Higher Education Regulatory Approach
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, on this side of the House we very much welcome the decision of Government to commence the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, but we deeply regret the delay, the changes the Government propose to make and the extent of the continuing uncertainty and delay over several parts of the Act.
One of the areas of inconsistency and confusion that the Government have introduced relates to complaints. The Government have chosen to create two different routes for complaint: via the Office for Students for academics and via the OIA for students. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain the rationale for separating them. Would it not be simpler to abandon the jurisdiction of the OIA and give all its powers to the newly empowered OfS? Can the Minister explain what the Government think will happen if—as is perfectly possible—standards of protection diverge in some way and one group is given stronger protection than another? What happens if a member of staff complains to the OfS and a student complains to the OIA on the same case?
Sticking with complaints, the Government have said that they will amend the law governing the operation of the OfS complaints scheme so that it is not obliged to consider every complaint. However, the Act already says that the OfS can dismiss a complaint on the basis that it is either frivolous or vexatious. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain why this is necessary. What will be the threshold for the complaints the OfS will consider? Will there be an appeals mechanism if the OfS does not judge that a complaint meets its threshold?
The Government have also created a specific gap in relation to student unions. The Secretary of State said that she fully expects
“student unions to protect lawful free speech, whether they agree with the views expressed or not”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/1/25; col. 380.]
But the Government have said that they want to remove the provisions about student unions. Many of the worst and most egregious cases of cancellation, affecting a number of Members of your Lordships’ House, have involved student unions.
Given that the Government both accept the existence of a free-speech problem on campuses and the need for increased standards of protection, does exempting student unions from the scope of the Act not leave a serious gap in effective protection? Going forward, how do they expect to deal with cases where a cancellation, which would have been unlawful if done by a university or college, is done by a student union?
We are also in the dark about timing. The Government have said that they intend to bring into force various parts of the Act and seek to amend and then bring into force others. Can the Minister set out for the House the timescale for both processes? When will the statutory instrument bringing into force those sections which the Government will not seek to amend be laid before Parliament? When will the commencement date of those sections be? When will the Government seek to make the amendments they have proposed and when will they seek to bring those new sections into force? The start of the 2025-26 academic year seems a natural implementation point, but everyone involved in this area needs maximum certainty, so it would be helpful if the Minister could commit now, or commit to making a statement as soon as possible, setting out that timeline.
In the other place, the Secretary of State said that her decision to seek to repeal the tort clause was made to save universities and colleges expense by avoiding the risk of litigation. Can the Minister confirm that such a risk necessarily exists, even if the form of that risk takes the threat of actions for judicial review rather than civil litigation? Will she agree that, along with action under the complaints scheme, universities and colleges that disregard their duties under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act could face public law legal action, and that they must not see the removal of the tort clause as an excuse to drag their feet or ignore their legal responsibilities?
On foreign influence registration, we were very disappointed to see the removal of the monitoring of overseas funding changed, not only with what felt like very unfortunate timing but when the documents from the Free Speech Union judicial review have been revealed, which indicate that the potential impacts on English higher education institutions operating in China played a role in that decision. Can the Minister reassure the House that those decisions were not made with the Chancellor’s recent trip to China in mind?
I acknowledge the courage and energy of those academics who have campaigned to get this law enacted, including Dr Edward Skidelsky, who co-ordinated the letter of over 650 academics, Professor David Abulafia, Professor Alice Sullivan and Professor Abhishek Saha, as well as the women’s rights groups, including Sex Matters, led by the tireless Helen Joyce, the powerful legal interventions, including from Akua Reindorf KC and Dr Julius Grower, and the many groups that have campaigned on this issue.
At the end of this, we are left with more questions. If you were the governor of a university or responsible for managing these issues, what would you be doing now? How long are you going to have to wait until the position is clear? As so often has been the case since the election, why are the Government undoing something that had received full parliamentary scrutiny without a plan for what to put in its place? I suspect that I shall receive a long letter with answers from the Minister, but I live in hope for some answers now.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, Liberal Democrats welcome this Statement, but for entirely different reasons from those that noble Lords have just heard from the Conservative Front Bench. This provision removes parts of the Act that we opposed during its passage through Parliament, and we welcome that; we were not persuaded that the Act as such was necessary. It was driven by the right-wing culture war against the “liberal elite”, with the Conservatives taking their cue from the Republican right and Fox News as, sadly, they so often have done in recent years.
The Act contradicted Conservative and Liberal principles of respect for autonomous bodies and limits to government regulation and state interference. The costs of litigation imposed on cash-strapped universities threatened to be heavy. The burdens on student unions were likely to be beyond their capacity to manage. The proposed duplication of complaints schemes was badly designed. The requirements for accepting outside speakers virtually unconditionally potentially opened the door to Holocaust deniers, as well as to extremists of the right and left.
A number of universities clearly made mistakes in responding to student attempts to cancel academics and visiting speakers with whom they disagreed. I recall at least one vice-chancellor admitting in a private conversation the mistakes that he had made in responding to conflicting pressures. But it is not the first time that university administrations have made mistakes in responding to student protests—this is not new. I have been on both sides of student protests and staff responses since the 1960s, with changing political crises and student generations protesting on South African apartheid, Vietnam, civil rights and race inequalities, fossil fuel investments and tuition fees.
