Higher Education

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate from which I have learned a lot. We thank the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for introducing it; I am sorry that he did not say more about the quality of Sheffield’s own universities. I have visited both the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University; they have some really superb scientific laboratories, and they are acting as a motor for the regeneration of industry in that region. Sheffield also has one of the best politics departments in this country—dare I say it, possibly even better than Hull’s. We need to persuade people that Oxbridge is not the only place to go; they should get out there and go to the other excellent universities that we have around the regions.

There is still an overconcentration on Oxford and Cambridge. I note that a Liberal Democrat councillor in Cambridge has pointed out that Cambridge cannot expand much further because there simply is not enough water to support the larger activities it wishes to have. I note that the Government seem to give a high priority to a direct Oxford-Cambridge railway line, but a vital link across the Pennines would bring together Manchester, Leeds, Hull and others across the north. If levelling up is important, our regional universities have a key role to play in that, and we need the infrastructure as well. My children both work in research-intensive universities. My son stayed with us last night on his way from Edinburgh to San Francisco for a life sciences conference. If you are in that sort of world, you have to travel and you need good communications. If you say to someone, “You really should come and visit Leeds or Hull, but it will take an awfully long time to get there, even if you fly to Manchester Airport”, that is not going to help that university compete with Oxford, Cambridge and the south-eastern golden triangle.

We have superb universities in the north, the south-west and Scotland. The teaching-intensive universities are also very important to regional regeneration. As your Lordships know, Saltaire is part of the Bradford metropolitan area. The University of Bradford plays a key role in bringing back what was, at one point in the 19th century, one of our richest cities but has now become one of our poorest.

Partnerships with further education colleges are also important. It happens that one of Bradford’s further education colleges is based in Saltaire and I watch its teachers struggling with poor resources and poor salaries. I recognise that, if our universities are to flourish, they need not only enough well-qualified staff but technicians. We have a gross shortage of lab technicians across the United Kingdom at present, so this is one of the categories in which people must be attracted from overseas. Therefore, continuing education and bringing people back to work that they have missed is another very important part of what our universities do. I am proud to say that one of the best researchers at my son’s current lab came back from five years of child-rearing, on a charity’s fund helping women to return to university life. That is the sort of thing on which we need to focus if we are to reskill the whole of our workforce.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, talked about the underlying anti-university tone that one hears from some parts of our right. It is part of the infiltration of the right wing in Britain by the radical right in the United States. I recall reading an op-ed in the Telegraph some months ago, which said that our universities are systemically left-wing and indoctrinate their students. That is nonsense and I am sure the Minister agrees. Apart from anything else, a large number of our university staff are not even British, so are not involved in that sort of left-wing indoctrination.

It is deeply unfortunate that this tone is coming back into British politics. It works through the Government. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which we passed last year, imposed a number of restrictions on freedom of speech within universities. The Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, now before the House, makes a number of further incursions on university autonomy. We will be examining this in Committee in a week or two. The dismissal of experts, and of reasoned argument and evidence, is to be resisted at all costs, including by people who work for systemically left-wing foundations, such as the Resolution Foundation. I am sure this is part of the deep state that Liz Truss warned us against.

Research and innovation are extremely important. It is extremely important that we do not keep narrowing what is allowable to research to that which has an immediate and obvious pay-off. I am just reading Katalin Karikó’s book on her work, for which she has now been given the Nobel Prize. In her early years at the University of Pennsylvania, she was regarded as the “mad transferable RNA lady”.

I also remember a dinner with a professor of nanotechnology at Oxford, who was a few years older than me—we had sung together as boys—at which he assured me that nanotechnology had no possible commercial application whatever. Three years later, his son-in-law discovered a way to make injections without piercing the skin and the entire family became extraordinarily well off. We need to maintain research in the sciences, even if we are not quite sure where they are presently going. That is the path for the future.

As a number of noble Lords have said, we also need to talk about reskilling in a world in which whatever we learned between the ages of 10 and 23 will be out of date and irrelevant by the time we are 50. Since our children will have to go on working until they are 70, they will need to go back to university, with universities providing executive education, evening education and part-time courses.

If I am allowed to include the social sciences, I was asked at a dinner at an Oxford college last week whether I could justify the teaching of politics and international relations in universities on an academic scale—I should say that this was by a leading scientist. I could say only that I have trained a number of members of the British Diplomatic Service, people who work in the City on international issues, and students from abroad, and that it seems that teaching them about how to think, and how to understand that others do not necessarily think the same way as them, is a necessary part. I have a vivid memory of being asked by Boeing whether the LSE would give it an executive training course for some senior managers. We discovered that it had no idea that the rest of the world did not think like people who were born in Kansas. That is a justification for social science, in passing.

