for the Minister to make clearer what he thinks will be in the report. If he cannot do so today, perhaps he might be able to before Third Reading.

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[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green for submitting these amendments. I have added my name to Amendment 4. I do not think there is a great deal to add to what he has said, but some of this impacts on the arguments that I advanced on the previous group of amendments. It is about accessibility of information and careers advice on apprenticeships. It is also about the institute being seen as an open and accessible organisation. I think we all agree that we want it to meet its aims and to do so as successfully and quickly as possible. Asking it to provide information and to report to Parliament is not radical; it is about building the sort of confidence that I referred to on the previous group of amendments.

Monitoring how many small and medium-sized enterprises employ apprentices is also important because those employers will be key to the Government reaching their target of 3 million starts by 2020. Quite possibly this will be included in the list of categories mentioned by the Minister in his response to me on the last group of amendments, and perhaps he could say something about that in his reply. To some extent, SMEs have been the elephant in the room: they have not been referred to in our consideration of the Bill to anything like the extent they should have. They will play a very important part in apprenticeships—in small numbers, inevitably, and company by company—but overall they will make an important contribution.

I agree it is important that not just the number of apprenticeship starts but, as my noble friend Lord Young said, the number of employers taking on apprentices are listed. If those figures are not collected, how can the network being established by the institute be measured? The kind of information that I refer to will surely be collected, so I ask the Minister: why would the institute not make it publicly available and do so willingly?

I would like to add to what my noble friend Lord Young said by mentioning the apprentice contract and, to some extent, its status. He talked about complaints and the need for a helpline when apprentices need to pass on their concern about the quality of the apprenticeship being offered. There is no regulator in this sector and I ask the Minister whether the apprenticeship contract will be subject to the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The contract will be fully entered into by both parties, and that Act will play a part in the higher education sector as a result of the Bill before your Lordships’ House. A preliminary investigation led to universities being required for the first time to produce information on the cost of courses and so on, and that would be helpful. If the Minister cannot reply immediately, I shall be quite happy to receive a letter on the status of the apprentice contract and whether it will be subject to the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I would certainly like an apprentice who is having a hard time getting what they want or a proper education, particularly in an SME, to be able to communicate that, and unless there is an established route for them to do so, as described in the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, it will be very difficult to ask someone to invent one. There needs to be someone the apprentice can talk to first; otherwise, it will be just too difficult and we will never get to know the quality of the apprenticeship. Anything that became a regular reporting mechanism might well take up a lot of time but not produce any good. However, something should be in place so that, when things are really going wrong, the person at the wrong end of that can have a voice. It seems to me that that is worth including.

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[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

Unfortunately, I am unable to clarify that at the moment, but I will write to the noble Lord. I will also unfortunately have to write to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on his point about the Consumer Rights Act.

As a requirement of the Skills Funding Agency funding rules, the training provider must ensure that a commitment statement and the apprenticeship agreement are in place before funding is released, which implies that these things are happening—otherwise, funding would not be released—but I will confirm that. This is monitored by the SFA, and duplication by the institute is therefore not necessary. I hope that noble Lords will feel reassured enough on the basis of my explanation not to press these amendments.

[Lord Lucas]

Can my noble friend say whether the apprenticeship documents that an apprentice receives include the telephone number of the helpline?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

Again, I am unable to confirm that, but I will write to my noble friend. If not, I think perhaps it should.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, Amendment 6 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey. I will also speak to Amendment 28, which is in my name and supported by the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Watson of Invergowrie, and my noble friend Lord Storey.

I make no apology for bringing back Amendment 6. It is very simple. As we discussed in Committee, it would cost no money but would make a great difference. Craft and creative skills, personal services such as care or hairdressing, and professional skills such as business or accounting are not automatically seen as primarily technical. I accept that there has been a move away from the long-standing term “vocational” to cover non-academic qualifications and that the decision seems to have been taken that “technical” is the word of the moment, particularly now as we seem out of the blue to have T-levels—as the noble Lord, Lord Young explained. It would be interesting to know what consultation went on before the arrival on the scene of T-levels from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In order not to narrow the Bill to purely mechanical technical subjects, an explanatory clause would be a helpful addition and ensure that this legislation is seen to be inclusive of all work-based qualifications and across the range of courses offered in further education.

Arts subjects should be held in the same esteem as other courses. It is of great concern to hear that creativity and the arts are being squeezed out in schools. Between 2003 and 2013, there was a 50% drop in GCSE entries for design and technology, 23% for drama and 25% for other craft-related subjects. It stands to reason that this will have a knock-on effect on the take-up of further education courses in creative subjects. We would like to ensure through this amendment that there is no doubt that the attempts to improve technical education, as outlined in the Bill, apply equally across all courses.

