Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the Bill. I hope that the Government are sympathetic to it and, whether or not it manages to complete its passage through both Houses, will take up the issue of citizenship education as a very important element.

We face a collapse in public trust in our democratic institutions. Surveys show that public trust in Westminster politics is lower than it has ever been since surveys began. We had the lowest turnout for a century in the most recent election. We should not regard our democratic institutions and respect for the rule of law as entirely secure. We see populism in the United States threatening to undermine the entire structure of the American constitution, democracy and the rule of law, and in three or four weeks, we may be watching with some horror what might be the contested outcome of the American election. We need to make sure that populism does not begin to get a stronger hold here. That requires us to engage our citizens and teach them the values of mutual respect, freedom of expression and the value of our institutions as such.

There is very little respect for Westminster politics at all in the public at the moment and many of us are worried about the decline among our young in the willingness to tolerate and have mutual respect for alternative opinions, which is part of the current freedom of speech debate, and where the limits of freedom of speech are. So we do need this Bill, or we need the Government to take it on board. We know the obstacles. I read the Telegraph from time to time, which tells me that all teachers are left-wing and that university teachers are systemically left-wing and indoctrinate their pupils. We know all those things, but actually, it is possible to teach citizenship in a relatively neutral way and to challenge people. I used to have Chinese and Singaporean students at the London School of Economics and I had to work very hard to explain to them that disagreeing with me, as their teacher, was a good idea—but that is part of what one has to do.

Yes, we need proper education for teachers, too, to encourage them to do it. We need to make sure that our schools are part of their local community, which they have ceased to be, partly, in recent years. We need to make sure that school budgets are large enough for this, because citizenship education is a vital part of ensuring that our democracy flourishes.

In this House in the early 19th century, a number of Peers objected to universal education on the grounds that it would lead to having a population that did not respect its elders and betters. However, when the Reform Act 1866 came through, there were a number of Liberals who argued that “Now is the time we need to educate our masters”. We need to educate our citizens and that why this Bill is a good thing.

Freedom of Speech in Universities

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness probably understands that the speed with which the decision was made related to the timing of the commencement. It is right to be taking the time now and engaging in the way we are with those on various sides of the argument about the best way of proceeding on this issue.

I have spoken to some of the legal experts that the noble Baroness cites with respect to hate speech and understand their points. The fact that there is debate about the impact of this piece of legislation is part of the problem that we seek to ameliorate through the options we are considering. What I know is real is the strong concern among minority groups that the reality of the impact of the legislation would be to allow on to campuses people whose views would be reprehensible and would potentially constitute hate speech. That is what has brought the fear about. But this is not, of course, the only reason. There has also been considerable concern from universities themselves and from unions representing university staff about the disproportionate burdens. On the Jewish academics, I have met a lot of people already and I am more than content to meet with that group as well.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that the story in today’s Telegraph about the inability of the Cambridge University Conservative Association to have Suella Braverman visit this evening says that it is on advice of the police, due to another MP’s visit to Cambridge, and not that of the university.

I remind the House that we on these Benches were deeply doubtful about the Bill and the disproportionate burdens it would impose. Any decent conservative would believe in the autonomy of civil society and of academic institutions.

This is not a new problem. The first lecture I ever gave as a university lecturer, in January 1968, had a large demonstration—because they thought the dean was giving it—against Vietnam and the then Labour Government. My wife and I, as undergraduates, had taken part in earlier demonstrations about South Africa, which the Daily Telegraph, of course, denounced at the time. We now have a culture war in the United States, in which Republicans are—

[Noble Lords]

Question!

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Okay. Does the Minister accept that the urgency of this is rather overstated at present, given the one report in the Telegraph this morning? Does she agree that it is absolutely right to reconsider a badly drafted Act, and that the autonomy of universities has to be respected?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the House that this is a repeat of an Urgent Question and is therefore time limited to 10 minutes.

