Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 14th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Willetts, who seeks to prevent the creation of a new statutory tort. We have heard a couple of criticisms of the tort that are a little inconsistent. We heard that it will, on the one hand, lead to a flood of vexatious claims that will bog up our legal system and be very costly for our universities; and, on the other, that it is otiose, because the right for people to make claims to the courts already exists. It surely cannot be both at once.

My objection to Clause 4 is that I think it will undermine the regulator, the Office for Students. I speak not as a lawyer or an expert jurist, so I enter into this terrain with great trepidation. From a very practical point of view, my concern is for the work of the director for free speech and the authority of the Office for Students if we put this new statutory tort into law.

Having been involved in helping to set up the Office for Students through the Higher Education and Research Act with my noble friend Lord Younger, I am acutely aware that we have already created a very powerful regulator. The reporting structure that this Bill creates around the director for freedom of speech is none the less extremely useful. That is why I support this aspect of the Bill, which creates this new position in the leadership team of the Office for Students.

However, once the director for freedom of speech’s position is created, his or her position will be very strong and he or she will have sufficient powers to do the job that we expect him or her to do in promoting freedom of speech in our system. That is because the director for freedom of speech will be able to impose conditions of registration on any provider that falls short of the enhanced duties created by this Bill.

These conditions of registration are an extremely powerful regulatory tool, because they consist of far more than just the nuclear option that HEFCE used to have, which was just to withhold funding from a provider. The Office for Students has a very subtle suite of regulatory tools at its disposal. They run a full range from simply seeking an action plan from a university all the way through to imposing fines on an institution if it does not deliver on the action plan it has agreed with the director for freedom of speech. They do not need to consist simply of suspending a provider from the register and therefore effectively dooming it to failure, or taking away its university title. Those are nuclear options that no regulator really has any credibility in threatening, but the director for freedom of speech will have many other more useful tools at his or her disposal.

A statutory tort on the statute book will not help the regulator in any way at all; it already has the tools it needs. I strongly support my noble friend Lord Willetts. I hope the Government will listen to the debate and the excellent interventions that we have heard this afternoon and accept Clause 4’s removal from the Bill.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Johnson. Like so many other people in the debate, I strongly agree with the comments made, from the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Grabiner, onwards. I also do not believe that this clause should remain. I do not believe it will do the job it is supposed to, and it will almost inevitably lead to the chilling effect that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and others have described.

My noble friend Lord Blunkett asked why the not entirely fictitious person Kathleen could not pursue an action for unfair dismissal because she was compelled into a position that was intolerable. I believe that there was a time when she would have been advised to do that, would probably have done so, and could have counted on the support of her trade union in pursuing that course of action—I can say this directly, as my interest has been declared any number of times. Of course, she found that she could not count on the support of her trade union. I submit to your Lordships that one of the reasons she could not now count on its support is precisely the reason that my noble friend described. If you go back seven, eight, certainly 10 years, the battle that would have taken place in that union to make sure that someone’s employment rights had been sustained without having to resort to any other regulator or court would have been absolute. It would have been the determined position of that union. Some may say that if that would no longer happen, maybe we need something else.

I submit that the “something else” we need is certainly not Clause 4 and this tort. There are those who might say that they are not so concerned about the chilling effect because they do not believe that enough of these things will happen. I say to your Lordships’ Committee that if it wanted to hand-pick a group of its fellow citizens who would argue in the most tortured way about absolutely anything, it should go to one of our universities. There they are: serried ranks of people whose day-by-day enjoyment is to have furious arguments about matters of little consequence. [Interruption.] I have been one for many years.

I will tell the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that at Cambridge University, after the faculty of economics was redecorated, I was inveigled into taking part in a debate as to the order in which the portraits of its Nobel prize winners should be rehung and whether it should be Marshall or Keynes in the pre-eminent position. I left that debate after eight hours. No one was an inch further down the line of resolving it and, to my knowledge, the portraits have never been hung, because 20 years later no one is any further down the path of resolving it. I hate to say this: the only place where I have seen disputes followed with the same tenacious interest and complete unwillingness to give an inch is in my synagogue, but that is because it largely comprises lawyers. I do not make this point to be frivolous or humorous. The truth is that this is a most vexatious and disputatious group of people. They are employed to have arguments with each other; it reaches into every corner of their lives. If we think that they are unlikely to do so in these circumstances, we mislead ourselves completely.

Some people will be very well backed in pursuing this course of action. I think the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, made the point that some will be at a great disadvantage financially. The student unions that we are talking about are usually run by a small group of young people with no experience whatever of the law. Generally speaking, they are unable to exert any control over all the clubs that form the diaspora of their organisation—the Minister made that point. They will be put in a position that they cannot afford or control, and to which there will be no satisfactory long-term resolution.

All this brings me to say that the points that have been made, including by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, about having a regulator that can manage these things, and build on knowledge of how to manage them, is a route to a sensible solution. The rest of it—and I apologise if this is thought to be offensive; I do not mean it to be—is completely fanciful, and anybody who has spent more than a few weeks working in a university will know it.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have a huge amount of sympathy with the fears about the chilling effect of Clause 4 and the points that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, started off making. Basically, I am torn on Clause 4; I do not quite know where to go.

A number of people have discussed the potential of vexatious litigation. I think that is rather cynical. We keep hearing about all these bad-faith players. I am simply worried about litigiousness full stop, even by good-faith players. We know that a dependence on law courts to resolve problems can tangle us up and subsume the matter of fighting for freedom and free speech in legalese, lawyers and so forth, even if done with the best of intentions.

In other words, I do not want us to abandon what we all started off agreeing, which was that this Bill should not compensate for a need for a culture change in relation to arguing for the importance of academic freedom. It should not be seen as a replacement for that. I definitely do not want the law courts to get in the way, because they can kill off any possibility of that culture of the spirit of freedom being drowned out. That is one side of it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 60 follows on from what my noble friend Lord Willetts has said. We all seem to agree that we need a strong and effective regulator; that is absolutely at the bottom of this. My amendment makes absolutely clear the scope—or as lawyers say, the jurisdiction—of the regulator. It would prevent a subsequent challenge in court that the regulator did not have power to deal with this.

The amendment seeks to ensure that the OfS complaints scheme has a jurisdiction that is wider than the conventional ombudsman’s jurisdiction, which is simply to determine administrative fairness and reasonableness. It appears that the OfS complaints scheme is modelled closely on that of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. That is pragmatic and sensible, and we know that scheme works. However, in two decisions—the case of Maxwell in 2011 and a decision in 2007—the Court of Appeal limited in an important respect the jurisdiction of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator and ruled that, acting as an ombudsman, it cannot adjudicate on legal rights and duties and that such matters are to be left to the courts.

We need an amendment to make it plain that the limitation the Court of Appeal introduced in the case of the OIA will not apply to the OfS. Otherwise, the director for freedom of speech and academic freedom will have very limited powers to address the substance of university free speech disputes, which will typically concern the right to free speech and this Bill’s statutory duties. This amendment would remove an unintended weakness and provide the regulator with the powers that I believe this House wishes it to have.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 62. I can help the Minister by saying that it is probably imperfect. That may save her a lot of time later, as she tries to dissect it to see how well it would or would not work. I have been doing my best to find something that might work, but I am painfully aware of its imperfections. Perhaps the best thing I can do is explain what I want it to achieve. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, will not be upset by my saying that it follows his intentions as expressed in his amendment.