Amendment 28 is for clarification. As we discussed in Committee and as the noble Lord, Lord Young, set out, we would like to clarify the transition process between these schemes. There is already a comprehensive list of approved technical education qualifications in the Ofqual regulated qualifications framework. We seek to clarify the relationship between that framework and the list in the Bill. It would certainly introduce complexity and confusion to have multiple qualification lists. Can the Minister clarify that the institute’s list will be a transfer from rather than in addition to the Ofqual list? If so, what systems will be set up to ensure that the transition and transfers are as straightforward as possible? Does the Minister envisage any major differences between these two lists? I look forward to his reply and beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I add my support to the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. If I remember rightly, in Committee the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen of Pimlico, asked whether the word “professional” might be added to “technical” in the Bill to provide a broader and more prestigious view of what was covered. I think “professional” has a lot of attractions to it in bridging the divide between academic and vocational qualifications. “Technical” gets some of the way but not all the way. I thought it was a good suggestion. The Minister said that he would take it away and think about it. I am sorry if I have missed the results of those deliberations in the letters that have been sent out. But if I have not missed them and we have not had them, could we have them now, please?

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

8: Clause 2, page 2, line 14, after “providers” insert “, or persons acting on behalf of a number of such providers,”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 9. These amendments are very simple. They pick up on my noble friend Lord Baker’s excellent amendment, which was accepted in Committee, to point out that it is not just the local FE college or other major provider that wants to get into schools. There are a lot of excellent organisations which need to get into schools. Women in Construction is one. In needs to get the message through that there are a lot of very good jobs for women in construction. There are similar efforts going on about women in engineering and women in computing. They are not education providers. They have been funded by education providers and employers to produce a flow of students to education providers in general. Those organisations need to get into schools just as much as individual providers, if not more, because in many cases they have a level of prestige and glamour which the local FE college lacks. I beg to move.

[Lord Storey]

Amendment 17 is in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lady Garden. I moved a similar amendment in Committee, when I talked about “good” or “outstanding” FE colleges being awarded either status only if their careers education was of a high standard. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, spoke in a sort of roundabout way about the importance of careers education, but was concerned about straitjacketing through the use of “outstanding” and “good”. Having reflected on what she said, I have come back with a slightly changed amendment, which highlights the importance of careers education in further education and says that when Ofsted carries out inspections, it is important that the careers guidance in those establishments be of a high calibre.

One of the most important things that we need to do for young people is to provide that guidance and knowledge about careers. Many of us do it with our own children: if careers advice is not available, we have networks of people who can talk to our children and perhaps provide opportunities for them to do work experience. But many children and young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, do not get that network of support, and it must be down to the education system to provide that. Careers education should start in primary school. I remember that at my own school we had a careers session, where people from different jobs and workplaces would come into the school. There would be a carousel approach, and children could listen to them. That should go through to secondary schools, so I was delighted that the Government accepted the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, on university technical colleges being able to come into schools. They will be able to go into schools and tell young people about the different opportunities. We do not want a straitjacketing approach but one which lets young people see all the different possibilities. We have talked about this for a long time and have heard all sorts of promises about what will happen down the road. The situation is getting slightly better, but surely, if we are going to do one thing, the most important thing we can do for young people is to get careers education right.

I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Young, said on Amendment 4. Careers education is not just about careers advice and guidance, as important as those are, but about preparation for a career. If a young person has a career opportunity, I would have hoped that the educational establishment would prepare them for that, whether through techniques for interviews, filling out an application or preparing a CV—all those things come together in good careers advice. I hope the Government will listen to this, as I am sure they will, and that we can agree that careers advice should be part of the establishment of good FE providers.

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[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for tabling the amendments, which relate to careers. I have to say I am still struggling with the concept of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, being the meat in anyone’s sandwich. He is a pretty tough piece of meat, based on my experience of sitting opposite him at the Dispatch Box. That is meant as a compliment, actually.

On Amendment 8, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas, Clause 2 requires schools to ensure that there is an opportunity for a range of education and training providers to talk directly to pupils about the technical education qualifications and apprenticeships that they offer. The amendment is intended to ensure that such access is extended to people who represent groups of providers, such as women in construction or manufacturing. I remember attending an event held for women in manufacturing in your Lordships’ House a few years ago. I agree that we need a degree of flexibility so that pupils hear from the person best placed to inform them about the opportunities on offer. I recognise that in some cases that may not be the provider itself but perhaps it could be an ambassador, an employer or a member of a trade association or representative body, speaking on behalf of a number of small providers.

We will publish statutory guidance that will set out more detail and make it clear that we do not wish to impose unnecessary constraints. We are placing the onus on the school to develop their own arrangements for provider access, including agreeing with providers who will attend to talk to pupils. Clause 2, both as drafted and as we intend to clarify in underpinning statutory guidance, already provides for persons acting on behalf of a number of providers to access pupils. To get really technical and legal for a moment, I queried this in terms of statutory interpretation. The legal authority for our decision to resist the amendments is found on page 1019 of Bennion on Statutory Interpretation:

“Where an enactment refers to a person it is usually taken as intended to include that person’s agent authorised either expressly or by implication”.


The earliest legal authority on this is R v Symington (1895) 4BCR 323. It follows that the words “on behalf of” in the statute would not be needed to allow a person to act on behalf of providers.

Turning to the very good point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, regarding the amendment from my noble friend Lord Baker, it is certainly clear to me, and my officials have confirmed this, that the obligation on the school is to ensure that there is an opportunity for a range of education and training providers to access pupils, that they must prepare a policy statement and that that statement must include, for example, grounds for granting and refusing requests for access. Obviously it must be at the discretion of the head; if he feels that the people coming along are, frankly, not of quality and are not going to give their pupils the right advice, then it must be within the head’s remit to refuse access, provided that he is providing a range of education and training providers and has some other alternative that is better.