Financial crisis has been mentioned several times. We all have to recognise that, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, remarked, the long-term prospect for universities is of financial unsustainability and that, unless we get away from a model that depends on fees which no longer pay for the courses, and more and more overseas students, some of our universities will be in great difficulty. Those who say that tax cuts are the most important thing have to take this on board when thinking about the future of the country. That includes uncompetitive salaries, since our universities are in a global competition in which academics move from one country to another. I now note that some of the academics I know are moving from Britain to Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries or, of course, the United States.

Above all, we should never take the continuing success of our universities for granted. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, commented that they have always been training people but, in the 19th century, it was for the Church and the law, while German universities were training people for the sciences and engineering. Look at what happened to the British economy compared with the German, given the higher quality of German universities then. We could find ourselves in a similar position in the next 15 years if we are not careful. That is why we have to nourish our universities and ensure that they play their part in national economic growth and regional levelling up.

Free Music Education

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 12th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I completely agree, which is why all children do have this benefit and why music education is part of the national curriculum from key stages 1 to 3.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the former chair of the VOCES8 Foundation, which is a music education charity. We have found from going into primary schools that a large number of them have no teachers with any musical expertise. If that is the situation, it is difficult to do things such as getting the whole school to sing together, which clearly improves the entire atmosphere, let alone encouraging the more talented people. Are the Government willing to commit to ensure that every primary school has at least one teacher with basic musical training?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I understand the point that the noble Lord makes, but the data for 2021-22 shows that more than 86,000 hours were spent teaching music in secondary schools—I know the noble Lord referred to primary schools—which is more than at any time since 2014-15. The number of teachers has also increased since that date and now stands at more than 7,000, of whom 83% have a relevant post-A-level qualification.

Higher Education: Financial Pressures

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, none of us has felt the need to declare our interests, but I will declare a family interest as both of my children are currently working in research-intensive universities in this country, and both have been offered salaries considerably greater than they are currently earning. My son, who leads a systems biology laboratory at a Russell group university, is working in one of this country’s strategically important STEM areas. He came back from the United States after 10 years there on a Marie Curie scholarship—a European Union scheme that encourages researchers in North America to come back to Europe, and which, of course, no longer exists in Britain. He has had a series of temporary contracts and has just, at the age of 41, been offered a long-term contract. But he is still earning slightly less than what I understand most train drivers are earning. A hedge fund with quite close associations with a major donor to the Conservative Party offered him several times this salary some months ago—which was, naturally, a little tempting.

We should not assume that the situation in British universities can be maintained for very long. Some Members may have seen the article in the latest Times Higher Education supplement which suggests that Britain’s reputation as a science superpower is very shaky. It quotes Douglas Kell, the former executive chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council:

“Funding has dropped in real terms”


for research in STEM subjects

“by 60 per cent since 2009”.

It adds that, if you look at the data on who is producing the best scientific papers, the argument that UK science is so much better than European science, so we can look to partner with Asian and American institutions instead, is rather shaky too. Therefore, we should not take our current situation for granted.

I was shaken some months ago after talking to one of the younger colleagues with whom I used to work. He had moved from Oxford to Berlin because, he said, the institutions he now works with in Berlin are more intellectually rigorous and more pleasant to work in. That is worrying.

There are two narratives about UK universities that one hears from the Government and the Conservative Party. The first is that our universities are a major national asset, a crucial element of soft power and the basis of our claim to be a scientific superpower, as Boris Johnson was very proud of saying. They are also crucial for innovation, national economic growth and regional regeneration, and thus, as several Peers have said, for levelling up. Universities are also hubs for city regions and sources of skilled workers and cultural leadership for their regions.

The second, alternative narrative is that universities are nests of left-wing intellectuals, hostile to common sense and the instincts of ordinary voters, intent, to quote the Sunday Telegraph on “indoctrinating” their students with leftist or even Marxist ideas. It is the Policy Exchange perspective, if you like. University staff are alleged to be structurally biased. Even worse, they are “experts”, whom we all know are not to be listened to. They are “people of nowhere”, in the David Goodhart-Theresa May definition, dismissed as people who prefer foreign food and foreign friends to being proud of all things English. Particular fury has been directed at the humanities and the social sciences as offering irrelevant and frivolous courses. I find that a very dangerous narrative. I note that it comes from the anti-intellectual arguments produced by Republicans in the United States, and I hope that the Minister, who I know cares passionately about education, does not share it. Sadly, some of her colleagues do. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, remarked that it is a convenient arena for a culture war, if one wants one. We do not want one; it is the last thing we need in this country.