I am very grateful to the Minister, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for saying that he will review Clause 4. A viable alternative, which is not unusual in other regulated bodies, is to say that every institution regulated by that body should be compelled to accept its rules. This is a body within higher education, in the same sense that the REF, other funding decisions and many other decisions have now been imported into the world of universities. Most of us would probably have preferred that they remain more independent, but I have accepted the argument that this is very difficult to sustain, given some of the things that have happened.

In this case, what I am trying to achieve is that every institution providing higher education be registered with a body and consequently accept its rules. As the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, said earlier, it was intended that the Office for Students be constructed to be authoritative and to provide appropriate guidance. However, it is not then for a university, a student union or anybody else who brings a complaint through this mechanism to say that they will not abide by the decision taken by an officer—they could be named almost anything—in the Office for Students with the responsibility for adjudicating these matters.

I am keen that it should be a named office. A great deal of knowledge will be developed around the culture of dealing with these things in a way that probably would not happen with successive judges in courts. It will develop a knowledge and be able to respond in a knowledgeable way, and within the overall culture. The determination of this officeholder would be binding on those who had submitted the complaint.

I recognise that it is very seldom the case that people will say that this should be a completely untrammelled power. Therefore, I have also tried to build in a means by which the decision can be looked at—in a way, like an appeal. But in either case, whether accepted at first hearing or having gone through a second hearing, it is the decision and the parties must abide by it. I recognise that this makes no allowance for financial penalties, and I have not written anything of that kind into the amendment. However, it might very well make decisions about how a university, individuals within it or people invited to take part in its affairs should conduct themselves and, if necessary, reinstate a debate which has been cancelled. There is a whole variety of things that it could do.

I want to create something of that kind because it will be authoritative, it will address a number of questions that the Bill is obviously intended to address, and it will be from within the culture of higher education, rather than imposed on it from somewhere else, which is never a good recipe in higher education. It is miles better if it is felt to be at least in some significant way part of the beast of higher education. There may be many better ways of formulating this, but that is the amendment’s aim. It does exactly what a number of noble Lords have said, which is to reinforce the regulatory system by making its determinations mandatory for all those who have joined the club of that regulatory system. No doubt it would in due course provide guidance. That would probably be very useful after the first cases have been heard and people have begun to ponder their import and what has been learned from them. It would probably provide good guidance. That is a structure which the best regulators achieve.

The old mechanism in the Cabinet Office to look at the validity of regulation specified a number of things. I will not go through them all, but it specified that the outcomes should be proportionate, intelligible, widely disseminated and understood more widely. We should expect all that as part of the outcome from proper regulation. Better regulation makes people feel they can live with a solution, rather than being ordered to do it in a court or some other place.

This amendment hangs together with the deliberations on Clause 4. I am ready to accept that it will need radical reworking. Helpful as the House of Lords officials have been in my trying to get there, I can see that somebody, including me, could pull bits of it to pieces.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, there are some splendid amendments in this group. I very much liked what the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, had to say. I will speak briefly to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and to that of my noble friend Lady Morris. The former is an extremely important amendment on the broad principle that it is never too early to widen the horizons of children at school as to what may be possible and the options that may be there. We all know that there is a tendency for the career horizons of students to get narrower rather than broader, and if it is not there at a very early age then certainly is by the time they are in secondary school. They are affected by their peer group very strongly, and I hope that it is not too old-fashioned a phrase to say that it is a matter not just of gender stereotypes but of class stereotypes.

People are often restricted in their view of what is possible by the careers of people they know, such as their parents. These may be very good choices, but people need the whole bandwidth, as it were. I hope it is not seen as too facetious a comment—I know we are not talking about private schools—but if you attended Eton College and said that your career ambition was to be Prime Minister, that would be a reasonable and statistically likely objective, given that, I think, 20 Prime Ministers went to Eton. If that was your objective in life, the strong recommendation would be to go to Eton, assuming, of course, your parents could afford to send you there. If, however, you had been to the schools that most of us have been to and had said in your teenage years that your ambition was to be Prime Minister, you would have been told to sit down, have a drink of water and be more realistic in your expectations. I really think that before children start commenting, essentially in the same language as their peer group or their social background, the broader the options made plain to them the better—and, of course, the ways of achieving those options.

The other amendment I want to speak to is the one from my noble friend Lady Morris. I emphasise that, for me, the issue is not so much about parental examination, if you like, of life sciences, life relationship skills and the like; it is about the principle of accountability that could apply to any area of school activity. I must admit that it was news to me—I am nothing like the professional that she is—that schools could contract out pretty well anything they liked. To take an absurd example, it is possible that parents would not be able to discover what was in the English curriculum at school because it was commercially sensitive. Quite apart from that being unacceptable, it seems pretty impractical. Given that these subjects are being taught in schools to teenagers and the details of the curriculum are being withheld from parents because they are commercially sensitive, you would simply have a situation in the family where a teenager came home from school, their parents asked what they had been doing that day and the teenager responded by saying, “I’m afraid I can’t discuss it—it’s commercially sensitive.” On a practical level, even if the principle is right, which I do not think it is, my noble friend’s amendment should be supported.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I support pretty much all the amendments in the group. The one tabled by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, is particularly helpful and casts a glow over most of the others. That is why I plead it in aid when talking about Amendment 171F, spoken to by my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley and so strongly supported by both the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, with both of whom I align myself.

I should like to make three points. First, almost all of us in ordinary conversation talk about the importance of the relationship and the fact that education is a team sport—schools, kids and parents are all involved. We take it as a truth and do not question it any further. But the other thing about this team sport is that none of the bits is sealed off from another. All of us who have brought up children must have had the experience of them coming home and wanting to talk about something that has arisen in the curriculum they are being taught. If we do not have the smallest idea of what that might be, it will be a much less fruitful conversation than any parent, or the child who introduced the subject, would want to have. These points have to be fundamental and this amendment goes to the heart of the issue. If we mean that it is a team—something shared and collaborative—it must mean that we are all in the position where we can talk about what the other experiences and what the other knows. If not, it does not really mean anything. I hope that point will be taken very strongly.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

The fact is that, for large numbers of children—whether the areas in which they live have grammar schools or have all the difficulties outlined by my noble friend Lord Knight in terms of how the transfer between year 6 and year 7 works—year 6 is blighted for those children, their parents and carers and often, frankly, for their wider family members who are also worrying about where their niece, nephew or whoever else might end up. This is a year when these children, who are at the top of their primary school, ought to be developing their leadership skills in an age-appropriate way and ought to be looking to the next phase of their education and thinking about how exciting it is going to be. However, what they are actually doing is worrying: of course, they are worrying about SATs, but they are also worrying about where they are going to end up. The idea that some of them end up in one school and some end up in another—sometimes on the basis of admissions arrangements which are completely inexplicable to parents—is an absolutely terrible thing. If we really want education to work for all children and to be the service that can do the best by all children and young people, we certainly need to have reassurance from the Minister about no expansion of grammar schools, but we also need to ensure that we have genuinely fair admissions arrangements for all children, wherever they are.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 169. I express my gratitude to both Ministers on the Government Front Bench for a very helpful conversation. In the course of what they will say, they may well be able to allay some of the anxieties that I have expressed about the position of adopted children in the past. I greatly appreciated that, and want my appreciation recorded.