Amendment 9 is also in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. It is intended to ensure that the policy statement produced by every school will set out the circumstances in which both providers and persons acting on their behalf will be given access to pupils. The current provisions already allow for such persons to talk to pupils. As I said, we will publish statutory guidance which makes this degree of flexibility explicitly clear: the onus is on schools to liaise with providers to agree who is best placed to talk to them.

Turning to Amendment 17, which deals in more detail with Ofsted and careers advice, careers advice is a vital part of the role that every school and college must play in preparing students for the workplace. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that careers advice should start in primary school. Primary Futures does excellent work in this regard. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, that the Careers & Enterprise Company, in which we are investing considerable money—£90 million—has made an excellent start.

However, the quality of the careers offer is considered carefully by Ofsted when conducting standard inspections of FE colleges. Therefore, the amendment is unnecessary. Matters relating to careers provision feature in all four graded judgements made by Ofsted inspectors. First, in judging leadership and management, inspectors take account of the extent to which learners receive thorough and impartial careers guidance to enable them to make informed choices about their current learning and future career plans. Secondly, in judging the quality of teaching, learning and assessment, inspectors consider how far learners are supported to develop their employability skills, including appropriate attitudes and behaviour for work. Thirdly, in judging students’ personal development, behaviour and welfare, inspectors consider how learners benefit from purposeful work-related learning, including external work experience. Finally, in judging outcomes, inspectors consider information about students’ destinations and the acquisition of the qualifications, skills and knowledge that will help them to progress.

Ofsted also evaluates the education and training provision offered by the college, including 16 to 19 study programmes, apprenticeships and traineeships. In making these judgments, inspectors consider the extent to which each type of provision offers tailored careers advice and work experience opportunities to students and develops their employability skills. Noble Lords made some good points about Ofsted’s approach to that, and I will certainly discuss that further with Ofsted shortly. However, I hope that what I have said about its obligation framework reassures my noble friend that colleges are held to account properly for the quality of their careers provision and that he will be able to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for his short CPD session, which I hope I shall manage to remember and will rehearse later in Hansard. Given that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

22: Schedule 1, page 26, line 4, at end insert—
“( ) The group of persons that prepared a standard must have considered, including within the standard, a qualification widely recognised by employers for that occupation or for an aspect of it.”

[Lord Lucas]

There has been a problem with apprenticeships, at least historically, where people have wanted to include qualifications within them. I would be very grateful if my noble friend would make it clear that this has now passed and that the idea of including qualifications within apprenticeship qualifications, or indeed within qualifications at FE colleges, is now fully accepted. Generally, this is to the advantage of the learner. If I am doing a qualification within one of the 15 proposed Sainsbury routes, and that apprenticeship involves getting to know cybersecurity, I do not want to have a haberdasher’s qualification in cybersecurity: I want to have something which will be recognised in every single industry which might require that skill. The same applies to accountancy, marketing and other skills which are common across the routes, where these are things that you might wish an apprentice to learn in the course of their apprenticeship, or have experience of. It also applies particularly to technical qualifications in IT, where you would expect an apprentice to follow one or more international qualifications produced by the likes of Microsoft because that is what the industry as a whole demands and that is what produces a young person who can move from job to job because they have the qualifications that are recognised in their next job and not just those which are appropriate for the particular patch where they did their apprenticeship.

It is also important in this context that the specifications for apprenticeship should recognise that there are alternative qualifications in some circumstances. You may want your young person to be familiar with computer networking but there are two, maybe three, top-quality international qualifications in computer networking. Which one do you want to use? It will be the one that works with your business. However, the people in charge of the apprenticeship will recognise that these are equivalent and that either one can count and fit in place. I think this has been accepted now. There seems to be some residual difficulty reported to me. However, I would be very grateful for my noble friend’s assurance that the concept of embedding qualifications in apprenticeships or in further education courses is now fully accepted. I beg to move.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I support my noble friend’s amendment. I suspect that individual apprentices will work on the basis that he mentioned as certain qualifications in certain industries are not in the regular run of FE colleges, or universities for that matter, but have been accepted by the industry as the accepted standard. My noble friend mentioned Microsoft. Cisco does this as well. It is particularly the case in the whole area of computing, where various companies have established qualifications which have become the standard. In fact, the Cisco qualification for schools is more demanding than GCSE computing, and many people work towards that. We have to make sure that these qualifications do not disappear when the Institute for Apprenticeships clears out a lot of valueless qualifications. These are not valueless, particularly the international ones. Given that the digital revolution is happening so suddenly, a huge variety of examinations and qualifications in artificial intelligence may come our way. Each area will want to protect its own interest. I would hope that the Institute for Apprenticeships would take this message on board. I do not know whether a statutory measure is required.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lucas for this amendment, the effect of which would be to require each group of persons who develop a standard to consider whether an existing qualification ought to be included within it. Occupational standards will form the basis of both apprenticeships and technical education qualifications, and need to be suitable for each of them. The standard should include the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to form the basis of either an apprenticeship or a technical education qualification. Including existing qualifications in addition to the knowledge, skills and behaviours would cause complications when technical education qualifications are being developed using the standard.