The Government have wobbled between these two narratives over the past eight years. They have squeezed university funding as severely as funding for schools and preschool education. They have frozen tuition fees, and they have left the EU, and thus Horizon and Erasmus, and also the structural funds, some of which flowed to universities in the poorer parts of Britain.

The incoherence of policy has been really quite remarkable. That is partly because of the high turnover of Ministers. In the five years since January 2018, we have had successive reorganisations of ministerial responsibility and witnessed seven Secretaries of State for Education come and go; six Secretaries of State for Business and Industrial Strategy, and now a seventh for Business and Trade; seven Ministers for Higher Education; and, thankfully, only five Secretaries of State for Science and Innovation. None has stayed in post long enough to master their brief; policies have drifted, with the overall assumption that the UK should distance itself as far as possible from the European continent and that, as far as possible, public spending on education and research should be held down. This is not the way we need to go, and we very much need to reverse course.

I add that the role of the Office for Students, which has been mentioned by several people in the debate, is itself in question. It is unclear whether the Office for Students is there to help support the university sector or to police and regulate what are seen as the dangers of the university sector. That is another area at which we need to look.

Several Members have talked about the freezing of tuition fees. Their value has dropped by well over 20% and the current inflation makes it worse. If we were now to have a collapse in the intake of students from east and south Asia, there would be a financial crisis in many of our universities. We have not talked much about maintenance grants and social mobility, but the squeezing of funds for foundation courses is a real squeeze on social mobility. Some universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are now working very hard to find bright but undereducated young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I suggest that, now that we are returning to rather a calmer sort of government—we hope—the Government might like to think about setting out another independent review of what we need to do about university funding when the current arrangements end in 2024-25, after the next election. The Minister will remember that, in 2008, the Labour Government kicked the issue of tuition fees past the election by setting up the Browne review. I recommend that the Government consider doing the same now, so that at least when the next Government come in there is some sort of consensus about where we need to go from here.

We have talked a little about international research networks. All research is essentially international and cross-border. We benefit enormously from links with European countries, North America and beyond, and we all recognise that leaving the European Union has damaged those links very considerably. Incoherence is there again across Whitehall. I have heard British academics working in the United States say that that they do not wish to come back to Britain because they know their American wives will be in the queue at the Home Office and that they will have to pay a lot of money to get them into this country. My son brought his American wife back and did pay the money he needed to pay to do it.

Some 20% or more of most universities’ staff come from abroad, and the tightening of Home Office policy on visas means that, when they accept a post, it is harder and harder for them to get their families into this country. That damages the culture of our universities as well. Getting the Home Office, the Department for Education, the Treasury and the Department for Business to have, together, a sense of understanding about what is needed for our universities to flourish is something the Government might usefully spend time on.

Others have spoken on Erasmus and Turing, so I need to say little, except that moving back towards a more sensible and rational relationship with our neighbours must include rejoining not only Horizon but Erasmus. Rejoining Horizon will not be easy and there are those who say, “Good heavens, we are going to have to pay for this”. Of course we are going to have to pay. We gained more from Horizon when we were members of the European Union than we paid in for the scheme, but that was because this was part of an overall balance between contributions and obligations to the European Union. Now that we are outside—and saving our £350 million, or whatever it is, per week—if we wish to rejoin these schemes, we will have to pay. There are advantages for us.

We are, I hope, an international country. We are escaping, I hope, from English nationalism, from which we have suffered so badly in the last few years. That means we need to maintain a university network which benefits enormously from its international ties but which contributes fundamentally to the prosperity of this country. I think the Minister shares all these objectives; I only wish the rest of the Government did.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, let me begin by thanking noble Lords for their important contributions during all stages of the Bill’s passage through this House. As we have debated, freedom of speech is critical to modern society and is the lifeblood of our higher education sector. This Bill will establish new mechanisms for ensuring that freedom of speech is properly protected.

The discussions we have had since the Bill was introduced in this House have resulted in important clarifications, which we debated on Report last week. For example, we discussed the very definition of freedom of speech. I am pleased that we have introduced amendments which make clearer what we mean by that term, referring to Article 10(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights as it has effect in the UK. I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, for spearheading the discussions on this point.