Erasmus+

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The Prime Minister and the Government are working hard to reset our relationship with our European friends. The Prime Minister hosted the EPC at Blenheim Palace, where he was able to engage with all our European friends, and he has recently visited Germany, France and Ireland to progress that positive bilateral work. I think the noble Earl slightly underestimates the impact of the Turing scheme, which has enabled considerable numbers of young people to go overseas to work and study. The Government support it and will want to think about how we can develop it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I understand that one of the objections to rejoining Erasmus+ is the imbalance between the flow of students coming into Britain and those going out. Would it not be sensible, given the crisis in modern language learning and teaching in English schools, to link the negotiations to rejoin Erasmus with a deliberate scheme to improve the learning and teaching of French, Spanish, German and Italian in British schools, and to encourage British students to go across to those countries and develop fluency in those languages? That would help the British economy and our relationship with other countries and would have a whole host of other benefits.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an important point about the significance of languages. I am not sure that we are presently in a position to advise or inform in detail on the UK’s negotiating strategy. But, notwithstanding that, he is of course right about the significance of languages. That is why in the department we have, for example, a very good scheme for language assistants, which enables people from the UK to travel overseas to work as language assistants and those from overseas to come to the UK. It has been successful in helping to promote language learning. We are also very committed to ensuring that the great benefits that come for younger people from being able to take part in school trips, for example, are also facilitated despite the additional barriers that have been put in place by our decision to leave the EU.

Higher Education Funding

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in welcoming the Minister to the Lords, I remind her that I have often thought that the academic lobby is the most powerful lobby in this place. If you add up the chancellors, chairs of councils, former professors and others, it certainly is overrepresented in the Lords and its voice is always quite loud. I welcome the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko. It reminded me that when I was a graduate student working on some of the most advanced computers available, you fed punch cards in at one end, got reams of paper out of the other and typed up the result on your typewriter afterwards. The world has moved on a great deal in the last 40 or 50 years.

I disagreed strongly with the interpretation of free speech in universities of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, just as I disagreed with the article by her former colleague Frank Furedi in the Times the other week, but that is a debate for another time. On the whole, the question of freedom of speech in universities is very complex.

We all know that our university sector is one of the jewels of our global reputation and our economy. The global rankings show that. I am particularly proud of having a child who is now on the staff at Imperial, which rose to second in the QS global rankings this year. My son works in another of the top 20 universities in this country. However, we must remember that universities do not necessarily stay at the top of the list. I am always conscious that 120 years ago, German universities were dominant in the world, far better than British universities and much better than American universities at the time. Of course, German universities collapsed when the Nazis came into power. Many of their best staff left to colonise British and American universities, which led to the dominance of American universities for some time.

Our universities have improved considerably over the last half-century. The quality of teaching in our universities has improved a great deal since I started out, without any training at all in how to teach at university, in a research university which often regarded teaching as an interference with the serious work of academic research. I therefore have mixed views on students as customers. We now have to pay more attention to our undergraduate as well as our graduate students, which we certainly did not do in universities that thought they were important in the 1960s, when I was first appointed to one.

We do not need a major restructuring of the current system or a royal commission. It is far better to promote a gradual evolution towards an even more varied higher and further education sector. We need to take higher education and further education together and to recognise that if we talk about the challenge to higher education funding, the challenge to further education funding is even more acute. The intermediate skills which we need in this country—construction, nursing, social care—we are desperately short of. That is part of what drives high immigration into this country: the Ghanaian nurses, the Latvian builders and others. Getting further education right is as important to improving the British economy and the quality of our society as getting higher education right.

We often underestimate the sheer diversity of our higher education sector. I have worked in three research universities, but I am very conscious in the north of England of the extent to which regional universities play a very important part in the regional society and the regional economy. I often hear people say that students who come to study in a particular place often stay on after graduation, which reinforces the local economy and society.

