Independent Schools: VAT

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, we need to look at this thing from a wider perspective. I suggest that we look at it in terms of what it is trying to achieve. Basically, it is concerned with achieving a certain measure of equality. We all recognise that our society is, rightly or wrongly, characterised by a deep sense of inequality, and that has educational and economic roots: a few schools, for example, produce students who control positions of power. Therefore, if our society is going to make progress and be stable and cohesive, it should be equal. An equal society would mean that those who have should share with those who do not. Therefore, in principle, I support this principle. The only question is whether it will achieve anything by itself. No, it is only a small step. Are other measures being contemplated? I do not see that. Therefore, my answer is: yes, this is a step in the right direction, provided it is complemented by other steps.

Higher Education (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Industry and Regulators Committee on its excellent report, which raises some important issues. Precisely because it ranges over a large number of issues, different people will pick up on different bits of it. I thought I would pick up on an aspect that may not be picked up in a gathering such as this, a conversation on what is happening to the higher education system in general; on the problems that the higher education system faces; and on what we can do about it. This issue requires a national conversation about what we should be doing.

I want to contribute three ideas to that conversation today. First, it is clear that our universities are passing through a difficult phase. Some 40% of England’s universities have budget deficits. Courses are being closed. Staff are being retrenched and so on. We know all this, but I think there is a danger of panicking and creating a situation where we end up following courses of action that we might regret. It is important to bear in mind that this is happening mostly with universities in England. For universities in Scotland, the score is slightly different; it is therefore difficult to arrive at a single homogeneous national perspective.

Secondly, this kind of crisis is not new. We have been hearing about it for the 40 years that I have been in this country. It is important to note that, happily, the crisis we are facing is financial, not intellectual—as I discovered when I went out to India as a vice-chancellor of one of the finest universities, where the crisis is intellectual. Teachers have few commitments. Academic pursuits are not valued. Happily, our crisis is largely financial; I say “happily” because it is in contrast to the academic and intellectual crisis that countries such as India and even China face. On the financial level, it is worth bearing in mind that we are not bankrupt: nearly £40 billion is contributed to universities from public funds. I say all this not to calm things down but simply to suggest that there is no need for immediate action. There is a need for immediate reflection. We need to look at ourselves and ask where our universities need to go.

With that in mind, I start with the three ideas that I want to propose. First, it is important to bear in mind that we need to find new sources of revenue. I will talk about overseas students in a minute. I do not like the category of overseas students, and I find the division between domestic and overseas dangerously colonial. I have objected to this in the past in writing and shall do so today, but that is a different story.

The first thing is that we need to find new sources of revenue. This can come from not only going out and getting new sources of revenue but cutting down on our expenditure. I must say that some universities—some of those that have gone bankrupt or have been talking about passing through a budget deficit—have not been administratively competent. We need to look at ourselves and ask whether universities have been administratively competent and whether university salaries have been manageable. I hate to say all this but, when vice-chancellors collect about £350,000, I ask myself, “Is this the real world in which I live?”. When I went out to India as a vice-chancellor, I did not get a penny because the vice-chancellor was supposed to be sinecure. They are retired professors and eminent people so they serve for free. Here, vice-chancellors fatten themselves off the backs of their university colleagues. The first question to ask ourselves is this: is there no room for reducing our expenditure before we talk about ways to raise revenue? That is point number one.

On point number two, higher education is a basic medium for structuring the relations of power and status between different social groups. It is through higher education that one acquires a certain status, money and power. There are people in any society—certainly in our society—who have never been to university, who are poor and marginalised. The question then is: what is being done about them? In any fair system of higher education there must be a provision for the poor, the marginalised and those who have never been to university.

Therefore, the fees we charge students should be progressive, in the sense of being proportionate to the parental capacity to pay. This is how things happen in many parts of the world, including provision for the blacks in the United States. It should be possible for us to say that people earning less than a certain amount of money or who have never been to university do not pay any fee or maintenance fee. As for the rest, they can be taken care of by the loan system that we operate, provided it is opened up in such a way that the period for repayment is extended over a period of time and the conditions of return are not so harsh.

This second point is important. I really want to emphasise this: there are people in any society for whom it should be possible for us to give a complete freeship—no tuition fee, no maintenance fee. That kind of provision has to be made in a society, otherwise you have a society that is totally unfair.

The third point I want to make is on the distinction between domestic and overseas students. I do not know how it came to be made. In many countries there is no such distinction. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, will correct me if I am wrong, but I think there is no differential fee between domestic and overseas students in Germany; it is the same fee. There are other countries where the same fee is charged to domestic and overseas students.

In the mid-1970s, we introduced this distinction between domestic and overseas students. I may be mistaken, but that seems to be when it came into our vocabulary. What does it mean? It means “ours” and “theirs”. These are our students; we look after them. Over there are “they”, whom we do not have to look after; they come to us. The stereotype is that they are rich and loaded with money, so we can raise their fees. There is no limit to how much we can raise their fees, whereas with ours we have to be careful. The Government have to make sure that our students’ fees are not increased beyond a certain point.

This distinction between ours and theirs—between domestic students, which we even call home students, and overseas students—is dangerously similar to the colonial distinction between our country and one over there. If I may say so, it smacks of the spirit of some degree of mean nationalism: that our people will benefit at the expense of them, so when we have overseas students we make sure they pay the salary of the redundant staff. I have been told that five overseas students means one lecturer. When I first heard this I was alarmed. I was asked by my vice-chancellor at the University of Hull, “Look, can you not recruit five students? You’ll save the job of one university lecturer”. I almost felt that I was being blackmailed into saving the job of a young lecturer by recruiting five students. We need to be careful.

The other thing is that we have become so harsh. Our attitude to overseas students is totally ambivalent and confused. At one level we want them, because one student means a fifth of a lecturer’s salary or whatever. At another level, we put overseas students in the category of immigrants. We put all kinds of restrictions on visas for graduate students coming to us. We say, “They can work” or, “They cannot work”, and create all kinds of wretched complexities. On the one hand we seem to resent them, while on the other hand we are anxious to have them. Where do we stand?

I go to India fairly often every year, and I am confronted by Ministers and others who ask me, “What is Britain’s attitude to overseas students?”. Do we want them, as the Americans do—or did until recently—when the doors are open and all kinds of facilities are thrown open? The Australians do that; Australia is now taking many of our students. What is Britain’s attitude? Do we want them or not? If we do, are we being hospitable to them or are we going to be mean in terms of not wanting them, putting all kinds of restrictions on the number of visas and increasing the minimum amount of money that they should earn before they can qualify? All these categories with which we play around have been dangerously obnoxious, and I very much hope that we can take a consistent attitude to overseas students, in the sense of welcoming them subject to certain conditions. Certainly, whatever attitude we take, it has to be one on which the nation is agreed, not resentful.

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.