We have also addressed drafting problems to which noble Lords drew our attention. We have avoided inadvertently giving alumni the same protections as current students. We have also clarified that the new power given to the Office for Students to give guidance on supporting freedom of speech is not related to the duty on higher education providers and their constituent colleges to promote the importance of freedom of speech and academic freedom. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and my noble friend Lord Willetts for their amendments in Committee that brought these issues to light.

We have also made a breakthrough on an important issue. Building on the progress made in the other place, we have agreed to ban the use of non-disclosure agreements by providers and colleges in cases of sexual misconduct, abuse or harassment, or other forms of bullying and harassment. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, for tabling this amendment, which the Government supported. Significant progress has been made in this area in the last year, with many institutions signing up to the voluntary pledge not to use NDAs launched by the previous Minister for Higher and Further Education, my right honourable friend Michelle Donelan, in conjunction with Can’t Buy My Silence. I am sure this amendment will be celebrated when this Bill is brought back for consideration by Members of the other place.

I turn now to the provision which has generated the most discussion: the tort. Last week, the House decided to remove the relevant clause from the Bill. The Government will naturally reflect on this verdict and the arguments advanced to support it very carefully indeed. Of course, I am disappointed that noble Lords were not persuaded by the government amendments, which we tabled to ensure that a person could bring a claim only if they had suffered a loss and that claims could be brought only after a complaint scheme had been used. I will not repeat the arguments in favour of retaining the tort, subject to those amendments, as they have already been rehearsed at some length. However, Ministers continue to believe that those arguments have genuine force and validity.

On Report, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, raised some remaining concerns about the new powers of the Office for Students and how they might impact on commercial partnerships of higher education institutions, in particular university presses. I hope the noble Baroness has received my letter. If it would be helpful, I would be more than happy to meet with noble Lords who remain concerned to clarify those points, as needed. The noble Baroness also asked whether the Office for Students could refuse to give evidence to, for example, the Education Select Committee. We have spoken to the Office for Students, which has reassured us that it would co-operate fully with requests from Select Committees.

As a latecomer to this Bill, I have been struck by the level of engagement with it. That means there is a long list of people to thank—perhaps too many to mention by name. There has been an extraordinary number of constructive and helpful contributions, both during our debates in the Chamber and in discussions outside it.

These have included the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton, Lady Smith of Newnham, Lady Garden, Lady Morris of Yardley, and Lady Chakrabarti; the noble Lords, Lord Collins, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, Lord Triesman, and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath; my noble friends Lord Willetts, Lord Johnson, Lord Moylan, and Lord Sandhurst; the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry; and, last but definitely not least, the noble, and noble and learned, Lords on the Cross Benches: the noble and learned Lords, Lord Hope and Lord Etherton; the noble Lords, Lord Grabiner and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven; and the noble Baronesses, Lady Shafik, Lady Deech, Lady Falkner, and Lady Fox of Buckley.

There are many other noble Lords on all Benches whose speeches in debate have lent weight to our proceedings. While we may not have been in agreement on all these issues, I am heartened that the constructive debate heard in Committee and on Report has fostered a consensus in this House on the need for this Bill. I thank all of your Lordships for your engagement.

Lastly, I would like to express my profound gratitude to the stalwart members of the Bill team: Sophie Cahill, Jamie Burton, Vicki Stewart, Zoe Forbes, Samer Almanasfi, and last but definitely not least, Suki Lehrer. Throughout the last six months, they have provided nothing short of superlative support to me and to my ministerial colleagues, my noble friends Lord Howe and Lady Penn, and who have worked long hours, never without a smile on their faces—sometimes virtual, on Teams. Ministers, and indeed the House, are in their debt. I also express my personal thanks to my noble friend Lord Howe. In my words, he has definitely done the heavy lifting on this Bill with his professionalism, concern and extraordinary attention to detail, which are all well known in this House.

We send this Bill back to another place with, I hope, the same ambitions as when it reached your Lordships’ House. We need to support a higher education sector in which students and staff are free to speak their minds and engage in contentious debates. I believe that this Bill has the potential to make a crucial contribution to that aim, and I wish it well.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister. I also thank the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for the way in which he handled Committee and Report on the Bill, and the various consultations. It was a model of how Ministers should engage. We had a very constructive process with the Bill, for which I am, and all of us are, very grateful.