Amendment 169 is not about the big issues on admission which we have been discussing, although I completely associate myself—if I can pick just one of my noble colleagues—with my noble friend Lady Morris about geographic and local coherence in the arrangements we make. This amendment may appear to be a small and detailed matter by comparison, but I can assure the Committee that it is of the first importance to the small number of people who are impacted by it. Amendment 169 addresses the difference in educational access and assistance experienced by children adopted from care internationally, contrasted with those who are adopted from care in the United Kingdom, and the impact of these differences on their education and life prospects.

I declare an interest as the proud father of a quite exceptional adopted daughter who became part of our family on the third day of her life and is a great blessing. When I first spoke about this matter in the House, she was 10; she is now 13 and, until the discussion I had today, it appeared to me that nothing had moved forward in those three years of her life. However, I think that we will hear something rather more different today.

Adopted children face many challenges which are well documented. Many have special needs, some far greater than others, and, in many cases, because some spend years in care before finding a loving family home, they experience many of these difficulties to a very great extent. The care they experience is of very mixed quality, especially abroad, and they carry that experience alongside the fundamental experience of loss of attachment throughout their lives. There are multiple studies in the leading peer-reviewed journal, Adoption & Fostering, which most Members of the House will feel establishes the facts beyond dispute. The impact on these children has also been largely experienced by children from particular countries: China, India, Thailand, Ethiopia, Guatemala and some from Russia. As your Lordships will easily detect, the impact of discrimination has therefore been far greater on children of colour.

The scheme of intercountry adoption is regulated by the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in respect of Intercountry Adoption 1993. It was ratified by this country, among the then 24 EU members, and it says that all children adopted from care overseas should have the same rights as those in the receiving countries. There was nothing at all unwilling about our participation, and I note that David Cameron was in the forefront of making all kinds of adoption, here and abroad, easier. I hope that in the course of this discussion, we will hear about changes being made to the School Admissions Code, so that it will require local authorities and other admissions bodies to give the same top priority for pupil places to children adopted from state care in this country.

In case it is not well understood, although I suspect that it will be, I add that most of the children who are adopted from overseas, once they are adopted, come here and become United Kingdom citizens. The question on their parents’ minds will be, “Why on earth would they have worse prospects than comparable United Kingdom citizens?”. It is acknowledged that this would be discrimination between kids adopted here and overseas, and it would violate the 2010 Equality Act which states in terms that there must be no discrimination in school admissions based on country of origin.

The data is strong. While I will not delay the Committee for long, it is always worth trying to use an occasion like this to underpin why the changes are necessary. Some 94% of peer-reviewed papers show adoption to be correlated with lower academic attainment and related behaviour problems. This is clear among very young children and gets clearer with age—it is most acute among teenagers. Of the issues faced by children, trauma around attachment and anxiety about the loss of attachment are absolutely distinct and significant in all the research. Some 80% of adopted children express profound confusion and anxiety at school; two-thirds report that they are bullied. Neither they nor their parents feel, in an overwhelming proportion of cases, that they have had an equal chance. To underline the point as thoroughly as I can: adopted children are 20 times more likely to be excluded than their classmates. In the first three years of primary school, they are 16 times more likely to be excluded. None of these data are spurious; they all meet high levels of statistical significance and confidence.

I was very grateful to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said a while ago about the role of parents, because I feel that I am talking about the same thing. It is inevitable in these circumstances—and I believe quite rightly—that parents have the central role. It is not a mainstream role for national or local government for obvious reasons, but I know first-hand that parents pay the closest attention to the attributes in the pool of school options in front of them. Parents are the ones who interact with the schools and local authority. I promise you that, as a parent, you come to know which schools are most attuned to social and emotional trauma issues, can sponsor and encourage executive functioning for your child, know about providing sensory diets to regulate behaviour and grasp the implications of neurological divergence. You form self-help groups of parents grappling with these issues where you learn a lot and enjoy a lot of support. You get to know—because you have to—where there is specific training and knowledge of attachment trauma and where the head teacher and specialist staff really know what they are doing, as distinct from knowing what they should be doing. It is the way in which you choose the mission-critical path for your child and it does not rely then on good luck in admissions. It is parent engagement and decision-making at its clearest.

Many schools are excellent at many other things, but they are not all necessarily excellent at everything and may not be excellent at this vital thing which I am describing, which could determine whether your child joins that absurdly high number of kids who get excluded or bullied, underachieve or are profoundly miserable. It matters not one whit to you whether your child was adopted from here or abroad.

I look forward to what the Minister will be able to say but, having commented on the Ministers in this House, I say that much of the running on this was made by Nick Gibb when he was Schools Minister. He told local authorities in December 2017 that they should include children adopted overseas for priority admission to schools identified by their parents to give the kids the best chance. Unfortunately, a significant number of local authorities would not take that advice from the Minister for Schools, which I think was very sad. But we are now in a position where we have a ministerial team that will, and I sincerely welcome that. I also welcome that there will be further thought on the pupil premium plus, which is also very significant for this group of students, and hope there will be further comment on that.

It turns out that we did not need, as I thought for some years we did, primary legislation to achieve the things that I think can be described by Ministers today. I welcome that for a very straightforward reason that is not all that much to do with personal experience, although of course that does bear on me. I welcome it because kids get one chance, and kids who have difficulties need all the help they can to take that chance. It is up to us to give it to them.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, in this amendment. I have great respect for people who adopt. I personally support a wonderful organisation called Hope and Homes for Children, which has closed many orphanages in eastern European countries and allowed the children to be effectively adopted—it is not quite the terminology that most of these countries use. I took the Children and Families Act through your Lordships’ House, which was very substantially about improving adoption arrangements. I remember the noble Lord raising this point with me when I was a Minister. It seemed a no-brainer then and it seems to be so now, and I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister will support him in making this amendment.

I would also like to speak briefly on the point about academies fixing their admissions arrangements to their advantage, which has been mentioned. As a rule, this is unfair. There are some schools—schools of different types, actually—which have rather complicated admissions arrangements and one sometimes wonders whether they are deliberately complicated. But, as I say, I think it is unfair on the vast majority of academies and multi-academy trusts.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Triesman Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part two
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, there may be few times in recent history when new thinking on schools was more important. I share the overview and analysis of the gaps here from the noble Lords, Lord Hunt and Lord Knight, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the analysis of state centrism from the noble Lord, Lord Baker; I shall not repeat those points, because I simply agree with them. I will focus on Part 2, on how to optimise learning outcomes and remove impediments through modest changes to growing challenges.