Therefore, we absolutely must go on supporting teaching universities as well as research universities. I look at Huddersfield University as an example: the quality of the classical and pop music it teaches its students becomes an important part of a different part of our economy, as does the quality of its teaching of textiles and other useful vocational elements. So I hope we will come back to talk about the further education sector in more detail; it is one we should never neglect.

The previous Government were incoherent about and often hostile to universities. I heard someone yesterday talking about the “war on universities” hopefully now being over. We are all conscious that the Home Office has done its best to push back against the Department for Education and those concerned with research in imposing the appallingly high visa and health charges on staff and students visiting Britain. I hope the Minister will take up with the Home Office the sheer damage that these charges do to international staff and staff exchanges.

My son is a systems biologist working on joint projects with academics in Germany, France and the United States. If you say to someone, “We would like you to come and work in our lab for 12 months but, if you want to bring your wife and two children with you, it may cost you £20,000 or more up front to arrive in Britain”, you are blocking academic exchange and academic quality. Good universities are unavoidably international universities and movement is a very important part of how they all behave. Getting universities right and having a coherent policy across Whitehall, with a sense that universities are again valued, is an important message which I hope this Government will get across.

Let us also recognise that there is a substantial problem in maintaining the quality of our universities in pay. Academic pay, as with teachers’ pay and even more so with further education pay, has sunk very badly over the last 20 years. My son has just been given a permanent contract, 14 years after he finished his PhD. On promotion, his salary is now larger than his mother’s professorial pension. I note that as an example of just how poorly academic scientists in key areas—he is a systems biologist—are paid now. That is another part of the funding challenge for our universities because, in a highly international world, we will not keep our academics. They will take jobs in the United States, Berlin or elsewhere unless we do something about pay.

Research funding has been mentioned, as well as research buildings and computers. The decision to review the Edinburgh exascale computer is extremely worrying, because we need to maintain global quality by maintaining the quality of resources for our research. That is all part of a very broad challenge to funding.

We are now at peak international student flow. Nearly a quarter of students in our universities come from abroad—almost too many from China, and I suspect more at the present moment than there will be in three or four years. That means that we need to think about other ways in which to fund our future universities. I would like to see our university and higher education sector moving towards a model that I saw when I went to the United States, to Cornell University. It is a comprehensive university that has a Nobel Prize winner teaching in its physics department, but also faculties of home economics, hotel administration and labour relations. I would like to see universities run from top to vocational, if you see what I mean.

We should have more part-time degrees, apprenticeship degrees and continuing education. I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rees, that we should think about two-year degrees as well as three-year degrees, and taking your higher education in bits as you move on. It is important to be more flexible and less snobby about that dimension of higher education.

We agree with the Quality Assurance Agency paper, which said:

“It is increasingly apparent that the current funding arrangements in England are unsustainable in the long term”.


They are unsustainable and they need to change. That probably means we have to increase student fees to some extent. We certainly need to increase research funding and we must also fundraise for bursaries, scholarships, endowments and buildings.

Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a passionate debate about a policy which we do not know the details of yet, and which, as many noble Lords have said, has a lot of consequences about which one cannot be entirely sure at present.

I am a disciple of slow government. Many of the things that I objected to most about the last Conservative Government involved Ministers dashing in and pushing ideas which they had not thought through and which ended up being disastrous. I fear that this is one of those. Certainly, it ought not to be implemented within a few months of being decided.

I am also in favour of a simplification of the British tax system. As your Lordships know, the British tax system is far more complicated than that of any other European country, with a much longer tax code. This, I fear, is a further complication, with a great many administrative costs around tax moving backwards and forwards, being remitted and so on and so forth.

There is a major problem of inequality and unfairness in the provision of education in this country. It is the result both of the steady increase in private school fees above inflation over a very long period and of the cumulative cuts in funding for state education over the last 20 years—which has doubled the gap between what we spend on children in state schools and children in the private sector, with the quality of the facilities in private schools increased even further by donations supported by their charitable status. There is a desperate need for better funding of state schools as a result.

