Higher Education

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for securing this debate and congratulate him on introducing it with such wisdom and insight.

We have been talking about universities; they are funny institutions that keep evolving over time. They began with Aristotle’s and Plato’s academies; in the Middle Ages we had the theology-based institutions; in the 19th century, with the rise of capitalism, they underwent further changes and now, under the impact of modern technology, they are undergoing even further changes, with the result that it becomes rather difficult to talk about “the university”. I am fairly confident that the university will continue to respond to contemporary technological changes, and one of the things I expect it to do over time—in fact, it is already doing it—is to make sure that lectures, for example, which it has concentrated on delivering, are taken over by one or two places in the world and the contents are then broadcast to other parts of the world. So I do not have to go to Harvard to listen to lectures on philosophy from a professor there; I can listen to them on tape in my own study, or my fellow students can listen to them in the University of Bombay or Delhi. In which case, why do you need a lecturer in the university? Why do you want a person to be engaged in lecturing, taking up time that could be freed up for other activities? This means that universities 10 years from now will be very different institutions.

However different the institutions are, there will be some roles they will have to continue to play and cannot avoid playing—in fact, more so than before. We have been talking about universities’ contribution to the economy. That is only one small role that they play. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, pointed out, they are also custodians of civilisation. University is a place where people think about the world around them and comment on the values that inspire people and the way in which their society is declining, which they cry out against. Universities are unique places where individuals are paid to withdraw themselves from the world around them and comment on that world.

So universities play multiple roles, one of which is to become centres of international excellence. International students come to our universities because our universities were born 500 years ago and have developed in a manner suited to the modern age, which has not happened in India or China, or elsewhere—their universities are growing slowly and are not fully developed. In some cases, they are rather poor and corrupt, hence their students come to us. Rather than resenting their presence and talking about them in a very dismissive way, we should welcome them.

This obviously raises problems, because the whole world wants to come to our universities—not because we are a great people but because we had the historical opportunity to start much earlier than them. Given this, what do we do? Naturally, we want to be able to open our doors to them, but, at the same time, we cannot throw them open completely, because what happens to our people? Given the asymmetry between the two different streams of students coming in, we need to find ways of coping with it. There are various ways and that is what we should concentrate on, not lambasting international students who are paying enormous sums of money to come here. Rather, we should talk about reserving a minimum number of places for our own students, or other ways in which this can be done. This is what is being done in France, Germany and the United States.

The other point I want to make, which I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, wanted us to explore, is about levelling up, which I think has been ignored. Levelling up is a concept which has become quite famous since 2019, but I am not very comfortable with levelling up. It is like meritocracy: you pick up people and bring them up to a certain level, and that is what you are supposed to do, but who fixes what level they should be brought up to? If you can level up, you can also level down, and so students become objects of manipulation.

I suggest instead that we should create a system where students are able to realise their full potential and do whatever they want to do, be that through a university degree, acquiring higher skills in a polytechnic, or through other ways. I therefore suggest that we continue to talk about our students in a very respectful way, making sure that they leave university as well-rounded citizens.

Schools: Financial Education

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, on securing this debate and introducing it so well.

In two minutes I can do no more than raise three important points about financial education. In a survey, over two-thirds of secondary school teachers did not know that financial education was a curriculum requirement. Nearly two-thirds of young adults did not remember receiving it. As was pointed out earlier, for those who did receive it, it amounted to no more than 48 minutes, as opposed to the 30-hours minimum requirement.

Starting with that kind of base, I want to ask three questions about financial education. First, why does it have such a low profile; why is it not widely known, properly researched and talked about? Secondly, what are the consequences of marginalising financial education in this way? If a child’s attitude to money is shaped by the age of seven, what happens to those children who are past the age of seven but have not been exposed to this kind of education at all?

My third question relates to the content of financial education. What will you teach in financial education? Will it simply be how to spend money and how to save it? If it is to be proper financial education, it must be about the financial system and about explaining to a child what it is to have £1 and how a piece of paper acquires the value of £1 or £5: in other words, explaining to them how our system works and why money is in some sense central to our social system. Once we do this, children will begin to understand how our society is propelled by money, why it is pathologically obsessed with money and what can be done to avoid the consequences of that obsession.

