Education (Student Support) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2018

Debate between Lord Puttnam and Lord Willis of Knaresborough

Monday 21st May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, I will probably not be quite as brief as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, but I support the Motion of my noble friend Lord Hunt. In doing so, I hope to help the Minister with some experiences from the past, which I think are very germane.

My noble friend Lord Hunt and I entered this House on exactly the same day: 5 November 1997. He came as someone with great authority and experience in the National Health Service; I came from a terribly different world, with the specific job of working for the right honourable David Blunkett—now the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, then the Secretary of State for Education. We had a crisis in teaching and with teachers. I commend to the House the front page of the Times Educational Supplement from 6 April. It states:

“Missing: 47,000 secondary teachers. In a system already struggling to fill the gaps, some are thinking the unthinkable: is it time for teaching without teachers?”


I would add this: is it time for nursing without nurses?

The situation is very serious because any possibility that the Minister and his department have of resolving the problem depends entirely on the pipeline supplied by the teaching profession. That has a time factor attached to it, which is very important. It took the Blair Government—I worked constantly at the department for education—six years to get back to equilibrium after the teaching crisis. We were short of around 47,000 teachers—ironically, almost exactly the same number that we are short of today.

Here is the problem: a demographic bulge will hit us in 2024. At that point, we will be short of something close to 50,000 secondary teachers. It is totally predictable; we can see it coming. It happens to be coming at a time when the number of graduates entering the profession is, necessarily, quite light because of an inverted demographic. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, will understand and attest to the figures I am giving. We had an enormous problem. This Government have an enormous problem, and the less they solve their educational pipeline problem, by ensuring that there are enough teachers in the system, the worse the nursing problem will get.

I commend the past to the Minister. We learned a powerful lesson between 1997 and 2003. Unless the Minister wants to revisit a similar lesson in the National Health Service, he must address this issue now.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, for reminding us of those days, which were both terrifying—I say that as an ex-educationalist—and exciting. Meeting the challenge, based on an evidence base, enables you to move forward. I declare an interest, having worked for the past few years for Health Education England since its formation as a non-departmental body, following the 2012 Act.

What I find terribly sad about this SI is the lack of evidence behind the move. I do not know, and I suspect very few people in this House know, whether the move to an all-graduate profession—treating nursing graduates the same as teaching graduates or graduates going into law or other professions—should be done on a loan system. There is an argument for that, but in reality, we have absolutely no evidence to demonstrate that it will be effective, particularly at undergraduate level. Like many Members of the House, I look forward to the student funding review, because at least we will get that evidence base, which will be put before both Houses.

I find what I think is behind this deeply disappointing. Your Lordships spent many months debating the Health and Social Care Act 2012. There were a lot of fierce arguments. One of the reasons why the then coalition Government put forward the proposals was to take many of the decisions, particularly about staffing and education, out of the political arena and give them to an NDPB, to allow them to plan ahead. Health Education England was created for that very purpose. This is doing the exact opposite. It is pointless having an organisation which is there to plan a workforce and then taking away the means by which it can generate that workforce, be it at undergraduate or postgraduate level. It saddens me that after some of the excellent things that have been introduced—I declare an interest as having been involved with the nursing associate proposal—the belief is still peddled that this is somehow substitution. It should not be, it is not and it must not be a substitution. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is absolutely right to make that point: we do not want to move back to a lower quality simply to produce more people.

Will the Minister give us an idea of the quality, particularly at undergraduate level? I am sure that he will say that while we might not have as many applicants, we still have as many actual posts and that the quality of people applying for those posts is going up. I can find no evidence at all in the HESA survey that that is actually happening. If it is, I will celebrate it, and I am sure the Minister will tell us. The issue I want to raise—it is why I have spoken in this debate—concerns one of the great areas of weakness at the moment, and that is our ability to recruit and retain mental health nurses. This is a massive issue, and not simply for traditional reasons but because the demographics and the epidemiology show that ever more of us who, like your Lordships, have an average age of 70-plus are likely to have a mental health problem as part of their comorbidities as they get older. Few of us can deny that.

I am working at the moment at how we can provide the mental health workforce in 10 or 15 years’ time. I look around at where there is a stream of potential workers who could come in, and frankly it is at postgraduate level, using psychology graduates. I can tell the House that over the last three years, 49,466 psychology graduates have come out of our universities, yet we have a dire shortage of postgraduate mental health nurses. Instead of proposing, as my work does, that we really target these people to try to fill this gap in relatively quick time, this SI is saying that that is no longer possible, that these people with debts already from their university days—their undergraduate days—will now face having to fund work in a specialist area. Will the Government look seriously not just at narrow shortages but at wholesale shortages, which we certainly have in mental health nursing? Can we find a better way of attracting and retaining these people?

I finish with three brief questions. We are going to get, through the NHS and indeed through private sector organisations, 0.5% of their payroll being spent on the apprenticeship levy. I ask the Minister whether trusts and private sector organisations, particularly those in adult social care, will be able to use part of that levy to create in-house bursaries to support the development of staff. As yet we have not talked about the role of other sectors in bringing these people through. Will that be possible?

Secondly, if the Minister says, “Ah, no, BEIS says that you can use this money only if it is for apprenticeships”, are we able to rebadge postgraduate work in nursing, in the different fields, through the levy to provide the bursary—and, of course, fee remission—as a result of that route? There is a big pool of money coming in here, which could be used much more effectively.

Thirdly and finally, I ask the Minister, in trying to solve this conundrum, to make an assurance to this House that it is quality that we want and quality we must give to the people of the UK—particularly the people of England, to which this SI applies—rather than quick fixes in other ways, which I am sure will come down the track if we do not resolve this matter now.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Puttnam and Lord Willis of Knaresborough

Monday 24th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

I am very grateful to my noble friend. The fact that the House is so packed to hear this amendment on technology brightens my soul.