My party has been in favour of education for all, funded out of general taxation, for a very long time. Titus Salt, a Liberal MP who built Saltaire, built a village with a school at its centre. His successor as Liberal MP for Bradford, WE Forster, introduced the first Elementary Education Act. I do not recognise the description of that Act given by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor. Of the debate within the Liberal Party, including on the Prussian elements, I recall that it was between nonconformists and Anglicans over the quality of religious education. The noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, a historian, will remember that a number of Tories in both Houses opposed the Acts on the principle that education for the working classes might encourage them to become discontented with their station in life. I fear that there were those in the Conservative Party of the last 20 years who had something of that in their attitude to the funding of state education.

Clearly, we need better-funded schools for all our children, not only for the principle but because they are citizens and because competitiveness requires us to get the skills that we need for all our population. Since we have just seen riots committed by people who were no doubt excluded from school in their teens and have not really had any purpose in life since, there are all sorts of reasons why funding for state education should increase. I was very glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, say that. Every time he hears one of the candidates for the Conservative leadership say, “What we want are further tax cuts and a smaller state”, I hope that he thinks that that would mean further cuts to state education. We cannot say we want a smaller state if we want to have decent education and welfare for our citizens.

We are talking here about a very diverse private sector. I see it in both Yorkshire and London, and I am struck by how different it is. Day fees for private schools in London are twice those in Yorkshire. In West Yorkshire, 4% or 5% of people go to private schools—these are Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, Jewish, Muslim, Quaker; small, large, prestigious. In south-west London, a quarter of students go to private schools. There is a real social divide, and it worries me that the gap in income and wealth in London is also becoming a gap in society, which we need to tackle.

Of course, there are also specialist schools. I declare an interest here: I dropped out of the state sector at the age of nine by getting a full scholarship to a choir school just across the road. It is not entirely clear what will happen to these specialist schools, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said. I was given a full scholarship, and thus free education, as a choirboy. Does that get taxed with VAT or are those schools exempt? When I went on to secondary school, my father’s employer gave me a two-thirds fee scholarship, very generously—good-enough scholarships were then provided by Barclays Bank. I presume bursaries and partial scholarships are subject to tax, but what about Eton’s King’s scholarships, for example, which are full scholarships for very bright young men? I have met one or two of them—one or two when they were Cabinet Ministers. Do those come under the same system or not?

I will not touch on SEN; I am sure the Minister will, because it is clear from all the messages that we have got that SEN raises very considerable difficulties, and the problem again is that state schools are unable to provide sufficient support for SEN in their schools. I have talked to teaching assistants, and I have seen some of my local schools. Titus Salt School has an extremely good stream for dealing with children with Down’s in the school, but there are not very many schools that can manage to do that sort of thing. I look forward to what the Minister will say on SEN.

As a party, Liberal Democrats oppose VAT on schools, but we do favour a much tougher approach to charitable status and the requirement to contribute to public benefit. The charitable status of schools requires a major contribution to public benefit. Some do this extremely well—I have visited the York partnership and have seen other schools—while others are beginning to lose any sense of providing the sort of public benefit that is required and have gone a long way from their original charitable purposes, with international franchising, failure to invest in bursaries for local students or failure to share their facilities with the local community. I am aware of one school in Yorkshire that had such a large proportion of foreign students that it was beginning to lose any possibility of optimising British values or even making sure that English remained the dominant language within the school corridors.

I read this in the Times the other week, written by a Policy Exchange staffer:

“It is through education that children come to understand themselves as citizens of a nation, with a common culture and shared values”.


I hope we all agree with that, and I hope we think that that should be the purpose of all schools, public or private, state or independent. That requires active partnership between the state sector and the independent sector. It requires independent schools to recognise that one of their main purposes and responsibilities is to act as members of their local community and their national community. That said, I think this is the wrong way to encourage that, and that the priority for the Government should be a qualitative improvement in our state schools, their funding, staffing and resources. I regret that we have not yet seen enough evidence of that.

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.