This Bill was drafted by the last Secretary of State but five. It was eventually inherited by the current team in the Department for Education, with what I dare say was an element of surprise as well as interest: it was, after all, initially drafted almost entirely by Policy Exchange through a range of papers, and Policy Exchange had based its analysis very heavily on American as much as British sources. There were therefore oddities in the Bill, which I hope we have ironed out as we have gone through.

Many of us were very much concerned about the potential for this Bill to damage university autonomy and extend state authority, including Members on the Conservative Benches and others. There are a number of areas in which we have made considerable progress on the defence of freedom of speech. For many of us, there is the removal of civil tort, not simply the reduction of the weight of the civil tort on universities. That remains to be sorted out in the Commons. I hope that the current ministerial team will reflect very deeply on whether to insist on its own amendment or to accept the amendment which a substantial majority in this House produced.

There is also the outstanding issue of the appointment of the new free speech champion. I very much hope that the Government will take particular care in finding a candidate for that position who will be accepted—possibly even welcomed—by the sector he or she sets out to regulate.

Still outstanding is the question of the degree of overlap between what is set out in this Bill, the recent National Security and Investment Act and the current National Security Bill. All of them impose new duties and new reporting requirements on universities, some of which have not yet entirely been ironed out, particularly for the National Security Bill—I hope we will be able to do that as it proceeds through the House.

I thank in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, who took the burden when I was away for part of Committee, as well as our team, including Sarah Pugh in our Whips’ Office. I know that the Bill team must have worked extremely hard throughout this. One recognises that civil servants are often not thanked enough for the criticisms they accept and the burdens they undertake.

Our universities are a huge national asset. They are an important part of our soft power in the world and a major source of our international income. We all need to be sure, as we have done in considering the Bill and as we look now at the National Security Bill, that we do not damage our universities in dealing with some of the problems and threats which they face, sometimes from their students, sometimes from visiting speakers, and sometimes from foreign powers, because they are such a large part of what makes this country very special.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank both the Ministers, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and also the Bill team for their accessibility and friendliness throughout the whole of this process. I also congratulate the noble Baroness on her list of commendations of noble Lords who have participated, and wish to second that. Obviously, I need to thank my noble friend Lord Collins, who is probably on his feet in the Grand Committee, which is why he is not here. He did most of the heavy lifting around the Bill, particularly around the—for our part—unlamented Clause 4 and the non-disclosure amendment, which the Government accepted and for which we are very grateful indeed. I also thank Liz Cronin in the Lords office and our team in the Commons, Jonny Rutherford, Vicky Salt and Tim Waters, who provided us an enormous amount of support, which, as the Ministers will know, you need when you are in opposition and dealing with complex pieces of legislation. The stakeholders have also provided us with great briefings; of course, some of them are serving vice-chancellors and heads of colleges here in this Chamber.

The question at the outset was whether the Bill was necessary at all. The answer is that the jury is still out, but probably not quite as out as it was at the beginning of the process. I think we can say with some confidence that we are sending back to the Commons a piece of legislation that is much improved from the one we started out with. The reason for that is twofold. The Ministers and the Bill team engaged seriously all the way through this but this House also engaged in a non-partisan, cross-party examination of the Bill, and I congratulate noble Lords on that.

There are still some outstanding matters which will need further attention, such as the role of the students union, but also the issue that the noble Baroness referred to, which is Clause 8, previously Clause 9. I and my noble friend Lady Royall, the noble Lords, Lord Patten and Lord Wallace, and others raised the risk of duplicating security regulations and the risk that the Bill might pose to the business community, the commercial relations and the trading futures in which our universities have been successful.

I definitely welcome the Minister’s invitation to have a meeting, because I think the Russell group and others need to further discuss this whole matter, particularly when draft statutory instruments and guidance are under consideration. I am grateful to her for saying that. We were still being approached about this as late as last night, because there are still serious concerns among some of our academic community.

I add my thanks for what has been a really interesting Bill. It is slightly outside my normal remit of health and equalities, but I have very much enjoyed being the number two to my noble friend Lord Collins and working with noble Lords on the Bill.

Music Education in State Schools

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I cannot agree with the noble Earl. The EBacc was designed to be limited, absolutely to allow for the study of other subjects—many of which I know the noble Earl rightly cares a great deal about.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister have any figures on the number of schools without qualified, musically trained teachers attached to them? I declare my interests as a former chair of the Voces8 Foundation, which has been going into primary schools, particularly where there is no teacher present with any musical training, to introduce some basic singing.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not have that specific figure to hand, but I am happy to write to the noble Lord with it.