Religious Education in Schools

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my good friend the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for securing this debate and introducing it with characteristic eloquence. The three minutes I have do not really allow me to say anything significant so I will make three quick points of criticism of religious education as it is practised in our schools.

First, it is not properly thought through or carefully organised; it is taught by teachers who are not properly trained and who do not have sufficient time; and there is no careful planning or organic build-up from one year to the next. That is one simple criticism that I wanted to start with.

The two other criticisms are far more significant. It is not clear why we want to teach religious education. Is it to fill time? Is it to deal with undisciplined children? Is it to placate religious people? Why is religious education part of our curriculum? I do not think that many people who insisted on this have really given it thought.

We have not realised that it is not concerned with being a good citizen. A citizen has no religion; only human beings have. It is concerned with how to make somebody a decent human being so that his humanity inspires citizenship in all that he does and is. We want to teach religious education to give him a better grasp of civilisation, in the composition of which religion has played an important part; to make him a better human being and to get him to appreciate the countless advantages and disadvantages in being religious. Religion has been a force for evil as well as good. We have seen both. When it has been a force for good, it has been concerned with ecological issues, human brotherhood and emphasising human finitude—that human beings cannot be the lords of the universe. They are the sorts of things that religion should be teaching.

The third question is: what is taught? When you say we teach religious education, what is that? Is it teaching religions? What does that mean? Does it mean teaching the history, or the moral values? No, that is morality. What is distinctively religious about religious education? Here, many of us tend to lose sight of the fact that religion is ultimately concerned with spirituality, which is neither moral nor religious. I can be spiritual without having to believe in God—lots of people are. I can be deeply moral without being religious. In other words, spirituality has a distinct space in human life, and religious education should cultivate this and the ability to sensitively appreciate the spiritual aspect of life. Religious education, as we teach it, does not seem to do so.

Higher Education: Financial Pressures

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, on securing this debate and introducing it with considerable erudition and eloquence. This debate has become important in a post-Brexit age. It is because we have gone through the baptism of post-Brexit, and because of what is to follow, that we are concerned about the issues that it raises. I therefore want to ask myself what new issues it has raised, what the context is in which we are debating them and how old problems appear in new forms.

I shall concentrate on three issues that are important but, for obvious reasons, have not been discussed. The first has to do with the whole idea of student loans. Let us remember that a student comes out of university with a debt of, on average, £45,000. Even before he comes out with that debt and is still at university, he has to provide for his maintenance costs, which he does by relying on personal savings, with part-time work and in various other ways. There are many reports telling us how many students do not have food to eat, suffer hardships and undergo an enormous amount of pain in order to be able to graduate with some degree of decency.

Student loans do not serve the function of redistribution, which is what they are supposed to do. Levelling up must begin with, if anything, student loans, but that is not being done. Every penny that is given in loans has to be paid back, unless one is unable to do so after so many years and having earned below a certain amount of money. This does not happen in many of our competitive economies. For example, in France, tuition fees are pretty low; in Germany, they are non-existent in some Länder and very low in others. What is no less important is that the differential between the overseas student and the home student is much less than it is in our country. My feeling is that, rather than think of overseas students as a cow to milk and asking how they can help us bridge the gap in our own resources, we should be asking ourselves how the levelling-up scheme can be applied to them as well. In other words, the idea of the student loan needs to be rethought.

The second important subject I want to concentrate on is how the idea of the student loan has built in to it an element of structural bias in favour of overseas students having to pay more. If there is a teaching budget deficit, the expectation is that we will turn to overseas students, charge them £10,000 more than we charge domestic students and hope that they will bail us out. Our students cannot afford that kind of money, and they go to low-tariff universities. So there is a division between low-tariff universities, where our students go, and high-tariff universities, where overseas students go—a class division is almost built in to the student community. I do not think we fully appreciate how much resentment and hatred it causes among many of our students. I can say this with some confidence, having been a university professor for about 40 years.