When the noble Lords, Lord Puttnam and Lord Knight, and I raised this amendment in Committee, we were hopeful that the Minister would reflect on the issues raised and the importance of technology in our schools, and bring back government amendments on Report that indicated that this Government listened to one of the most important technologies driving our education system, our society and our economy. However, there is not a word in this piece of legislation about how we empower our young people to enter a technological society where they can take full advantage of all that pertains.

In responding to the debate in Committee, my noble friend the Minister said:

“We are talking to a number of interested parties—school leaders, professional bodies, educational charities, industry, academics and other experts—about how the department should take forward its thinking about technology”.—[Official Report, 13/7/11; col. GC 306.]

Sadly we have not had a single word about where those discussions have led. We have not had a single idea from the Government as to whether technology has a place in a modern UK education system in the 21st century. It is enormously disappointing that we still have from the Government a view that technology, particularly information communications technology, is a distraction from the central aim of raising standards. It is absolutely essential to the raising of standards to have proper technology and technology policies in our schools.

We are not promoting the case for ICT as an alternative to conventional subject matter or pedagogy but as an integral part of delivering a world-class, 21st century curriculum. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, recently reminded us that,

“Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton—but was also a published poet”.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who sadly died very recently, said:

“The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists”.

This amendment is about digital inclusion. It is about encouraging schools to meet their responsibilities to generations of young people who access ICT as both a tool and a discipline, and not to disadvantage themselves—or indeed the nation—as they move forward. However, it is so much more than just a pious and well-meaning amendment. All the evidence from studies from the Royal Society, the EPSRC, the Times Educational Supplement, the Government’s own department, major corporations, and charities such as futurelab and the e-Learning Foundation, of which the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and I are privileged to be the respective chairs, emphasise the link between the use of ICT, educational motivation and achievement and future economic success and well-being. Not a single reputable study points to our young people or our society being disadvantaged as a result of access to high-quality ICT. You have to go to parts of the United States to get that view.

However, some 4 million people in Britain today are not online and are usually the most disadvantaged. Forty-nine per cent of those without access come from the lowest socioeconomic groups, and 70 per cent are in social housing. Thirty-eight per cent of those who are currently unemployed are not online, despite the fact that 70 per cent of all jobs are advertised online. That is a very cruel deception. Ministers must understand that the majority of those households will have children, who, without our support, will be part of tomorrow’s statistics.

One million children in our schools today cannot get online at home. Yet so much of the work they are being set in schools, and so many of the projects which they are being asked to complete, rely upon them being able to get online and do their work in that way. By encouraging schools to be proactive—particularly in recognising that an IT policy must extend into the home, where often the greatest disparity exists—the Government can make children and their schools part of a solution to support a wide range of government objectives.

This amendment is not a plea for special funding. I have not mentioned funding once, and nor have my noble friends. Encouraging schools to use their pupil premium would go a long way to meet both school and home access requirements. However, it requires the statutory authority of this amendment to say to schools, “Technology should be at the heart of what you do, and you need to report every year on that to the Secretary of State, as well as to your pupils’ parents and to your governors”.

Finally, this amendment would also address one of the real challenges facing our schools and colleges: that of addressing the shortfall in the number of students studying computing across the UK. According to the current Royal Society study, from 2006 to 2009 we saw a fall of 33 per cent in the number of students studying ICT at GCSE level. There has been a similar fall since 2003 of one-third of students studying ICT at A2-level. We have also seen a 57 per cent reduction in A2 level students studying computer science. Such dramatic falls in numbers of students going into our universities to study computer science are having a seriously detrimental effect on our ability to produce the sort of graduates we need for our modern economy. That alone is a reason for us to put ICT and technology at the heart of delivering the 21st century curriculum.

I hope that, as this will not cost the Minister anything but will win him friends throughout the nation, this is one amendment about which the Minister can simply say to the House, “I accept the wisdom of your words”. I beg to move.

[Lord Puttnam]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for keeping this ball on the park. Like many other Members of your Lordships’ House, I have a number of interests in the education sector, all of which appear in the register of interests.

The omission of a clause such as this in the completed Bill in my judgment—and I put this to the Minister—would be literally mind-blowing: not a small omission, not something that has just slipped by, but a truly mind-blowing omission. That is why I support what I think is a very modest, simple and very easily deliverable objective, as laid out marvellously by the noble Lord, Lord Willis.

My contribution will concern the very serious issue of employability, possibly pre-empting one or two debates that will come up later on Report about jobs. During the summer break, I read a book by Jim Clifton, the chair of Gallup, entitled The Coming Jobs War. It is drawn from the largest survey Gallup had ever undertaken in its history. The view expressed in the book, and the conclusion that Mr Clifton comes to, is that the relationship between ICT skills and jobs in the developed world is absolutely everything. There will be winners and losers, and unless this Government —this was to an extent true of the Government previously—get a real grip on this issue, we can only be among the losers in the next 10 to 20 years.

I would like to offer a few statistics that may alarm the Government. If they have different statistics, I would be very happy to hear from the Minister. Only 9 per cent of ICT classes in this country are taught by teachers with any relevant qualifications. That means that 91 per cent of young people in this country are being taught so-called ICT by teachers with no qualifications whatever in the subject. I am not sure what other subjects fall into this category. I cannot believe that there are very many, and I cannot believe that a civilised nation would let this go on for very long when it knows that its entire employability framework for the next 10 to 20 years is reliant upon success in this area.