National Tutoring Programme

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am surprised at the implicit criticism of a company being Dutch; the last time I looked, I think Randstad was pretty global, and I am sure that the noble Baroness would support a global outlook. I can only repeat that we are working with it on a weekly basis, and we are not going to accept second best. This contract, as is normal with many government contracts, is on a one year, plus one year, plus one year basis, with break clauses for both sides. Our priority is delivering for children.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, global companies are not always best placed for local delivery. I recall that one of the major outside contractors for test and trace was a company headquartered in Miami, whereas local health officers might well have known what they were doing much more quickly. The Government seem to have an overall bias in favour of outsourcing rather than insourcing, despite the clear evidence that outsourcing very often ends up more expensive and less effective. Is it not time that we began to look at the public sector, particularly local authorities, can deliver services, rather than constantly outsourcing them to more expensive external providers?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I just cannot agree with the noble Lord in this case. If we step back and think about what children need, there is more capacity in some schools and less in others to deliver tutoring support, which is happening incredibly effectively, but it is also clear that, in some areas, additional support is required, for example, where there are particular requirements for special educational needs or a particular intensity of this support. This programme was designed to be flexible and to address those needs. We are working with the provider to ensure that happens.

Schools: Music Education

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I can confirm what the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has been saying about the value of partnerships between independent and state schools. At the age of nine I was lucky enough to go to a choir school and thus to drop out of the state sector. The independent school to which my father’s employer then gave me a scholarship had, in those days, pretty basic music facilities. It has since invested in the most superb music and drama facilities, which thankfully it has made available to the state schools around it. Part of the increased gap that we see between the independent and state sectors is due to the fact that independent schools have now developed these superb facilities, and it is important that they share them. That is part of the public benefit that justifies charitable status.

As I said yesterday, I am the trustee of a music charity, the Gresham Centre, which runs VOCES8 and Apollo5. We have actively pursued those partnerships, and the best independent schools now actively take part in them. One has to praise what they achieve. I wish that the best quality would spread further through the independent sector than it has done so far.

My children went to a state school with a very good music department. I recall attending an early school concert there, at which a young woman of Nigerian parentage sang a Fulani folk song. I thought that was just what diversity in school music should be about. My son then went to the Saturday school at the Centre for Young Musicians in London, which was previously funded by the state sector and is since funded by the City of London Corporation. From there, he managed to go to the London Schools Symphony Orchestra and he spent a year at Trinity College, of which the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has spoken. He kept up with the musicians from the independent sector whom he met at university. My daughter was, frankly, intimidated when she arrived at university by the greater self-confidence and achievement of the children arriving there from independent schools. It is sadly that case that music scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge are dominated by children who have been educated in the independent sector, because children in state schools do not get the training and experience to qualify. That is part of the gap that we are talking about.

Where are we? Yesterday, the Minister produced what I felt were rather odd statistics, and evidence that I did not entirely recognise. The extensive briefings we have all received for this debate tell a very different story from the one he tried to tell us. There are two sides to what we are talking about: one is the basic provision of the opportunity to sing and to learn an instrument for all children who go through British schools; the other is the chance for the talented and the interested to progress and learn an instrument to a high quality of performance or to sing with a highly developed choir, and perhaps, in time, to become a professional in either the popular or classical sector.

We have the wider context of the impact of austerity across the board. We know that local authority support for music hubs has been squeezed. We see county orchestras—a valuable opportunity for young children to learn to play to a certain level while still in state education—being cut back. For example, Bradford Council has not only cut much of its support for music but has just closed its final trio of public toilets. Saltaire is a tourist destination as a world heritage site, and I can tell noble Lords that, when you receive busloads of school children and the recently retired who want to look around the village, the first question they ask when they get off the bus is about toilets. The closure of public toilets is an example of austerity at its most acute.

The squeeze on school budgets means that teachers in marginal subjects are not replaced and, with the EBacc, music now looks like a marginal subject. The Minister said yesterday that there are few vacancies for music teachers. But that is because there are fewer posts to appoint them to, and that is not something about which we should be proud.

Last Saturday, in the Yorkshire Post, there was a story on the decline in musical education across Yorkshire. It focused particularly on Foxhill Primary School in Queensbury, in Bradford. As I am sure noble Lords will all know, that is home to the Black Dyke Mills Band. The primary school, therefore, does its best to maintain its own introductory brass band, as well as a school choir. How is it funded? The band play outside Tesco for the four weeks before Christmas, and the school depends on that collection and other donations to support what it wishes to include in its curriculum but cannot otherwise afford. That is the sort of thing schools are having to do to maintain the music.