I am unimpressed by the Government’s Pollyannaish narrative about sunny uplands and government levels of investment. It is not entirely the Government’s fault that we are in a deep shadow—quite possibly the deepest social and economic crisis in 75 years. Living standards are close to freefall. Covid has caused deep stresses, and Covid has not gone away. Health and social care is struggling with normal demands and a huge backlog of accumulated demands; half a million are on the social care waiting lists, and one in nine of us is waiting for routine surgery. Quite aside from the growth in demand for food banks and fear of heating bills, an average 2 million adults daily go a whole day without food, most often to try to feed their kids. That is the UK in 2022.

If anybody does not think that all this impacts kids and households very acutely, they must live on another planet. These kids do not inhabit sunny uplands. They are the kids who suffered most during lockdown and they are suffering most through economic recession, which is set to get worse, so please, let us have no platitudes or complacency today about government support. Nearly three-quarters of primary school heads say that catch-up funding barely scratches the surface of the problems that kids face. Head teachers are already diverting the pupil premiums from the most disadvantaged kids to general funds. This is a long-term blight which needs long-term investment or it will hobble our country.

UNICEF research shows that Covid impacted learning everywhere: the acquisition of foundational and socio-economic skills, mental health, and the safety and well-being of children. Here, we know that it spotlighted inequalities in our society, hurting the most vulnerable the most: the poorest and those from ethnic minorities. However, our problems predate the pandemic. A study in 2015 in England showed that, for every pound invested in school mental resilience programmes, England generated a net return on invest of £5.08. Research started in Finland and continued in this country estimates that every pound invested in preventing bullying in UK schools returned £7.52. Initiatives for pupils and teachers in mental health literacy have similar benefits. I am very grateful to the exceptional Sarah Kline, the CEO of United for Global Mental Health, for careful analysis of these data.

To be clear, I am talking not only about the struggles of kids with diagnosed mental illnesses, or those on the rapidly expanding list of spectrums, or kids who routinely see their SENCO at schools, or those with special challenges but without specialist help. These are significant cohorts on their own. I am talking about all kids, parents and a fair proportion of their teachers who are all impacting each other and amplifying major stress. Reliable research in the United States and the United Kingdom—on which Members of this House are experts, including my noble friend Lord Layard—conclusively demonstrates that these stresses subsequently hamper attainment across the curriculum. Put simply, children who are not provided with personal tools in their tool kit to be resilient enough to reach their potential do not reach it. The points made by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Altrincham, go very much to that point. These children’s parents and teachers do not have the training or tools to make enough of a difference. Of course, this is not the case for everyone, but a high proportion of kids are held back this way and a high proportion of teachers and parents cannot really help.

I declare my interest as a member of the board of a charity, Bounce Forward, originally started to respond to United States research on programmes to equip teachers and pupils with greater resilience. It is a small charity which reaches out to UK schools and local authorities, with real success. As you would predict, greater resilience has led to improvements right across the curriculum, in confidence and in reductions in bullying, as well as a hunger to catch up lost education time. Its methods could be embedded in school routines, timetables and teacher practice. The spread of good practice is too slow; mandated time is needed in timetables and modest sums need to be spent specifically on resilience through inset day slots and places in teacher education. It all seems so obvious, and Part 2 of the Bill needs to garner this information. I would like to hear whether the Minister can confirm that there are ways of transforming resilience and, roughly speaking, whether we can organise timetables to make that possible.

I know that I am short of time, but I ask the House’s indulgence for one brief note of real distress that I have about this Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, my noble friend Lord Watson and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and I have sought and received government assurances from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, that the full range of remedial steps provided to children adopted from care in the UK will be extended to children adopted from care abroad. I was always told—including by noble Lords here—that exclusion of this latter group had been an oversight and not a matter of policy. We all agreed that it was necessary to correct it. The House was repeatedly promised in writing that the anomaly would be corrected at the first available piece of primary legislation. This is that piece of primary legislation. However, the change is not in the Bill so we must amend it. These kids have one chance, not multiple chances. Every time that we neglect to make this correction, a small group of children suffers disproportionately—but we can stop that.

Adoption Support Fund

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have a similar interest to that of the right reverend Prelate to declare. I am blessed to be the father of an adopted and wholly remarkable young girl, who brings us huge joy. Like the right reverend Prelate, at least in respect of one aspect of her care, we have benefited from the fund’s existence. I know exactly what he is talking about. I also declare an interest as a member of the all-party group and of various self-organised adoption groups—the sort of groups that most adoptive parents find themselves in at one time or another.

I spent some years involved with and learning about adoption. I found that there is always something completely new to learn. I am particularly grateful to my noble friend Lord Russell of Liverpool for his outstanding leadership at Coram and for his ability to marshal and explain data that appears obscure to many people but is handled by him with a great deal of elegance and directness, which I value enormously. Although he cannot be here today, I also thank my noble friend Lord Listowel—he has also been a great force in this type of discussion or discussions about children in general—and I thank the other members of the all-party group. They are colleagues of great knowledge and commitment; I am honoured to be associated with them, as I am honoured to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester’s fine contribution.

If noble Lords will bear with me, for the next minute or so I want to try to describe why some of the things that happen feel so difficult. About 20 years ago, I chaired a national inquiry into housing benefit. I recall that inquiry today because, in it, we took evidence on the administration of housing benefit from more than 400 local authorities, from recipients and from those in the voluntary sector. Almost all of the local authorities had developed their own procedures. What they did was completely unintelligible—as unintelligible to them as it was to me. They had managed to wrap it in completely unintelligible language as well. Some of it was mysteriously linked to the procedures in other local authority departments with which they in housing benefit had never spoken—even when we found that their offices were next door to one another. Those other departments, which administered things such as free school meals or whatever, also spoke in equally mysterious codes and had equally labyrinthine processes.

I mention all this because, with the housing benefit, nobody—including its Minister—understood what was intended for some of the most deprived and struggling of their fellow citizens. Benefit recipients and authorities —everyone on both sides of the process—described their experience as like wandering in a strange land through a pea-soup fog. So I asked the inquiry to start again. It would assume the role of an out-of-work single mum of an adopted child in Easterhouse in Glasgow. Who and why on earth would anyone make her life more difficult and more uncertain? The inquiry would do its job in my view only if it could set out the value of housing benefit and the problems that it was supposed to address, so that we and that theoretical mum could understand it at the end of the process. Of course, we failed, but it was worth trying.

Adoption has many of the same characteristics. All the data speak to educational and developmental problems which we need to address. It will not be easy; the issues of attachment are complex. The desperately poor start in life that some children have because of drinking, addiction and instability on the part of their birth parents has already been described—fortunately, I have not experienced it. Those parents were never chosen by the child, but it is in their shadow that the child then lives. The overlapping conditions, the spectrums, can be punishing for any child and confusing for their adoptive parents and schools.

The multiple interventions for someone whom we really can help far better reminds me of that housing benefit experience. The harder your life is, the higher the hurdles we seem to erect for them to clamber over. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, wisely mentioned evidence from children given to the all-party group. They were able to explain their challenges and their appreciation of the adoption support fund. The higher the hurdles, the less resilience and sense of agency we provide for a child. Where we need scaffolding, we run the risk of far too little of it—far too little support for both the kids and their adults at home or in school. Parents and schools need systematic and coherent guidance; otherwise, it is simply too hard, too bewildering and too dispiriting. You want to do better for the child, but you find that you cannot.