Previous British Governments had wisely left it largely to universities as autonomous bodies to moderate intolerant demands and teach their students—and some of their staff—to disagree well and respect those with different opinions. Some of today’s student radicals have been determinedly intolerant in defending identity politics, but many on the right have also become determinedly intolerant in their anti-woke crusade.
The question of foreign funding is also difficult and delicate—but also not new. During my time at the London School of Economics, we had an embarrassing controversy over a large Middle East donation, but we later accepted a larger donation from another Middle Eastern ruler, after whom one of the LSE’s buildings is now named. There are potential problems about undue financial dependence on funding from any foreign state, especially if it is a non-democratic state. Can the Minister explain further what the reference in the Statement means when it refers to taking
“more time to consider implementation of the overseas funding measures”?
What sort of consultation with the HE sector is intended, and how long might it take?
The Act as passed was disproportionate in responding to incidents that had failed to respect freedom of speech. It was also disproportionate in the regulatory and financial burdens that it imposed on universities and student unions. I hope that the Minister will reassert that freedom of speech is a principle to be cherished, recognising how difficult that can sometimes be—and it is not a weapon to be used in a Trumpian “war against woke”.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for their responses to the Statement. I am glad that the noble Baroness welcomed the decisions made by the Government, which, when I addressed the House previously in response to an Urgent Question on this issue, I emphasised would be informed by careful consideration of a difficult and challenging issue. I believe that that is what the Government have undertaken to do.
I also share the noble Baroness’s admiration for those academics, many of whom I have spoken to as part of the consultation that we have done on this, in identifying the challenges in this really difficult area and the need for some of the protections offered by the legislation. I share with them a view that there should be an absolute commitment, which this Government have, to freedom of speech and academic freedom. It was, of course, a Labour Government who first enshrined freedom of expression in law through the Human Rights Act and suggested that higher education must be a space for robust discussion, intellectual rigour and exposure to new ideas. If you go to university, you must be prepared to have your views challenged, to hear contrary opinions and uncomfortable truths, to be prepared to argue for your own beliefs, and to accept that others may hold beliefs that you disagree with. Academics must be allowed to test the truth of the ideas that shape society and participate in a free exchange of ideas, including where that causes shock and discomfort.
The noble Lord is right that those are long-standing principles. However, while they have been long standing and not negotiable, this is a difficult and contested area that has not always had the senior or thoughtful engagement that it needs from university leaders, as the noble Lord concedes. That must change. That is why we gave careful thought to which elements of the legislation were appropriate to be commenced, which areas we thought needed repeal and which needed amendment.
On the complaints system, I was struck by the number of people who argued for the need for a form of redress and by those higher education institutions which argued about the burdensome nature of the tort and the ability for anybody potentially to take complaints under the previous legislation. It was asked why we should distinguish between students and staff. The OIA already has responsibility for considering student complaints and considers some complaints about freedom of speech. It will be much clearer for students to know where to go for any complaints. I am confident that the OIA and the OfS will work closely on complaints that come to them at the same time, as the noble Baroness outlined.
On the change to the complaints system, I have a strong expectation that one of the requirements to consider a complaint will be that it has gone properly through new internal processes that universities either are setting up or will set up. It is therefore appropriate that the responsibility on the OfS for the complaints system should be a power, not a duty, thereby enabling it to choose that the complaints which get to it have the strongest thematic and sector-wide implications.
We have decided not to commence provisions that would impose new duties on student unions, which are neither equipped nor funded to navigate a complex regulatory environment, with all the potential legal and regulatory costs that will entail. Student unions are already regulated by the Charity Commission, and we fully expect them to protect freedom of speech and the higher education providers within which they operate to support their student unions to do so. That is an appropriate balance to ensure that student unions come within the ambit of the spirit of what is happening here.
On whether a JR will pose the same threat of legal action as the tort, a judicial review does not bring with it the threat of damages in most cases, unlike a civil claim. That threat, linked to the tort, caused higher education providers concern about the burdensome nature of the tort and caused them to instruct lawyers earlier. Frankly, we decided that we would rather see tight resources in higher education going to support students and staff rather than to instruct and fund lawyers.
On the point about foreign influence and overseas measures, I thought more of the noble Baroness than to trot out the slur that the timing of this had been influenced by the Chancellor’s visit. She knows that this has been under consideration for much longer than that. This Government are committed to ensuring that our world-leading universities remain free from foreign interference. Providers should expect the OfS to take regulatory action if they allow foreign Governments to interfere in free speech or academic freedom, and it can already request information from providers about overseas arrangements. We are working at pace on the implementation of the foreign influence registration scheme, which will apply to universities across the UK, but we also want to ensure that, as we work carefully on this, we keep open options around the commencement of the overseas funding measures. We will return with more information about our decision on that.
On the timing of the legislation, as the noble Baroness asked, we will come forward with more information in a policy paper on the details of how our proposals will be implemented and legislated for. That will include more information about timing.
Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]
Lord Wallace of Saltaire ExcerptsFriday 18th October 2024
(3 months, 1 week ago)
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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(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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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—
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(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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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(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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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(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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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.