The third element we need to think about is the Turing Scheme. There has been a lot of vacillation about Erasmus—should we join it or not? The Prime Minister said we should not and we finally decided—I think in December 2020—to go with the Turing Scheme. Why did we decide not to join Erasmus and to go for the Turing Scheme? We wanted to go global. What does that mean? It means that we should not be tied to any particular group. What does that mean? It means that we should be free to choose a country with which we associate. What does that mean? How are you going to take the mighty leap and launch out into the world at large, rather than connect with various groups with which you are already affiliated? I should have thought that, rather than take this mighty jump and pick and choose partners, we should be thinking about collaborating with those with whom we have already been connected and then gradually spread out into the rest of the world.

More importantly, there remain difficulties with the Turing Scheme. For example, the amount involved is much less than what we would have got if we had been part of Erasmus—I am told about £83 million. The scheme is subject to the spending review, and therefore there is no continuity, because the amount of money can change year to year. There is no funding for staff exchange or for pupils coming to the UK. We are not clear about language learning facilities. There is also unease about the time it could take to process visa applications for overseas students, and the question of not sharing best practices or learning resources.

I therefore want to end by putting three questions to the Minister. First, is there any attempt to look at the student loan in the context of an opportunity to level up? Has any thought been given to that? Secondly, should we not be thinking of overseas students just as much as we think of our own? Should we be thinking of all of them as Arabs and rich Nigerians and Indians, or should we not also think of those whom I encounter regularly—those who are poor and want to benefit from our education? Thirdly, is any attempt being made to reconsider the Turing scheme?

Education and Society

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury on securing this debate and, more importantly, on introducing it with a beautiful blend of insight and compassion.

The one disadvantage of being the last Back-Bench speaker of the day is that you are not quite sure what you are going to say. Every time you hear a speaker, you cut out a paragraph from your notes. After hearing 40-odd speakers, there was not a single sentence in my notes that I could keep. I was therefore confronted by the arrogance of a virgin sheet of paper, and I thought that all I could do was to write whatever I could rustle up as being relevant to the debate and say it. So I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I do not sound very profound; rather, my concern is to raise certain important questions which, in my view, have not been raised but need to be.

The educational system of any country is generally shaped by two factors: first, what kind of world do we live in that imposes constraints and parameters that you cannot cross; and, secondly, what do we want to do with that world? Therefore, we need some understanding of the factuality of the kind of world we live in and some aspirational element regarding the kind of world we wish to create. The dialectic of this gives us some idea of the kind of educational system that we wish to create.

My first question is: what kind of world do we live in? That world has four characteristics. The first is diversity. It is a world in which there is a constant movement of people, ideas, new ideologies and new religions. Every day we are confronted by people we have never seen before, whose dress, manner of talking and morals are unfamiliar. Diversity is one inescapable feature of modern life.

The second is technology. Increasingly, our lives are dominated by technology. That is happening more and more with artificial intelligence, on which my noble friend Lord Giddens has been doing some excellent work, robotics and computers. Technology is in danger of replacing reflective human reason by reducing it to a pure technique.

The third factor is globalisation—the interdependence of one part of the world on another, but also, more importantly, bringing home to us the suffering of other people in the world and making it real to us so that the whole idea of the human species is replaced by the idea of a shared humanity or human community. The treasures of another civilisation matter to us as they did not matter to us before. Starvation in other parts of the world matters to us not because television presents us with pictures, but because we have come to make them a part of our mental universe.

The fourth feature of the world that we are living in is the market. Whether we like it or not, the market is here to stay. It is being extended into areas where it has not been before—namely health and education. If this is the kind of world that we are condemned to live in, what should we do to flourish in it? How can we bend it to our will or improve it? How can we negotiate our way through it? Of all the capacities that human beings will need to negotiate their way through the world that we have all been talking about, I want to emphasise three that have not been given the attention they deserve. In my view, they are critical. I say that as someone who has spent 60 years of his life in the field of education, first as a student and more latterly as a vice-chancellor.