The evidence of the value of music in schools is overwhelming, and not just from the University of South Carolina, as the Minister cited yesterday. The Institute of Education at the University of London has done research on this in collaboration with my charity, and I am happy to supply that to the Minister if he has not seen it. Collective singing and playing develops discipline and concentration, and is demonstrated to improve numeracy, self-confidence and performance. People often say to me how good the Parliament Choir is. That is not terribly surprising. What basic qualifications do you need to go into politics? You need self-confidence and the ability to stand up on a platform and project your voice. And what do you get from music, particularly from singing? It gives you some of the basic qualifications that you need.

In the context of the charity I am involved in, I watch, for example, the acapella groups we have created in the Grey Coat Foundation schools performing songs written by their members. That is wonderful. It shows self-confidence among teenagers. The other week, I watched the Shoreditch academy choir perform in St Anne’s on Gresham Street, which is our centre. Seeing these mostly young girls singing their hearts out, I know that we are doing something for them. To neglect this dimension of education in order to cut taxes and public spending would be as irrational as cutting spending on the police while claiming to support the principles of private property and secure communities. I am sure that the Government would not think of doing that.

The charitable sector is having to take over more of what the Government previously funded. We are doing that, but the demand is enormous and more than we can cope with. My charity is now involved in training for schools where no teachers have any basis in music, providing them with the core skills to be able to manage a school singing together. The quality of this country’s cultural life matters. The quality of our education matters in the broadest sense.

Yesterday, the director of education for Voces Cantabiles Music at the Gresham Centre sent me a cutting from Singapore. It said that the Singapore authorities are more and more clear that exams and maths are not the full story. When educating children, you need also to inculcate imagination, independent thinking, self-confidence and the ability to work with others. Music does that, and that is why it is a core part of education.

Education: GCSE Music

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

To answer the noble Baroness’s first question, about where the research I am using comes from, an initial five-year study by the University of South Carolina showed that music instruction appears to accelerate brain development in young children. I entirely accept that, but let us also talk about the amount of time that is being devoted to the teaching of music in schools. Music as a percentage of teaching time in secondary schools has remained broadly stable since 2010: 2.4% in 2010 and 2.3% in 2017. I get that data—I am conscious of noble Lords saying that we are loose with our data—from the school workforce census, a survey of 76% of secondary teachers and 85% of secondary schools.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of a musical education charity which is overwhelmed by requests from schools and music hubs for us to collaborate with them because the number of teachers with training in music teaching is declining and is expected to decline further in the next two or three years. Do the Government accept that music is going to be pushed aside as an extra subject and is likely, in state schools, to be provided increasingly by volunteers and charitable bodies?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the vacancy rate for music teachers in schools is currently 0.6%, so I do not believe that there is a crisis. I am glad that the noble Lord raised music education hubs, which are supporting more than 650,000 children learning to play an instrument. More than 340,000 pupils took part regularly in area-based ensembles and choirs, of which more than 8% were eligible for pupil premium. Music is an important part of our system and the Government are supporting it.

Schools: Music

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of a musical education charity, the VCM Foundation. Can the Minister give us figures on the numbers of music teachers in schools? We as a foundation have discovered that large numbers of primary schools, in particular, now have no teachers with any musical experience. We and some others are now helping to train teachers without musical experience to ensure that all schools have the opportunity to sing together and to learn to work together in the way that one can do through music.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the most recent figures I have for 2016 show that there is only a 0.5% vacancy rate for teachers of music in state schools.

Education and Society

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, many of us will have noted the 2017 report of the Social Mobility Commission published last week, with its sobering analysis of Britain’s alienated and socially marginal communities. It documents the widening gap in educational attainment between London and the English regions, with the worst “cold spots” for social mobility now in former industrial towns and coastal communities. It is striking that the map of low attainment, and of high levels of young people not in employment, education or training, matches so closely with those areas which voted heavily to leave the European Union 18 months ago. These areas, the report concludes,

“feel left behind, because they are. Whole communities feel that the benefits of globalisation have passed them by, because they have”.

We have become a more socially divided country, not so much along ethnic grounds as between the more successful and better educated cities and suburbs and the unskilled white working class. Worse, sections of our media and some of our politicians have written these British citizens off as a feckless underclass sponging off benefits and reluctant to work. Furthermore, part of our country’s dependence on immigration from the rest of Europe has come from employers’ preference for recruiting already trained and motivated workers from abroad as against the harder task of training and motivating poorly educated local people.