It is not my aim today to be negative or to feel dispirited—I am in the same mood as my noble friend Lord Russell on this—but I just want us to do better if we can, very much in the spirit of Edward Timpson. I readily acknowledge the advances that have been made by Her Majesty’s Government, the value of the adoption support fund and the positive ministerial approach of Damian Hinds and of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, in this House. I acknowledge, too, the interventions of a former member of the Government, Andrea Leadsom—who I gather is not a member anymore. Theirs have been key contributions, as have been those from opposition leadership, including Lucy Powell MP and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in our own House.

There is much that has been done which we can admire, but the job is at best part done. What might we learn now, guided by the report that we have in front of us, by leading headteachers such as Stuart Guest in Birmingham and Robin Warren in Camden and not least by the remarkable and unflinching parents who came to the all-party group to give evidence or who write to me—and, I suspect, to others in this House—more or less daily? First, the value and success of the adoption support fund are undeniable. Its continuation was an excellent step. I know all the arguments about spending reviews—as a Minister, I have made most of them in my time and usually felt completely dispirited by being asked to do so—but a childhood is a long-term investment. Being a citizen is a long-term investment. Funding should be a long-term commitment. If we were talking about dialysis, for example, no one would dream of saying, “We’ll consider access to machines just for a year or two at a time.” The case for doing it in the long term has been made enormously powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and others today.

Given what we know about childhood mental health and diminishing personal resilience—subjects on which Matt Hancock MP and others have spoken eloquently —we know that we must back long-term remedial approaches as surely as we know we will face the long-term costs or the dire alternatives if we fail to treat kidney disease properly. No long-term plan is not a long-term option. What guarantees can the Minister give today, aside from saying that there is a spending review, which we all know?

I mention this only briefly, because I do not think it is the meat of this, but can the Minister also give some further guarantees to ensure that children adopted from care abroad will have the same education rights as kids adopted from care in the UK? He may respond by saying that he now knows that there is Private Member’s Bill before the House, but it would have been so much better if the Government had done it themselves.

The mind-boggling complexity that I referred to earlier relates to the fact that so many adopted children receive multiple diagnoses. The issues of attachment are often accompanied by sensory disorders, which may present as autism, attention duration problems, DCD, dyslexia and so on. Some kids may also, on top of that, be naughty. These are all things that happen in normal life. In the literature, misdiagnosis of a condition is frequent. Most significantly for today’s debate, it is the attachment issues that are considered last or not at all in that general mix. Parents may know and say that it is an issue to which they attach the greatest importance, given how much they know their child, but there are too few experienced school staff to recognise the issue properly. Exclusion tends to emphasise a breakdown in attachment. The evidence on rates of exclusion for adopted children should ring every alarm bell for us. I can say with certainty that it does for the parents who write to me.

I remain concerned about the general resilience and confidence of children—and of many of their teachers. You do not have to be a child with a problem to know that there are many challenges in life, but you may need a toolkit to handle the issues or the stress. They need to have those to become autonomous people.

Notwithstanding all that, there is a special and particular benefit that could be achieved. In our debate on 14 May, I suggested that a specific champion for adopted children be designated. The noble Lord, Lord Agnew of Oulton, made a response which is of course in Hansard from that day, saying that there were new systems in place and the Government needed to evaluate them. His officials may be learning from the initiative and studying it closely, but I tell noble Lords today that the overwhelming flow of parents’ reports that I get and the generous time that some schools have given me tell me that it is not working well. A qualified trauma lead in each local authority with real expertise would be a good start, as has been suggested. Some virtual heads do exist, but in many areas they do not. This is not yet an answer. I ask the Minister to return to the idea of having a champion who argues the case consistently and knits together the evidence.

Schools: Adopted Children

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Triesman]

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have for schools to improve the educational experience and attainment of adopted children, including those adopted from abroad.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the House for the chance to raise a matter that is close to my heart. I start by declaring an interest: I have an adopted 10 year-old daughter, and there is no greater blessing in my life than this wonderful child who became part of my family when three days old. Thank goodness she did not have in her background parents who were substance abusers or who bequeathed her other disadvantages, but children who arrive with difficulties of this kind are to be equally cherished.

I shall see in this debate no grounds for ideological differences on the matters that we discuss. David Cameron made a significant difference to our social attitudes to adoption. He could not see why, sensible precautions having been taken, a young person should spend many years in care before finding a loving home and family. The practical requirement for us is to make sure that it works to the greatest extent possible.

There are real challenges. For a variety of reasons, these kids have special needs, whether or not their birth parents were substance abusers or had major social or medical problems. The challenges are easy to identify, and the research is full of them. In summary, the DfE showed conclusively in 2018 that, at key stage 2, children who left care through adoption would do better at reading, writing and maths than children who were simply looked after, but they would do significantly worse than non-looked-after children. As Andrew Brown, Cerith Waters and Katherine Shelton show in their meticulous study published in Adoption & Fostering in 2017—that is the relevant peer-reviewed journal—education performance for children adopted from care demands comprehensive and robust study. The legal requirement to collate and monitor academic achievement and attainment of looked-after children unfortunately does not require specific study of adopted children. It would be easy to add this dimension to the research requirement. Will the Minister undertake to do so? It would certainly fit with the findings of the Timpson report.

The reasons for doing this are very strong: 94% of all the major research papers show adoption to be correlated with lower academic attainment and significantly elevated levels of behavioural problems. This is clear across all age groups to early adulthood and grows significantly in the teenage years. Can the Minister agree today to routine monitoring and reports? Will the data classify not just looked-after children but previously looked-after children who are now adopted? In the same vein, will Ofsted inspections focus some attention on the same children and the competencies within their schools to attend to the needs likely to be distinct among them, especially around the trauma of attachment?

Nearly four in five adopted children say of themselves that they are confused and worried at school and believe that other kids enjoy school far more. Two-thirds report being bullied or teased because of adoption. Some 70% of their parents fear lower attainment and three-fifths of those do not feel that their kids have an equal chance. These latter data come from Adoption UK, which I regard as an exceptional body. It details the challenges of abuse, neglect and trauma; the lack of widespread professional development in this area among teachers; the need for, but so often absence of, empathy; and, of course, the real paucity of resources, not adequately resolved at the moment by the pupil premium plus.

There is work in this field which is well worth celebrating, and I want to celebrate it. The leadership of Stuart Guest, head teacher of Colebourne school in Birmingham, has been of the highest order. He lectures widely and effectively to educationalists and parents and has had an impact even on Ofsted. His guidance is well worth seeking. A few schools that I know have reworked their provision. For example, in Primrose Hill Primary School the head teacher Robin Warren and the very talented SENCO Syra Sowe have recast provision among the many challenges experienced in their inner-city school, which is rightly seen as exceptional. They show that it can be done. Yet, generally, there are still problems at scale requiring urgent action.