The first capacity that we badly need is imagination—not just analytical intelligence, which is easy, but imagination. By that I mean the capacity to conceive an alternative, asking a question about anything that we face. Can it be done otherwise? What are the possible ways of doing this? Is this the best way? Can we not only conceive an alternative but appreciate others’ alternatives? If I see other religions, I ask myself, “Why are they different?”. Why is Hinduism different? The noble Lord, Lord Gadhia, talked about Hinduism and how the Guru-shishya tradition is pursued differently. Why is the Indian guru different from today’s western teacher, who is different from the earlier teachers of Socratic or Stoic tradition? The question is about understanding and appreciating alternatives and, in the process, expand our moral consciousness so that we develop sympathy.

Imagination is the only way to expand the range of sympathy and to take others into our mental universe and make them ours. Imagination is also the capacity by which we can counter the power of technology. Machines and robots can do anything except imagine. Their imagination is limited to what we put into them. Imagination is the capacity that allows you to prevent reason becoming a mere technique—a mere Cartesian tool—and to make it reflective and self-critical.

The second capacity that is important for us is self-criticism. Self-criticism means seeing through prejudices as they accumulate over the course of one’s life. As one grows up in a particular culture, certain prejudices come naturally to us, but to be able to see through them and then rise above them is rare. I give one example from Indian history. India has a long tradition of public debate. In 1820, when the Christian missionaries came out to India, the maharaja of Benares organised a public debate between them and the Hindu Pandits. There were 6,000 to 8,000 people in the audience. The Jesuits asked the Hindu Pandits the first question, “Do you believe in one God or many?”, expecting the answer to be obvious. The Hindu Pandits said, “Your question is incoherent and blasphemous because you are presupposing that God is a being. If God is Shakti—power or energy—the question makes no sense. Is electricity one or many? The question is absurd because you are assuming that God cannot be or is not an impersonal power. It is also blasphemous because you are reducing God to the limited categories of the human mind. Why can God not be both one and many, or why can he not be neither? Whether God is one or many presupposes that these two between them exhaust the range of possibilities”.

What is wrong here? It is not the questions but the inability to question the questions themselves. You ask the other questions expecting an answer which you can then decide is right or wrong, but you are judging the answer by your categories of what a conventionally good answer should be. But what if the addressee of your question turns on you and says, “I question your questions”? I could go on but I shall stop before the Whip stops me, as she tried to do last time.

In that context, rising above prejudices, since the noble Lord, Lord Gadhia, mentioned a Sanskrit quotation, I might show off my knowledge of Sanskrit. In Sanskrit literature, which I have studied closely, knowledge or education is defined as, “Sa vidya ya vimuktayeh”, which means, “That alone is learning which liberates you”. It liberates you from your conditioning and your prejudices, making you increasingly able to liberate yourself from this or that prejudice. The whole of life is the accumulation of prejudice and the gradual liberation from it, and that process is learning.

The third characteristic, which is absolutely important in this capacity, is, in the absence of a better word, what I would call wisdom, which is what philosophy is supposed to be about: philo and sophos. Wisdom is basically the capacity to understand the value of something. To understand the value of something is to know both its significance and its limits. Human rights, for example, are very valuable, but when we push them in an area where we talk about an old lady being asked to eat sitting on her toilet seat and say that her human rights have been violated, or when we talk about a child’s right to be loved, you have to ask: is the term “human right” being used properly? Is everything a matter of human rights? Human rights are important, but they have their own place and should not stray beyond a certain point.

Likewise the market, which is very important but has its limits. In my view, and I say this with great humility, what Margaret Thatcher did was to extend the market into areas where properly speaking it did not belong. The market was extended not only into the welfare state but into education. The scandals of vice-chancellors’ salaries and students complaining about not getting a proper education that is worth their money is all the fault of the marketisation of education. That marketisation is the result of not having sufficient wisdom and not knowing the value and limits of the market.

Education: Early Years

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by complimenting the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on securing the debate and introducing it so well.

When we talk about childcare and early years education, we need to bear in mind the context. If one looks at the social situation, the following facts are striking: 10% to 15% of pregnant women suffer from depression and anxiety, a third of the violence against women is committed against pregnant women, 1 million children in our society suffer from attention or conduct disorders, and 50% of our children below the age of three have experienced family breakdown.