One of the core principles of the apprenticeship reforms is to move away from qualifications. Under the framework model, apprentices collect a number of small, often low-quality, qualifications throughout their apprenticeship which often do not give employers much reassurance about apprentices’ ability to do the job. By moving to a single end-point assessment, the apprentice will be tested on the knowledge, skills and behaviours set out in the standard and their occupational competence to do the whole job, not just a small section of it.

This amendment does not require the inclusion of qualifications in standards but it is moving the approach back towards the system that we are moving away from. Although it is no doubt something that the awarding bodies would welcome, it could actively encourage employer groups to include qualifications where they may otherwise not have done so. That is likely to be contrary to the Government’s strategic guidance for the institute. However, I can reassure my noble friend and the House that in occupations where there is a qualification that is needed for an apprenticeship—for example, to achieve a professional status—they will not need to be prompted by this Bill to consider its inclusion in the standard, which is permissible as long as they meet set criteria for an exception. This is in line with the employer-led nature of the reforms. We therefore believe that this kind of direction is not needed in such a system. I hope that my noble friend will feel reassured enough on the basis of my explanation to withdraw this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am mostly comforted by my noble friend’s reference to employer-led matters. If that indicates that if employers want a qualification and fight hard enough they will get it, that seems to me satisfactory. Therefore, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 22 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I will also speak to Amendments 26 and 29 to 33, which are in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lord Storey.

This series of amendments is intended to limit the institute’s ability to acquire wholesale the intellectual property relating to materials developed by awarding bodies. We expressed serious concerns about this in Committee. This is a significant proposal, which was not canvassed in the skills plan. As drafted, it is unclear whether awarding organisations retain any copyright to potentially key documents relating to a qualification once ownership transfers to the IATE. It is further proposed in paragraph 23 of Schedule 1, proposed new Section A2IA—“Transfer of copyright relating to technical education qualifications”—that:

“The Institute may assign … or grant a licence to another person”,


in the copyright transferred to the institute. These are draconian proposals.

The arguments we have been offered include that the Government—that is, the taxpayer—will have paid the awarding body to develop the materials and are therefore entitled to ownership. Publishers often give advances to authors, but they do not thereafter claim copyright. The payment is for the skills and expertise; the contents should remain the property of the author organisation. Another reason given was that it would provide continuity. If awarding body A loses a contract to awarding body B, there could be a seamless transfer. This begs a few questions. If awarding body B has won the contract, how could it do so without providing its own materials, and what self-respecting awarding body would opt to take over a competitor’s materials? But what if awarding body A had gone bust? I find it sad and inexplicable that so much of the Bill presupposes that those involved with further and technical education are overly liable to go into insolvency. It is a pretty robust sector. Might it have gone into insolvency because the Government have taken over all its materials, one wonders? In any case, in the unlikely event that a key awarding body went into liquidation, I feel sure that measures could be taken to retrieve any materials which had not already been handed over lock, stock and barrel to the Government.

We have heard from City & Guilds and other awarding bodies that the provisions in the Bill on the ownership of intellectual property and qualifications are unclear. As many awarding organisations operate outside England and export their current qualifications overseas, this lack of clarity will have an impact on the development of qualifications. We note, as we did in Committee, that in both general academic studies and higher-level studies the Government do not attempt to own the copyright qualifications. We caution that this approach could have a disproportionate impact on the technical qualifications market in the UK.

We propose that institute-owned copyright is more appropriately applied at the level of national standards, allowing awarding organisations to retain their copyright in their own materials. The power of the institute is so uncertain that it makes it impossible to ascertain the value of investing in developing qualifications going forward. Further, it should be noted that there is no mention in the Sainsbury report, which was the progenitor of the skills plan, or in the skills plan, of the handing over of copyright to the institute in documents related to qualifications.

As to single awarding organisations, what evidence is there that the current awarding arrangement has led to distortions of the vocational market? As we pointed out in Committee, there is a certain inconsistency in government policy, which is going all out for more competition in universities—raising considerable concerns in this House—with a move to a monopolistic model for vocational awarding. The current mixed-market model may not be perfect but it supports and encourages investment and innovation, as well as giving choice and safeguarding learner interests in the event of any awarding organisation failure. A similar model was proposed for GCSE and English baccalaureate subjects, and was abandoned following robust evidence from the Education Select Committee and Ofqual. Why should these qualifications be treated differently? If a single-supplier franchising approach was deemed too high-risk for the general qualifications market, why should it be deemed suitable for technical qualifications? I wonder whether these restrictions might be connected with the fact that those in government—whether in Westminster or Whitehall—will predominantly have achieved their own success through academic routes. How many people in the DfE have followed an apprenticeship or a work-based route and understand first-hand just how relevant and rigorous those programmes are? The Civil Service used to have graduate and direct-entry routes, both of which could lead to the highest levels. These days, most will be graduates. It is therefore all the more important that those in government listen to the practitioners and heed their advice. I hope the Minister will be open to these important amendments, and I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I completely support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I do not think that any Peer who has been involved in the Bill wishes it anything other than complete success. We are all behind the objectives and the methodology which is set out in the Sainsbury report and what has been built upon that. We want to ensure in the passage of the Bill that what we are producing will work well.