Adopted children are 20 times more likely to be excluded than their classmates. In the first three years of primary school, they are 16 times more likely to face temporary exclusion. The Tavistock Institute demonstrates that 72% of these children have behavioural difficulties and many of their parents are struggling to cope—as are their schools and local authorities. The adoption support fund helps, but it is not really there for the schools. Parents, perhaps rightly, have the central role, but most of what they do relates directly to schools and has to be supported by them. Social and emotional trauma, capacity for executive functioning and the creation of sensory diets to regulate behaviour all need school engagement. A new balance has to be struck. Will the Minister this evening set out an agreement to provide new guidance to assist parents to engage in a professional dialogue with their child’s school to ensure that there is a holistic result from the deployment of ASF?

The best results in educational attainment have been seen in schools where there is specific training in attachment and a designated lead teacher. This should hardly surprise us; it is exactly the approach that we have adopted with safeguarding and Prevent. We expect someone to lead on it. Will the Minister today commit the Government to mandatory training on attachment and set out a timetable for doing so? Can we be assured that it will cover the needs of local authorities?

Quality teaching for teachers always starts in their own teacher training. Will the Minister take steps to ensure that attachment training is part of the initial teacher training syllabus? It could be done in the annual letter to the funding council, for example, as a way of accelerating it. Again, will the training schemes involve local authorities? Local authorities often have skills as commissioning experts, but they have few as social intervention experts; they are not the same thing. It is an area in which Ofsted can improve as well. It needs a battery of questions to ensure that a new framework of relationships is present between all the actors—a viable scaffolding. Can the Minister not insist on this?

There should be a requirement for an inclusion plan that is specifically funded. The pupil premium should do this, but many head teachers will tell you, without being prompted, that it gets mixed in with the other things that are now needed to prop up a school’s budget in a period in which there have been so many cuts and where budgets are under so much strain. Unlike the sports premium, it is not carefully inspected. Will the Minister ensure that inclusion plans for adopted children are funded and that funding is spent on those children, rather than simply being put into the general fund?

I advocate one more, but vital, change. Previously looked-after children adopted in the UK have rights to select, through their parents, the secondary school best able to meet their needs. It is a key judgment that parents are called on to make—and quite rightly. Kids adopted from abroad—even full UK citizens—have no such right. I know from helpful Answers to Written Questions that the Government want to correct an obvious anomaly. They plainly want to do so, and I applaud that fact. Indeed, the Schools Minister has written to all local authorities asking them to behave as though the law had already changed for this very small group of vulnerable children.

However, most local authorities, I am afraid, have not adjusted. For reasons that are all too familiar to the House, the Government have not found time for the legislation. Noble Lords may feel that it would have been a more fruitful use of a good deal of our time. Given that the change is wholly consensual, I ask today for a firm timetable. But I respectfully give notice to the House that I will seek the House’s approval to introduce a Private Member’s Bill to correct the inherent discrimination involved—better a government Bill, but if necessary someone else will need to do the job.

All these matters need to be championed. Sir Kevan Collins, the DfE evidence champion, has a very full schedule. The kids adopted from care need specific time and attention, and I suggest that they need their own champion. In any field of education, if a cohort of nearly three-quarters of the children were in difficulty, with their parents struggling to cope, we would surely act and allocate a clear responsibility.

Many reforms take time, and we may comfort ourselves on occasions that delay does not always destroy the opportunity altogether. But that is not so with these kids. They get their childhood and education just the once. When it is gone, it is gone. It is a simple fact, and it should compel us now to act decisively.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

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

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

My Lords, briefly, I support Amendment 17 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is an issue that will be referred to in later amendments in the passage of the Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I am particularly concerned about the mining of data which are available through all organisations that support students. That refers not only to organisations such as HESA but will obviously refer to the Office for Students in the future and to the universities themselves. It seems quite remarkable that we can ask for information.

I shall give the Minister and the House a clear example. You could ask a university to supply you with the number of students who have left a particular course over a three-year period. You could be told that you can have that information but it has a confidentiality clause linked to it, so you cannot publish or use the material without the express permission of the university or the individuals concerned. Most students are not interested in the individuals concerned; if they apply for a course in a subject or vocational area, they are interested in finding out how many people left during the course, how many qualified at the end of it and how many got jobs. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and subsequent amendments tabled on Report would make that information available not only to students but to people who want to advise students on where to go for their degree courses.

It is essential that we stop this nonsense of universities being able to protect information purely on the basis of confidentiality when there is nothing confidential in it at all. I can understand universities being asked not to release the names of individual students who have failed to complete, but this is a totally different issue of putting information in the public domain. It is high time that universities were held to account for making vital information available to students, and indeed to employers who may be using students from those courses.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I also support the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in this and would go a little further than the noble Lord, Lord Willis, with whom I profoundly agree. Over many years I have found that when you seek information in any of these areas in a general sense, you are told that it is essentially proprietary information owned by the universities rather than information in the public domain. That has several significant consequences. The first is that referred to by the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Willis. Many aspirant students or students who are on courses cannot get information to which they should be reasonably entitled.

As the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, it is also true that this situation makes things more difficult for employers. However, the third category for whom this situation makes things very difficult are those who are trying to do research on universities’ performance, on what works and does not and on what might be learned between universities. Provided that the identity of individuals is protected, there is no conceivably good reason not to have all that information available in a public sector as important as higher education and, indeed, in many other sectors as well. I suspect that in many other sectors it would be regarded as an extraordinary denial if this information were not made available for all those purposes—for users, those advising users and those doing research. I cannot see why in higher education this is regarded as private information not to be used for those purposes. That is wholly unsatisfactory.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

I wish to clarify an issue. When the Minister introduced this group of amendments, he said that he would ask for Amendments 15, 16 and 17 to be spoken to before he replied. Does that mean that we cannot speak to the rest of the amendments? I have other amendments in this group.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, I will follow what my noble friend Lord Willetts just said—but first perhaps I should say that I am afraid I was unable to participate at Second Reading because I was on parliamentary duties abroad. In Monday’s debates I did not have the temerity to participate among the serried ranks of vice-chancellors and other highly important academics. I felt that it was far beyond my pay grade. I have two degrees, one from Durham—I never attended any university function in the city of Durham—and one from the University of Newcastle, for which I had to do no work whatever. I am a former member of the court of the University of Lancaster, and for many years I have been a member of the court of the University of York.

The debate has made me look at Clause 106, which deals with co-operation and information sharing between the OfS and UKRI. The first two subsections of Clause 106 say:

“The OfS and UKRI may cooperate with one another in exercising any of their functions”,

and that the two bodies must,

“if required … by the Secretary of State, cooperate with one another in exercising any of their functions”.

My noble friend Lord Willetts rather questioned whether we need to pile obligations that may not be necessary on these organisations.

I hope that the Minister will tell us the Government’s view, because I hesitate as to whether we need to insist that there be an annual report with all these specific things. I would have thought that the bodies were likely to do that anyway and that the Secretary of State, if he found it necessary, would insist that they produce such a report. He would have the right, if he thought it necessary, to insist on the topics that should be covered in that report.