In that context, we must ask ourselves what government policy should be aiming at. It is absolutely right to concentrate on childcare facilities. The importance of early years provision and the Government’s intervention can hardly be overestimated. Such intervention ensures that the disadvantages that a child brings from home are countered, a level playing field for children, and that no child starts school at a disadvantage. It also makes sure that no child builds up resentment and frustration at society for not giving them the chance to live up to their potential. No less important, it makes the rich people in our society realise that the poor are their responsibility and they should be making sacrifices for them.

The advantages of early-years education are absolutely crucial. In that context, I compliment the Government on their plan to introduce 30 hours a week of free childcare for those who earn less than £100,000. I am also pleased that the Ofsted report tells us that the proportion of good and outstanding nurseries, childminders and preschools has risen, and is now at 91%. The gap between children eligible for free school meals and their peers in reaching a good level of development is also declining, and that is warmly to be welcomed.

While welcoming all this, I want to point to a few important difficulties with the Government’s scheme. First, the target—working parents who earn less than £100,000 a year—is a very wide social group. It does not target those who need childcare the most. In other words, it is very important that we should be thinking not about those earning £100,000—lots of people earn £100,000—but people who earn much less, and prioritise them so that their claims are not ignored.

Secondly, the scheme explicitly excludes foster children from the additional 15 hours of childcare. This is discriminating and not terribly rational. Thirdly, the funding for the scheme is inadequate. In several cases, parents have to put down some money to keep the childcare or preschools going. Around 1,000 nurseries and childminders have gone out of business in the last two years—something that should worry those of us who are concerned about the future of our children.

Teachers involved in childcare schemes, preschools and childminding need proper status, recognition and career patterns so that they know where they are on the career path and how they can go further. There must be some chance for them to improve their qualifications so that they are not stuck in a cul-de-sac or simply seen as preschool teachers. They should be able to come out and join the mainstream after acquiring certain qualifications.

Finally, it is striking, as various reports point out, that the range of local children’s services is not integrated, and different branches of local authorities function in different ways, without much co-ordination. There is also insufficient understanding of what constitutes disadvantage. We talk about helping disadvantaged children, but what is disadvantage, how do you measure or quantify it, and how do you deal with it? I have not seen any research in this area or any attempt to highlight the problem. Moreover, there do not seem to be any specific targets to improve the outcomes for the most disadvantaged. In any scheme to improve people’s situation, the goal should be that 10% or 20% can achieve a certain level of outcome. Without that kind of vision, one has no means of knowing how well a particular scheme is doing. With these reservations, I welcome the Government’s proposals and hope the Minister will answer at least some of these questions today.

A Manifesto to Strengthen Families

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I too welcome the Minister to his new appointment. I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and his colleague in the other place, Fiona Bruce, for drafting the manifesto. It presents a very depressing picture of what is happening to family in our country. We are almost a world leader in family breakdown, and in economic terms the estimated cost of family breakdown is about £48 billion. By the age of five, around half the children in low-income families have seen matrimonial breakdown. That leaves deep scars. So in addition to the economic consequences there are psychological and moral scars on people growing up. The question is: what do we do about it?

The manifesto points out several reasons why this happens, including poverty, fathers not being involved in the raising of a child, domestic violence and poor ability to manage relations—all those factors are responsible. In the 18 policies that the manifesto articulates, these problems are addressed.

However, in the minute and a half that is left to me, I want to concentrate on two major difficulties that I have with the report. First, I began to ask myself what kind of family the report is talking about. Family is an abstraction. There is one structure of family among Afro-Caribbeans, another among the south Asians and a third among the white community. What kind of family model did the manifesto’s writers have in mind?

If you look at the manifesto closely, it is striking that the ethnic-minority family is virtually absent. For that family there are certain peculiar problems. Parental pressures can be exerted over children asking them to perform, sometimes beyond their capacity. There can also be cultural conflicts, with children going out to school and bringing back certain cultural mores and customs that parents are unable to cope with. There can even be linguistic and conceptual problems, where parents are unable to communicate with their children. A few years ago I was part of a BBC film called “I Can’t Talk To My Parents”. It focused on a girl who wanted to go to university in another town, but her parents could not understand why she wanted to do that and not stay at home with them and study. She said that she wanted to explore herself, but she did not have the language to explain that concept to her parents—neither the parents nor the child could explain to each other what they meant. The report does not fully take care of Asian families and others.