In the process of putting the Bill together, certain ideas have been developed which will not weather exposure to practice. When it comes to sitting down with industries, awarding bodies and others, the ideas that are being touted as the way things will be under the Bill will not be the things that work out. I want to make sure that the Bill has sufficient flexibility built into it so that, if things need to take a different turn to make this project succeed, they will be able to, and we will not find ourselves hobbled by primary legislation.

I have one separate amendment in this group that is aimed at the question of multiple qualifications within one particular sub-route—I do not yet know what they will be called; in the picture supplied to us they look like the fingers of a hand, although I do not think they will be called fingers. To restrict yourself to one single awarding organisation creates a monopoly in the short term, and in the long term it reinforces it. If you take one particular skill set within the universe covered by the Bill, and you say, “Only this awarding organisation can create qualifications for this for the next seven years”, what other awarding organisation will maintain the ability to compete? None of them will. Why should they? There is no business for seven years and they cannot afford to do it. It is all based on a collection of people, and anyway it is not something that stays still; it continuously evolves. There is no way that they will remain in a position to compete, so when you come up to the renewal of this single licence, there will be only one competitor.

--- Later in debate ---

I hope that I have explained that the reforms to the skills system will succeed only if the institute retains copyright of relevant course documents. In making such significant changes to technical education, it is incumbent on us all to make sure that we prioritise the needs of employers and of students. There is, however, a great deal of flexibility within the Bill for the institute to make arrangements as it sees fit, and I firmly believe that we should trust it to make decisions that are for the good of the skills system. I therefore hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, will be sufficiently reassured not to press their amendments.

[Lord Lucas]

I am grateful for what my noble friend said on my amendments, but to turn to the main group, where she has adumbrated some new ideas in very few words, might we have a meeting between Report and Third Reading so that we can better understand the details of what is proposed?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for her full reply on all this, but I am left as confused as at the start. There is this curious thing that the institute can grant a licence back to the awarding body that actually created the materials in the first place or can give them to multiple awarding organisations. I find that a curious concept given that awarding organisations have to have a commercial structure and to make ends meet, and the materials with which they trade are very often their assessment materials. The Minister has made great play of the fact that there is flexibility in the Bill. But the trouble is that, by the time the Bill goes through with these measures enshrined that copyright is transferred to the institute, there is not much flexibility there if copyright is once lost to the institute.

There were a number of other things that I will read in detail in the Minister’s reply. I will not go through the different points that I have scribbled down because they merit a lot of thought. I also pick up the request made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that we will need some serious conversations about this because it will come back at Third Reading for a vote unless we can get some clearer reassurance.

Immigration Skills Charge Regulations 2017

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome these regulations. They are well targeted, have a good concept, good execution, with a sensible set of exemptions and remission for small businesses. I am disappointed that they do not extend to hospitality and construction, both areas where we have a substantial tendency for employers to bring in people from overseas rather than concentrate on training our own people. However, I entirely understand, given that most of that migration is from the EU, why we do not wish to complicate our Brexit negotiations by trying this on the continent just yet. However, when you talk to hospitality employers, they say, “We have to employ these overseas people because the Brits just don’t know how to treat customers”. I say let us bring back the British Airways charm school, which is what I grew up with. We can do this; we just need to train people properly. I do not think that we should accept the excuses of our hospitality industry. We should apply this principle to it to get it to bring our own people up to speed.

However, within the industries this measure is aimed at, it is an excellent idea. It is largely, I think, aimed in practice at IT and industries round that. I would be very grateful if the Minister or his colleagues would agree to meet me and representatives of the tech industry to discuss how to craft training which will meet the needs of employers who are hit by this levy so that the incentive which is provided by it can be directed at the provision of training which will ensure that the objectives of the levy are realised.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

We are all being so polite. Perhaps we have learned from the charm school with which the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, grew up. We, of course, support investment in skills and training but it is appropriate to put these proposals in the context of the very tight brief which the MAC, as always, was given. It was required to advise on,

“significantly reducing the level of economic migration from outside the EU”,

taking into account the impact on the economy, including on productivity and competitiveness, and was asked to consider five issues, of which a skills levy was one. As the Minister said, at the time of the review the Government had already signalled an intent to introduce the charge. It is fair to acknowledge the MAC endorsement of the proposal. It said in its review:

“We consider that the imposition of an ISC will serve to incentivise employers to reduce their reliance on employing migrant workers and to invest in training and upskilling UK workers”.


But I also observe that, certainly in the health sector, that gives the term “incentivise” a rather new meaning. The Explanatory Memorandum refers to a collapse in training. Will the Minister tell the Committee whether the Government have analysed why that has been the case?

The letter from the Minister, Robert Halfon, to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee confirms that this is a tax. We know that the Treasury hates hypothecation, but given its rationale it seems to us that those who are paying it must be able to see how it is used and, more than that, be involved in decisions about the application of the funds, because they know what normally works best in their own sectors. There must be a lot of sector-specific experience which should be tapped, as well as this being in the interest of transparency.