Broader and better-quality education will not be enough on its own to bring those depressed and deprived communities back into harmony with the rest of Britain. We need, as the Social Mobility Commission also remarks,

“a more redistributive approach to spreading education, employment and housing prospects across our country”.

We need a reinvigoration of local government and local democracy. We need investment in transport links outside the south-east. We need local industrial regeneration, and we need locally available finance to support the growth of local enterprises, which our banks have been so poor at fostering. It goes without saying that Brexit will do nothing to better their chances and is likely to make their situation worse.

However, education and training are essential to social as well as economic recovery, and early years education is the most important priority for children from poor and often vulnerable families, often with only one parent and without the support of a wider family group. I am proud that the Liberal Democrats in coalition successfully introduced the pupil premium, which teachers in these areas tell me has made a real difference to the resources they have at their disposal. I regret that the Conservatives managed to cut back on the Sure Start programme, and I am concerned that continuing cuts in local authority grants have led to some places that most need to provide early educational support leaving many vulnerable children without it.

I say to the Labour Party that increasing public spending on the 50% who do not go to university, all the way through from nurseries to apprenticeships and continuing and further education, should be a higher priority than cutting fees for university students. I dissented from my party’s official line on tuition fees for this reason more than 10 years ago, and I hold to the same view today. Any progressive politician should put improving the life chances of the least advantaged first, before answering the pleas of the more confident and more successful.

There are many other measures we should be pressing to encourage children from those communities to learn, to gain life skills and employment skills, and so to grow up feeling that they are included in our national community. Teacher turnover in such areas is too high; we need not only to grant them more respect but to offer them higher pay and perhaps bonuses for extended service. Teach First has shown how to bring bright graduates with enthusiasm into schools; we should extend that, perhaps by writing off student loans at a progressive rate for those who teach in priority areas.

School partnerships are clearly important in encouraging teachers to stay and in lifting performance. Multiacademy trusts are one way to provide such partnerships, but local authorities should also have a wider role in encouraging schools to work together. The independent schools sector should also do more to support school partnerships, partly, but not only, to justify the public benefit obligated by their charitable status. I have seen some excellent independent/state school partnerships in action, but I am conscious that best practice does not extend across much of the independent sector.

Schools do not operate all year round: disadvantaged pupils fall back every summer. Liberal Democrat councillors in north Bradford have been running a summer school for children between primary and secondary school over the past two years, with, so far, excellent results in helping them make the school transition successfully and continuing to grow and learn. We need both non-governmental groups and local authorities to provide more opportunities for disadvantaged children out of school hours and terms to widen their perspectives and raise their aspirations. Middle-class children benefit, after all, from a range of out-of-school activities from an early age; working-class children miss out on that. I was saddened to discover that the visit to the Lake District which the north Bradford summer school included was for some children the first time in their life that they had been outside Bradford.

Low aspiration flows from low expectations of worthwhile jobs to work for, so the transition from school to work is a vital aspect of successful secondary education. Some employers and chambers of commerce now work closely with local schools to provide work experience and the prospect of training, but, again, best practice does not extend far enough across the country. Further education colleges, which should work in partnership with schools and employers, have been, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, and my noble friend Lady Garden have said, financially squeezed and sidelined. We also need to strengthen the idea of continuing, lifelong education for all, which means strengthening the role of FE colleges in providing it. I wish I could believe that the apprenticeship scheme will help in this respect; much of what I have heard suggests that it will fail to provide the most crucial element, which is a path into skilled work for young people.

The Church of England already plays a constructive part in limiting the disintegration of our divided society. I too recall the Faith in the City initiative, which I understood as an appeal to middle-class and rural congregations to care about and support the Church’s work in deprived communities. Church schools have a good record in providing more than just the national syllabus in education and in providing children in schools with a wider sense of community. I thank the diocese of London in particular for the support it gives to the musical education charity which I chaired for 12 years, which takes singing into state schools that have lost their music teachers and takes musical children out of their neighbourhoods to sing and perform with others—to raise their eyes and voices beyond what they thought was possible.

The Church of England, and many other institutions within our civil society, have much to contribute to repairing the weaknesses of our country’s education and so in rebuilding an inclusive society, but the prime responsibility lies with our public institutions, our state and our Treasury to invest in the quality of education needed to rebuild a flourishing and inclusive national community.