The other difficulty is that the report talks about strengthening families. I always worry when I see normative concepts such as “strengthening”. In many cases, for the south Asian family it is not a question of strengthening the family bond but of it being too strong. There are occasions where children are very deeply bonded to their parents and unable to exercise autonomy and independence, especially girls. In that situation, what does strengthening the family mean?

I have several difficulties of this kind. However, I simply intend to alert the writers of the manifesto to the problems that this will create and not at all to detract from the considerable merit of the manifesto.

Education: Maintained and Independent Schools

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for securing this debate and for introducing it so well.

The Prime Minister has spoken often about creating a meritocratic Britain. By this she means that a good education should be within the reach of all our children. It is therefore a scandal that nearly 90% of our independent schools are rated good or outstanding and 80% of them outstanding, but only 20% of state schools are regarded as outstanding. This leads to a waste of talent because state schools do not produce outstanding children. It leads to a shortage of skilled labour and, more importantly, to resentment and frustration among a large number of state school pupils who feel that they are not getting their due for their talent.

It is striking that it is the threat of Brexit that has alerted us to the enormity of this danger and, as the Prime Minister said, now that Britain is about to embark on a new adventure it is time to rethink all the old certainties. It is unfortunate that a question of this magnitude should come up in this context, which is polemical, polarises the country and does not allow us an independent assessment of the two concepts of schools.

When we talk about independent schools it is also worth bearing in mind that there are about 2,300 and 50% of them are pretty small—with fewer than 150 pupils—which educate between them just under half a million pupils aged five to 15. The partnership between state schools and independent schools has to be seen in that context. So how do we improve state schools? Various Governments have come and gone and floated all kinds of ideas and we have more or less agreed that if we are going to improve state schools we will have to think in terms of allocating more resources to them, with better teachers, greater autonomy and leadership at the top, and increasing parents’ say in how they are run. Independent schools can and do contribute to this, but not for the reasons that are generally cited. The reason cited is that independent schools get charitable status; they get relief from business rates and therefore, as a kind of contractual quid pro quo, they should give something back to the state which has given them so much.

I do not think that argument particularly works or is even particularly valid. The independent schools if pressured could say that they are not interested in accepting the business rate relief and the charitable status. What do you do then? Go back to square one? They might say that the concession they are getting by virtue of not having to pay business rates is so small that it is not worth the bother. What do we do then? Are they completely exempted from all the obligations that they have to state schools? I suggest that to couch the argument in terms of a contractual quid pro quo is dangerous for both independent schools and state schools.

We should rather think in the following terms. First, independent schools by virtue of the fact that they are outstanding and getting wonderful results have certain moral obligations to their fellow citizens. I emphasise the importance of moral obligation because it cannot be denied that those schools that have the resources and the capacity ought to be able to contribute to those which have fewer resources and less capacity.

I also think of the argument articulated in the language of enlightened self-interest. If the distance between state schools and independent schools remains as large then there is going to be resentment and constant hatred for independent schools, and that is not the climate in which independent schools will be able to function. There is also crude self-interest, because independent schools are increasingly becoming homes for the children of foreigners. I was told recently that the number of overseas nationals, especially Chinese and others, whose children are admitted to our schools, either here or in their campuses abroad, is much larger than it used to be—about 33% larger over the past five years. If this is the situation they are going to be reduced to then it is rather important that they should think in terms of collaborating with state schools in our country.

The question therefore is to articulate why it is important that the two sets of schools should be able to co-operate. I think they can co-operate at various levels, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, pointed out, and I want to add one or two other ideas. They can lend their staff, especially in minority subjects; provide access to facilities—for example, in science labs, sports facilities, or music; extend a larger number of scholarships than they have done so far; provide teaching, coaching and career advice; and share best practices. These are some of the ways that independent schools can help state ones; there are many others.