The Institute of Directors recognised that “penalising employers” who need to look to the “global talent pool” is,

“not the answer to gaining more home-grown talent”.

To balance that, PwC said:

“The levy will not impact the way that companies recruit as they require the skills they require”.


It raised the spectre of, in the long term,

“parts of businesses moving overseas, if mounting costs become prohibitive and companies risk damaging their brands by providing substandard products or services”.

I recall that during the passage of the Bill an argument used against this, partly in the higher education sector, was that some industries will pay the charge but would not see any benefits because their sectors are not apprenticeship-appropriate. That applied in particular to the health sector. I will leave it to my noble friend Lady Walmsley to deal in detail with the health sector. I know that I will support everything that she says.

During the passage of the Bill we also expressed concern about the costs of the bureaucracy of this exercise. Given the investment that the sectors in question already make in training, there seemed to be a danger of a charge being levied, having administration costs deducted and the balance then returned to them. I have been assured that the deduction will be small because the Home Office visa system will be used, but there will be a deduction. We can add to that the unquantified cost of the loading on to the Home Office, which is overloaded. It probably feels that the light at the end of the tunnel is that ever-present oncoming train.

The MAC also said that,

“it is impossible to conclude, ex ante, whether the benefit arising to employers … will outweigh the costs imposed on Tier 2 sponsors”,

because the Government have not yet determined how the revenue will be reinvested. That is clearly a significant point. It is clear that the health sector has come to a conclusion, and it is not the positive conclusion that the Government want to see. Robert Halfon, in his letter to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, said:

“The cost to the healthcare sector and to the NHS in particular has not been estimated”.


That is quite an astonishing statement.

One other area is that of intercompany transfers. The Minister has referred to the exemption in the regulations, but the exemption is limited to trainees. Why is it so limited? Is it simply because they are trainees? That fits in with the thrust of the proposals. I ask that question and make the implied point because we need to do all that we can to attract, retain and not deter international companies basing themselves in the UK. I do not think that I need to fill in the gaps between the lines there.

There are steps that the Government can take after taking through these regulations, particularly by way of exemptions and by working with different sectors, which would make them more palatable to those who find them unpalatable, and more effective, and might help to avoid unintended consequences, as these charges are clearly going to be significant for some sectors.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 69 on the National Student Survey and Amendment 67 on postponing by a year the ability of TEF rankings to affect the fees universities can charge. Noble Lords will be relieved to hear that I will not repeat the longish and geekish speech I made in Committee on the National Student Survey. I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Bew—a man whose expertise in this field no one in the House will doubt—putting the main arguments forward. However, the House ought to be updated on two recent developments that bear on the validity of the NSS.

First, there is the letter of 23 February from Ed Humpherson, the director-general for regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, to the DfE, responding to concerns raised with that authority on the NSS. It is a letter that needs a little reading between the lines, but in summary it refers approvingly to what Ministers have done to downgrade the NSS in the TEF. I will come back to that in a minute. It tells the department it must address the recommendations in the ONS report of June 2016 on the NSS and of the Royal Statistical Society in July 2016. Why do I draw attention to those two documents? They are the fundamental and official documents on which the critics of the NSS rest their case. They also take reading between the lines, but when this is done they are excoriating critiques.

Secondly, there is the question of benchmarking. Those reports and everyone who has addressed this subject agree that you cannot use the TEF for direct comparison between institutions. You simply cannot use it to compare the Royal College of Music and Trinity Laban—the two conservatoires that my noble friend Lord Winston and I have the honour of chairing—with Kingston University or any other I could mention. Instead, we are supposed to use benchmarking, which means comparing similar institutions.

Benchmarking raises its own set of statistical questions, which I will spare the House, so the Government decided that they needed an independent report on benchmarking and its statistical difficulties. What does that report say? It says nothing. Why does it say nothing? It is because it does not exist. Why does it not exist? It is because the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which admits this perfectly freely, has failed to commission it. It has been very difficult to get anyone to take it on. The pillar that bears the NSS in the TEF may be of solid oak, or it may be completely rotten. Without that study we have no idea.

The amendment I am speaking to calls for an inquiry into the NSS. I am delighted by all the concessions that the Government have made on the NSS in the TEF—although I should not call them “concessions”; they have given way to reason on these subjects—including its official downgrading to the least important metric, the admission of its shortcomings for small institutions, the one-year postponement of the subject TEF and the lessons-learned exercise. All those are sensible and welcome concessions from the Government. However, they mandate one further concession. It would be a self-inflicted blunder by the Government now to go ahead and let the TEF stop some universities’ raising fees on the original timetable until and unless that lessons-learned exercise has been completed and, indeed, the study that was supposed to have been commissioned by the Higher Education Statistics Agency has been commissioned.

We have been jumping in the dark into a pit whose depth we do not know. I want, and most noble Lords want, the TEF to work, but a rushed TEF, littered with statistical errors, will not work. If Ministers want the TEF to last—they do, and I do—they need a measured timetable for its introduction. They need to give it time to bed down. Otherwise, the flaws that I and others have been pointing to in this debate will turn from glints in the eyes of the geeks to real-world inadequacies and perhaps in some cases will even threaten the existence of the institutions that lose out as a result of those flaws. That would undermine the legitimacy of the whole scheme.