Over many years working in this building, I have always had a rather dismal view of imposing on people duties that are not really necessary. I remain to be convinced that what is proposed is necessary and await what the Minister says in reply.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and Amendment 509A. I do not want to repeat the points that have been made about the relative importance of teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level and teaching and research—all those seem to me to be fundamental, systemic qualities of the university system. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was helpful to us in using the analogy of a divorce. I have never tried that myself—not the analogy; I have never tried divorce—but I know that a good deal of attention then needs to be given to the children of that divorce. This is the attention being given to the children of this organisational divorce.

I will make one additional point which I think justifies the requirement for an annual report and for it to contain what is specified in the amendment. If the materials produced by world-class universities in other countries can show any dissonance in university provision in another country—in this case, it could be here—they will do so. They see themselves as being in a very competitive world. If they feel that there is a lack in standards of integration, particularly of research and teaching, they will say so and do their best to persuade students who might otherwise come here to go somewhere else. I make this as a completely empirical point; it is not ideological. You could sit in the library of many British Council offices around the world, look at the reports and see it for yourselves. I ask noble Lords to think about how we protect our reputation. One key way is to protect our reputation for the integration of these matters.

I have one question to add to those being asked of the Minister. At the moment, the Secretary of State, usually through the Minister for Higher Education—however named; in this case it is quite right to say that two Secretaries of State may complicate the matter—usually writes an annual letter in which a number of the sorts of things that are in this amendment are specified. They are not orders to the system but guidance as to the things that the Government might think important. Will the institution of the provision of such an annual letter continue? If it does, there will be a requirement for an annual review, because otherwise it would be impossible for people to take into proper account what is asked of them by the Secretaries of State.

I do not think that there has ever been a fundamental objection to the letter that is sent annually. Every so often it was galling to try to go through it. None the less, it was a reasonable way for people to say, “These are the things that concern us”, without trying to take control over autonomous institutions. If provision of such a letter is to continue and there is merit in it, this amendment would add further merit.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, I appreciate all the contributions that noble Lords have made to this short debate. The Government have consistently agreed with the many stakeholders who have said that it is crucial that the OfS and UKRI work together on a variety of issues across their respective remits. I assure noble Lords that we will reflect carefully on the points raised in the debate on these amendments and consider them in the days ahead.

My noble and learned friend Lord Mackay, the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and the noble Lord, Lord Smith, spoke of joint responsibilities and were right to cite some areas where they could be very helpful, particularly in the areas of research degree-awarding powers, the higher education innovation fund and looking at the overall health of the sector. Through Clause 106, we have empowered the two organisations to co-operate and share information. This power will support a number of their functions by allowing for a full and shared understanding of issues such as the stability, sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness of HE providers and the research base. The factsheet on this topic that we published in November 2016 provides further evidence of the priority that the Government attach to OfS/UKRI collaboration, and I hope noble Lords have found it helpful.

The Bill gives the two bodies discretion to decide between them the areas where they will co-operate. It also gives the Secretary of State the power to require them to co-operate should voluntary joint working between the organisations fail. Let me assure the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, that we fully expect that there will be some sort of governance arrangement between the two organisations which oversees their joint activity. While the two organisations may decide that such a governance arrangement is most effectively delivered in the form of a joint committee, it is not necessary to mandate this in legislation, although we will reflect on the views raised in this debate. Nor do we think that the best approach is to specify in the Bill the areas in which both organisations should work together. However, I can assure noble Lords that it is our firm intention that, in the unlikely event that collaboration between the two organisations is not systematically happening, the Government will use the power in Clause 106 to compel it.

While the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, through Amendments 22 and 508A respectively, have identified many likely areas of joint working, it seems probable that the areas in which the OfS and UKRI will need to collaborate will change in the future. We are of course mindful of the need for this legislation to stand the test of time. My noble friends Lord Jopling and Lord Willetts spoke of the OfS and UKRI co-operating. We remain to be convinced that further obligations are necessary. We agree that the OfS and UKRI need to exercise some discretion and would not want to prescribe in the Bill a list of areas of co-operation, as it would be restrictive and not future-proofed. As I have said, both organisations will report annually and we expect those reports to include areas of joint working. We are not convinced that creating a separate joint reporting duty is necessary. This may prove overly bureaucratic and require the organisations to duplicate effort.

Similarly with Amendment 509A, I propose that the Bill provides a strong legislative basis to ensure effective joint working. Such co-operation will need to take place at all levels throughout each organisation. While I understand and welcome the intention of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, I do not believe that this should be the responsibility of a single board member. In our view, it is preferable that responsibility is shared by the whole board. This is why the recently published advertisement for UKRI board members lists among their key duties that of ensuring that,

“strong, collaborative relationships are put in place to aid joint working with the Office for Students, the devolved HE funding bodies and other key partners”.

I hope this provides some reassurance.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay asked about various areas of joint working, including the awarding of research degrees. The OfS will be responsible for all degree-awarding powers, including research degree-awarding powers. However, I can reassure them that the OfS will work jointly with UKRI in making decisions around research degree-awarding powers.

I am therefore grateful to noble Lords for their suggestions. As I said at the beginning, we will reflect carefully on the amendments, but I respectfully ask that this amendment be withdrawn.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I should probably have declared my interests in my Second Reading speech—but they are in the register and I declare them now.

I will start with a theme that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and other noble Lords brought up: autonomy. I shall not, given how long the debate has gone on, repeat the points that the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, my noble friend Lord Winston and other noble Lords made. In particular, my noble friend Lady Warwick made a substantive speech which I hope will command the attention of the House. I remind the House of the mechanisms that we utilised in the past to try to ensure that university autonomy was sustained whatever the Government of the day, however unpopular or controversial the issues that might be raised, and however much public sentiment might not approve of them.

All through the history of modern universities, this country has inserted buffer arrangements between the state and higher education—and that is not an accident. It was an absolutely deliberate intention to make sure that the great qualities of universities could be sustained, irrespective of the calamities—the world wars and the other huge movements in tectonic plates. There was the UGC, later HEFCE, and even, when the polytechnics were going through the process of becoming universities, the work of the CNAA, which was designed to make sure that the older universities played a part in ensuring that the quality of the newer universities would be sufficiently adequate or better than sufficiently adequate to take their place as universities among the entire group—a system which worked well in England, Scotland and, as far as I am aware, in Wales. However, in every single case, and in particular in relation to teaching, the processes were both thorough on the part of those buffer bodies and also a protection of the autonomy and independence of universities so that they could pursue matters with genuine academic freedom.

In the field of research, the work that was originally done on quality assurance was never made prescriptive in a way that interfered with the autonomy of universities but expressed a desire to see great excellence being achieved in those places where it was possible and a broader spread of excellence in those places which perhaps could not do some of the work in particle physics or whatever it might be. I can remember—it is one of the interests I have declared—the negotiations with the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, about the character of the research excellence framework that he wished to see. Even the annual letter from the Secretary of State, first to HEFCE and then through the more recent period, was a general outline of what the expectations of the country were. It was never a set of orders to which universities must subscribe, which would lead, were they not to do so, to them being closed, cut back or denigrated. These were genuine protections. I am not trying to repeat a Second Reading point but these were the values to which this country signed up in 1997 in the UNESCO normative treaty on academic freedom and the independence of institutions, which this Bill would tear up.