Let us remember one important thing. The two sets of schools are never going to be complete partners. Rivalry is built into their structure. Independent schools are in the business of recruiting fee-paying pupils, and fee-paying schools are decidedly what state schools are not. Given that there is this rivalry and that independent schools are going to be looking for children who are prepared to pay, why should they raise the standards of state schools? If the standards are raised to a high level, why would anybody want to go to independent schools? On the continent of Europe, in France and Germany, very few students go to independent schools, because state schools are considered sufficient. I am not saying that it is in the interest of independent schools to impoverish or keep state schools parasitic on them, but I emphasise that there is a relationship of patron and client. It is not a relationship of equals, but has an element of rivalry. Consistent with that, we should certainly think of collaboration between the two, but not raise our expectations too high.

Education: Citizenship

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. I congratulate, and thank, him not only on securing this debate but on introducing it with such commitment and wisdom.

The noble Lord has spoken about a citizenship programme. I will talk about that in a moment, but I begin by talking about citizenship education as it exists in our schools and where I think it can be improved. I am delighted that the Government have made sure that citizenship education remains a compulsory national curriculum subject at key stages 3 and 4. I am also delighted that it continues to include such subjects as our parliamentary system of democracy, the making of laws, the evolution of constitutional monarchy and the way in which it functions, national, ethnic, religious and other identities and the variety of electoral systems through which people can be represented. This is greatly welcomed.

However, I am slightly uneasy about three areas. The first is what is being taught in the name of citizenship education, how it is taught and within what framework. I put these three together because they are closely related. It is very striking that citizenship education concentrates simply on providing information about institutions. It has very little to say about political ideologies: about conservatism, socialism, liberalism, fascism—the variety of spectra through which people have perceived and tried to organise political arrangements. It is very important that our students know what these ideas and ideologies stand for and how to arbitrate between them. That is my first area of concern.

My second concern is that we live in a multicultural society and that it is therefore important that its citizens are able to relate to each other and to form a cohesive community by developing what I call multicultural literacy or multicultural competence. By that, I mean the capacity to recognise and live with differences and to uncover the commonalities that underpin those differences. It is important to be able to relate to people across cultural boundaries and to be able to recognise them as one’s fellow humans and fellow citizens despite those differences. Multicultural literacy is absolutely vital if a society as diverse as ours is to be cohesive.

The third important thing that is badly needed is more directly connected with the way in which we teach. We teach via bits of information, relying on very fine books, such as those written by my dear friend the noble Lord, Lord Norton. I admire those books. However, it is important to take concrete issues and to show how different ideas and agencies play out within them. For example, if I were teaching politics to 16, 17 and 18 year-olds, I would consider it vital to take a real situation, such as the Holocaust, the partition of India or a situation of ethnic genocide, and to use this as an opportunity to see how different forces come to play so that people who have lived together as good neighbours—as brothers—and helped each other out in times of sickness and tragedy can change so suddenly, apparently overnight, to being at each other’s throats. How does this happen? What are the preconditions? If we do not understand these people, we demonise them, saying that they have all gone mad. Have they become fanatics overnight? In five minutes? That is impossible. There must be a culture or climate within which certain forces are already at work. These forces are kept under control in certain situations but may be released from control when the situation changes.

If we want our students to appreciate what it is to live politically, what political life is all about, we have to discuss not merely bodies of information but concrete issues. If we do not want to concentrate on big issues such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide—a fortnight or a month can be devoted to the study of those—another thing that can be done is to ask pupils to bring in headlines from newspapers about important issues that happen to interest them and, starting from there, help them to understand through a range of issues the day-to-day reality of what is going on in the world at large.

While all this is being taught, it is important to stress that citizenship is a lived reality and should be practised. The ethos and practices of the school must therefore reflect the principles that the school wants to impress on its pupils. Pupils can be involved in taking certain decisions within the school so that they can learn that citizenship does not begin once they leave school; it is practised within the school. Decisions are taken on delinquent children, all kinds of acts of indiscipline and managing the school. Pupils can also put forth their views on how the school’s resources should be allocated.