I beg the Minister, who has made so much progress with this Bill, not to concede, at the last minute, an own goal which may mean that what could have been a reasonable victory turns into a dreadful loss.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 68 in this group. I support very much what my noble friend the Duke of Wellington has said. I think he has an elegant approach in his amendment. Mine is different but we have the same concern. I am sure there are exceptions, but by and large this House wants the TEF to succeed. We want students to have more and better information on the quality and style of teaching than they have at the moment. We want universities and other higher education institutions to be motivated to improve the quality of their teaching.

We have some severe worries about the present quality of information, but let us set out and see what we can do over the next few years to improve it. After all, universities are supposed to be good at that sort of thing and, as we said, we have Chris Husbands in charge of the process. That gives me a good deal of hope and confidence. However, we cannot, on the basis of an unreformed, much criticised, hardly understood set of measures, leap into giving universities gold, silver and bronze metrics. If we give a university a bronze measure, the likelihood is that it will be struck off the list in those countries where students are centrally funded, such as the Gulf states. We will cause severe problems to students in countries where face is important, such as those in the Far East, who will have to say to their friends, “I am going to a bronze-rated university”. Bronze will be seen as failing because these universities will be marked out as the bottom 20%.

This is just not necessary. We have succeeded, in our research rankings, in producing a measure of sufficient detail and sophistication for people to read it in detail. It produces quite marked differences between institutions, but nobody reads it as a mark of a failing institution. It is information, not ranking, which is why I come back to my noble friend’s amendment as being a useful way of approaching this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

But is it not true that in the Government’s proposed system 20% of universities will always be in the bottom ranking? This is not a situation where the system can improve performance; it is a system that will always punish 20% of universities.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I think that my noble friend is making an assumption that 20% represents bronze. The gold, silver and bronze system is a good thing and we should look at it positively. For example, if a new provider opens its doors, as it were, after three years and is already at the bronze level, with the opportunity to go up to silver and gold, surely that has to be a positive thing, and it is also something that students from here and abroad can look at.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell]

I wish to support the amendment for its reference to,

“including those with experience of part-time, adult and distance learning”.

I support it in the light of the changing demographics, which are probably more extreme than people realise in this country. We can now expect anyone born today to have a very high chance of living to be 100, and certainly to 90. The fall-out of this on the economy and on how society is organised will be profound, and we need to be ready for it. Against that background, I suggest that part-time education, with opportunities to restructure your life and have secondary, portfolio careers—possibly several, within the century of a lifetime—is really important, and should be taken on board throughout this Bill, which serves very much the existing demographic.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I talked about this general area in Committee, but I have tabled Amendment 97 because since then I have received a fundraising letter from the development office at Oxford, which included the words: “All the evidence points to the provision of bursaries and scholarships being one of the most effective and sustainable investments we can make”. This is an outright lie. Oxford knows, as will anyone who has investigated the subject, that as far as we know bursaries and scholarships have zero effect on improving the lives of students, and OFFA will confirm this. There are many more effective ways, including a wonderful summer school run by Oxford which has demonstrably very strong effects.

I wrote back, protesting this departure from the truth and Oxford wrote back to me to confess, without admitting that it had been lying. It said that at Oxford there were no differences in retention or attainment for bursary holders, compared with those for higher-income groups. It went on to say that there were possibly some effects but that, “This hypothesis cannot be rigorously tested without creating control groups which, as OFFA recognises, would be unethical”. So Oxford is denying not only truth but also randomised controlled trials as a means of establishing the truth. This is quite astonishing. Is the development office run on entirely different ethical grounds from the rest of the university? I have been corresponding with the professor in charge, but there does not seem to be any recognition that truth or science come into the mission which Oxford should be following.

I have a general concern about all that is happening under the access schemes. I have seen several examples of universities applying for money to support what they are doing where there has not been adequate research or evaluation. At the end of the day, the main flood of money into this scheme comes from students: it is students who are funding this. Universities ought to owe them an absolute duty to be doing the very best they can to make good use of this money. At the moment, they do not collaborate or evaluate in the way that they should, and I would like the Office for Students to have the power to change that.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, and supported by my noble friend Lady Bakewell, whose salient arguments I endorse but will not repeat.

I turn to Amendment 87 in my name. At Second Reading, I mentioned how important it is to ensure that the Director of Fair Access and Participation has the independence and autonomy required to do the job effectively. Although various interventions have helped to improve the proportion of university entrants from disadvantaged groups, the gap is still far too great between them and their more advantaged peers. Eighteen year-olds from the most advantaged areas are more than two and a half times more likely to enter higher education than those from poor neighbourhoods. Put another way, fewer than one in five young people from lower income backgrounds go to university, compared with three in five from the most advantaged areas. Recent figures show that around 20% of people from low-income groups go to university, compared with 47% of all people aged between 17 and 30.