I think that very careful thought about this amendment, which I intend to support, would be repaid, and the Minister will have to give very convincing reasons why, even in Committee, we should not consider it. Some of the arguments that have been put forward in your Lordships’ House this afternoon do not bear much examination. For example, as my noble friend Lady Cohen said, it is not the case that universities must all provide the full range of subjects. The wording is “an extensive range”.

I put it to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for whom I have great admiration, that it is not the case that many of the more specialist institutions are so narrow that they do not do a wide range of things, as those of us who have had the privilege of being Ministers covering higher education will know. Imperial College London was mentioned a while ago. The college is rich in every science, including all the social sciences, and it has absolutely magnificent ratings in all those areas. Even the conservatoire music colleges have usually extended their range. SOAS is certainly another example—and there are many. For the avoidance of doubt, there may be an opportunity in what the Minister says to achieve greater specificity regarding what we mean, but in my view that is the bottom line.

In conclusion, I am absolutely astounded by our squeamishness in worrying about whether we can define a university. There have no doubt been massive debates right across time about whether we can do that. I remember recently reading an account of whether Bob Dylan really had created literature, and there was a huge debate about what literature might be. There are always debates about these broader concepts. However, broadly speaking, when you go around the world and talk to people about coming to a university in the United Kingdom, they know very well what you mean. It is not an accident that so many people apply to come to the United Kingdom to study in our universities and they do not all complain that the terminology is fusty and old. I can imagine a focus group saying, “If only we didn’t call them universities. Let’s call them ‘higher education providers’ and floods of people will suddenly appear. The marketing will be transformed”. People come because of their expectations.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that there may very well be people who are dissatisfied, or whose children are dissatisfied—but, broadly speaking, when you look at the number of people who want to come here and who understand perfectly well what we offer, you do not see a system that has broken down, although of course it could do with some reform. I have looked high and low to see what crisis the Bill is intended to resolve and I do not believe that it can be found. If it could, I can tell your Lordships that three areas for which I used to have responsibility—the Chevening, Marshall and Commonwealth scholarships—would be devoid of people wanting them. On the contrary, every single one of them is fought for.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I apologise for taking more of the Committee’s time but I feel that we are losing sight of one of the major reasons why my name is attached to this amendment. I believe very strongly that we have to consider, up front, a definition of a university in the Bill. It is a question not of whether we do or do not have a definition but of who controls that definition. Absolutely rightly, the Bill distinguishes between degree-awarding powers and the title of “university”. So it should and so it must, because we are now in a world where many institutions which are not and will never wish to be universities give degrees. Further education colleges are a very obvious and important sector.

We are also, I am delighted to say, moving into a world with degree apprenticeships. The question is whether the definition of a university is perhaps not super-precise but clear and perfectly workable, like almost every other definition in legislation all over this land, or whether we leave the decisions about what a university is to the bureaucrats of the Office for Students, who will make those decisions but will never actually have to make them public.

So I come back to the purpose of this amendment and why we feel it is so important. If we do not have a definition in the legislation, there will be a definition but we will none of us have any control over it and we will never know what it is.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, Ministers are sometimes asked to explain the need for a Bill for which there is limited necessity and which may well do much more harm than good. I am not convinced by what the Government have said about why this Bill is needed. As they have looked for the changes in higher education, I am far from convinced that any of the safeguards they propose will protect what is most valued in higher education in this country.

There may be a case for bringing together research councils, as advocated by Sir Paul Nurse, although I am of the same view as the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave. I can see that innovation may be impeded by a silo structure but it is imperative to think through what we want to achieve and what we might lose if we get it wrong. The UKRI would need to understand that not all research can or should be directed at supporting business, important as I accept business is. We are world leaders precisely because we have never lost our passion for fundamental research or allowed its finances to wither. It often translates into near market or full commercial opportunities. The Bill risks jumping these stages. It could easily damage fundamental research, our international reputation for this research and, perversely, the strong business-facing mission that almost every university has.

In due course, I have no doubt that researchers will grasp that the UK should not be their choice of destination and they will go to places where they feel there is much more latitude and willingness to accept that broad and deep research, and its impact on international students, is more important. The Bill may—unintentionally, perhaps—turn off the tap for many international students in this way.

Like many of your Lordships, I think the Bill is dangerous to the fundamental values of United Kingdom higher education. At the heart of this legislation are a number of attacks on the autonomy of institutions and their capacity to establish and maintain standards, and the consequential damage to academic freedom. None of the assurances have so far been convincing. Indeed, only extensive amendment or rejection of key elements of the Bill are likely to inspire confidence. Almost all speakers have seen this as an area where additional protection is needed.

We have a long history in this country of tussling with these issues. The global status of United Kingdom higher education rests on past success in keeping political fingers off the higher education steering wheel, both in teaching and research. Our system of charters, which has been mentioned—and, indeed, in two cases, papal bulls—and the confirmation of independence in Acts of Parliament have laid the foundations for the independence which is so fundamental. Funding mechanisms have ensured that government finance and public interest always had a buffer mechanism between them—between the political world and ground-breaking research and study in universities. We designed it over all those years to achieve that outcome. We now put it at risk.

I wish to report two issues to the House. I sent, without comment, copies of the Bill and Explanatory Notes to colleagues who had served on the Commonwealth Universities Council, which I had the great pleasure of chairing at one stage. I prompted them in no way and, without prompting, they all wrote back and said the same thing: that it is extraordinary; that they had not realised that higher education in the United Kingdom had deteriorated so badly. They naively said that they believed, and continued to believe, that the international ratings lauded by the Government even today had been a true picture. They now believe that, for all the protestations to the contrary, the Government think that United Kingdom higher education is in need of urgent treatment—a life support system which only the Government can provide. Apparently, we need major injections of untested institutions able to award degrees whether or not they have a proper track record. We are so narrow and undiverse, my colleagues said, so complacent about the future that we need to concede authority over our universities to a Minister and to bureaucrats in Whitehall. The Bill sends a poor message around the world by any standards, and the medals system is probably the worst bit of all.

In 1997 my noble friend Lady Blackstone signed for the United Kingdom a normative instrument at UNESCO, a global treaty on the status of academic teachers and researchers and on academic freedom. I had the good fortune to be there and the honour to help draft the international commitment to which the United Kingdom assented. It guaranteed the protection of academic freedom, not least by protecting in treaty terms the autonomy of legitimate academic institutions. It set global standards and it expressed long-standing and long-established values in this country and many others. Several aspects of this Bill break those normative instrument obligations.

The powers of the OfS, starting at Clause 2, are outwith the United Kingdom’s international obligations. Will the Minister confirm that the Bill will be brought into full compliance with the international obligations to which we have signed up? Will he address this point in all aspects of the operation of the OfS and UKRI? Will he be prepared to write into this legislation that obligation to the UNESCO 1997 normative instrument—and to the 1998 world conference higher education declaration, to which we also gave our consent—so that, for the avoidance of doubt, the Government have accepted the current extent of autonomy for higher education institutions and teachers, which they signed their name to and undertook to protect?