I turn now to the very important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on having a specific citizenship programme rather than just education. We must realise the following important point. Having lived here for almost 58 years, having arrived as a student, becoming a professor, and all the things that followed, I wonder why the great public institutions of which we were proud and which we cherished have one by one declined in their legitimacy and people have begun to lose faith in them. We used to be extremely proud of our police service. In India, the British police service was always held up as a model. Of course, it can still be held up in that way when compared to the Indians’. Nevertheless, there are problems. We used to be proud of our print journalism and the quality, variety and depth of our newspapers. We used to be proud of our Civil Service, and of the integrity of the NHS. As one looks at all the cover-ups and so on, one begins to ask what is going on. Citizenship should be understood not simply in terms of serving people but in terms of taking custody of our collective life. If there are qualities that we value, I should have thought that a citizenship programme would help to ensure that citizens take responsibility for their society and cultivate the virtues and competencies that are necessary to have the healthy society that we once had and that was the basis of our great reputation.

Education: Personal, Social and Health Education

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen for securing this debate and introducing it so well. I want to bring a slightly different dimension to our debate and talk about the social and political context in which education needs to be seen and located. After all, we are asking what new skills and knowledge are needed in order that people can grow up in our society as sane human beings. Our society has changed profoundly over the past few decades and it is going to change even more. That will present the citizens of the future with new challenges. I want to look in particular at three of these new challenges which have not yet been noted in our debate.

First, there is the challenge caused by globalisation. We are an integral part of an interdependent world. The rest of the world is not beyond our boundaries; in fact, the expression “the rest of the world” does not make sense because it is already here in our midst, shaping us in a profound way. That is so not only in the form of immigrants, but also in the form of new cultures and new modes of ideas. The very idea of a border becomes in a sense problematical. Because we are constantly being exposed to new currents of thought and new ideas, there is inevitably a sense of panic. What is going to happen to us? There is a sense of disorientation and the loss of a sense of belonging. Our children, from a very young age, are faced with the problems of, “Who am I? Where do I belong? How do I retain a sense of continuity while at the same time coping with change?”. The first basic survival skill that they are going to need will be how to maintain a sense of identity that is not frozen. It must be able to cope with change, but at the same time it should not be like a set of clothes which can be discarded in favour of another set. We will have to teach them reflective skills from a young age.

The second profound change our society is undergoing is that we are increasingly multicultural. This is not only because of outsiders but because of choices that our own people are making, such as gay marriage, cohabitation and lots of other things. If we are going to live at peace with ourselves and others in this kind of society, we will require certain multicultural competences and sensibilities. We should learn to appreciate differences, feel at ease in their presence, and also develop an imaginative sympathy. Right from the age of two or three, children should be able to recognise that people can be of different colours and have different ways of life, and feel at ease with them and learn to cope with them. That skill is absolutely crucial as children grow up if we are going to maintain any degree of social cohesion and social harmony.

The third skill that I think is just as important has to do with something that one or two of your Lordships have already mentioned. There is a pervasive culture of indifference to others. We have seen severe cuts to people’s livelihoods brought about by the banking crisis, which I thought would have provoked an enormous sense of injustice and anger. It did not do anything of the kind. Bankers seem to be shameless; what are the rest of us doing? We who failed to mount sufficient pressure on the Government to bring about a regulatory regime are complicit in and partly responsible for the consequences of our deeds. Therefore, these cuts are not happening behind our backs; they are happening because of us.

It is this culture of indifference—“I have nothing to do with it, it is all the Government over there taking decisions”—that has to be countered. That involves a sense of compassion, concern for others and, going a little further, what some philosophers have called the ethical care of the self—a certain sense of pride in oneself, a sense of responsibility for oneself, so that one should be able say, with regard to health education, sex education, or whatever, “I am not that kind of person. I value myself too highly to become pregnant as a teenager or to engage in certain abominable practices”. If one had that kind of pride in oneself, which is more than self-respect and different from self-esteem, one would not dream of doing certain things. Can we instil that culture of care of the self in our children? If we do, we will have solved many of our problems without having recourse to technology or bureaucratic regulation.