I appreciate that the Government have pledged to increase the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and are determined to improve social mobility. I do not just appreciate it; I congratulate the Government on taking this position. I know that the Minister for Higher Education is aware and is concerned about the fact that there is also a very uneven distribution of students from poor families across different universities. The most socially privileged students are nearly seven times more likely to go to universities with high entry requirements. Put another way, only 3% of disadvantaged young people go to the more selective one-third of universities, compared with 21% of those from the richest neighbourhoods. The gap is even higher in the 13 most selective universities. That is enough statistics. They mean that people from lower-income backgrounds are seriously underrepresented in the more selective universities which have the most prestige and provide the easiest routes into high-status and highly paid jobs. As long as this goes on, attempts to increase social mobility will be jeopardised.

The role of the Director of Fair Access, therefore, needs to be given as much strength as possible to achieve the changes needed. The director will be helped by new duties to publish applications, offers and acceptance and progression rates, broken down by ethnicity, disadvantage and gender. Greater transparency, leading to more information about the performance of HEIs, will be a great help, but alone it is not enough.

I can see the business case for incorporating the Office for Fair Access into what is currently called the new Office for Students—although we hope that name might change. It makes sense on efficiency grounds, but it diminishes the independence of the Director of Fair Access. In future, he or she will have to report through the head of the Office for Students, a body that universities will fund and which may therefore be less inclined to challenge HEIs generally, and powerful individual universities in particular, on issues of access. There is a risk then that he or she may be overruled on important issues relating to access. I understand that the Sutton Trust has had some assurances that this is not the intention. To be sure that this does not occur, however, a simple safeguard could be introduced by amending the Bill to require the Director of Fair Access and Participation to report annually to Parliament on the performance of the Office for Students. This would strengthen the role, maintaining both independence and accountability, so I hope the Minister, when he replies, will accept the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, as my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern has just implied, in performing its functions clearly the OfS should not just have regard to current and known needs as they may now be identified. It should also have regard to such needs as may come to light later on. By referring to the latter as “emerging needs” my noble and learned friend has produced a useful amendment, which I hope will be adopted.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Younger on the amendments that he has put his name to. They represent a great step forward and a real example of how a Government can listen and react constructively. I am grateful to him for his Amendment 6, which covers some areas that I referred to.

Perhaps I may question my noble friend on proposed new subsection (7)(c) in Amendment 11. I am puzzled as to why the “freedom” in this subsection is restricted to only these activities. In particular, there are occasions when the received wisdom within universities is rather different to that outside universities. I am not clear which this wording refers to, nor why there should not be a freedom to advocate popular opinions. I know that this has been a matter of controversy within universities from time to time, when people are referred to as popularisers of science in a derogatory way. Again, that should not result in discrimination or losing jobs and privileges. I will also refer to my two amendments in this group, which are linked with the Government’s Amendment 6.

--- Later in debate ---

I return to the lead amendment in this group, on institutional autonomy. Together with the related amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, it represents the most robust protection for institutional autonomy that has ever existed in our modern higher education system, and I am delighted to support its inclusion in the Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, if he cannot reply now, will he reply by letter to the question I asked on Amendment 11?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

Yes, I certainly pledge to do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, I shall speak first to the amendments on the transparency condition, then turn to those regarding student transfer. I have reflected on the arguments put forward in Committee, and we are clear that the transparency duty must remain focused on equality of opportunity through widening participation. I noted in Committee that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and my noble friend Lord Lucas raised an important point on including attainment in the existing requirements to provide application, offer, acceptance and completion data. The evidence shows that there is more to do to close the attainment gap, which is particularly pronounced for certain groups of BME students.

We agree with noble Lords that attainment is an area that should be addressed and I thank them for their attention on this matter. That is why our Amendment 14 will add degree attainment at the end of the undergraduate’s course to the existing information required under the transparency condition. This will enable us to look across the whole student lifecycle, from application to graduation. I will now ask my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, to speak to their amendments, and I will then respond.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 15 and 17. Amendment 15 would give the Secretary of State a general power to add requirements. My principal concern with this bit of the Bill is that we have not really understood how much information UCAS has which it has not let out for the benefit of students and how many ways there are in which that information might be used to improve the quality of student decision-making. We will find this out, as time goes on, and I would like the Government to have the ability to respond to it. I am grateful for the changes which the Government have made in the Bill, particularly those to research using UCAS information, and we will certainly make some progress in this direction. However, I would be delighted if the Government felt able to give themselves the additional freedoms contained in Amendment 15.

Turning to Amendment 17, I want to be sure that all this information, which is being published by universities and made publishable by the Office for Students, actually reaches students who are in the process of making a decision. In the monopoly system in which we live, this effectively means that it must be provided—and easily accessed—through the UCAS system. Without this amendment, I cannot see where the Bill gives the OfS or any other part of Government the ability to direct that this information should reach students when they need it, rather than just being published and stuck away in some obscure place on universities’ websites, as is a lot of interesting information such as, in some cases, what the courses actually teach. There is a long practice of not making vital information easy to find. I would like the Government to have the ability to make sure that it was there when students ought to have it.

[The Earl of Dundee]

My Lords, as has been indicated, Clause 10 identifies and prescribes certain mandatory transparency conditions. However, in Amendment 15, my noble friend Lord Lucas manages to propose a wider and more useful scope. The new words drafted by his amendment provide greater flexibility and enable the Secretary of State to assist better and more thorough transparency. I hope the amendment will be accepted.