National Tutoring Programme
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am surprised at the implicit criticism of a company being Dutch; the last time I looked, I think Randstad was pretty global, and I am sure that the noble Baroness would support a global outlook. I can only repeat that we are working with it on a weekly basis, and we are not going to accept second best. This contract, as is normal with many government contracts, is on a one year, plus one year, plus one year basis, with break clauses for both sides. Our priority is delivering for children.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, global companies are not always best placed for local delivery. I recall that one of the major outside contractors for test and trace was a company headquartered in Miami, whereas local health officers might well have known what they were doing much more quickly. The Government seem to have an overall bias in favour of outsourcing rather than insourcing, despite the clear evidence that outsourcing very often ends up more expensive and less effective. Is it not time that we began to look at the public sector, particularly local authorities, can deliver services, rather than constantly outsourcing them to more expensive external providers?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I just cannot agree with the noble Lord in this case. If we step back and think about what children need, there is more capacity in some schools and less in others to deliver tutoring support, which is happening incredibly effectively, but it is also clear that, in some areas, additional support is required, for example, where there are particular requirements for special educational needs or a particular intensity of this support. This programme was designed to be flexible and to address those needs. We are working with the provider to ensure that happens.
Schools: Music Education
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I can confirm what the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has been saying about the value of partnerships between independent and state schools. At the age of nine I was lucky enough to go to a choir school and thus to drop out of the state sector. The independent school to which my father’s employer then gave me a scholarship had, in those days, pretty basic music facilities. It has since invested in the most superb music and drama facilities, which thankfully it has made available to the state schools around it. Part of the increased gap that we see between the independent and state sectors is due to the fact that independent schools have now developed these superb facilities, and it is important that they share them. That is part of the public benefit that justifies charitable status.
As I said yesterday, I am the trustee of a music charity, the Gresham Centre, which runs VOCES8 and Apollo5. We have actively pursued those partnerships, and the best independent schools now actively take part in them. One has to praise what they achieve. I wish that the best quality would spread further through the independent sector than it has done so far.
My children went to a state school with a very good music department. I recall attending an early school concert there, at which a young woman of Nigerian parentage sang a Fulani folk song. I thought that was just what diversity in school music should be about. My son then went to the Saturday school at the Centre for Young Musicians in London, which was previously funded by the state sector and is since funded by the City of London Corporation. From there, he managed to go to the London Schools Symphony Orchestra and he spent a year at Trinity College, of which the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has spoken. He kept up with the musicians from the independent sector whom he met at university. My daughter was, frankly, intimidated when she arrived at university by the greater self-confidence and achievement of the children arriving there from independent schools. It is sadly that case that music scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge are dominated by children who have been educated in the independent sector, because children in state schools do not get the training and experience to qualify. That is part of the gap that we are talking about.
Where are we? Yesterday, the Minister produced what I felt were rather odd statistics, and evidence that I did not entirely recognise. The extensive briefings we have all received for this debate tell a very different story from the one he tried to tell us. There are two sides to what we are talking about: one is the basic provision of the opportunity to sing and to learn an instrument for all children who go through British schools; the other is the chance for the talented and the interested to progress and learn an instrument to a high quality of performance or to sing with a highly developed choir, and perhaps, in time, to become a professional in either the popular or classical sector.
We have the wider context of the impact of austerity across the board. We know that local authority support for music hubs has been squeezed. We see county orchestras—a valuable opportunity for young children to learn to play to a certain level while still in state education—being cut back. For example, Bradford Council has not only cut much of its support for music but has just closed its final trio of public toilets. Saltaire is a tourist destination as a world heritage site, and I can tell noble Lords that, when you receive busloads of school children and the recently retired who want to look around the village, the first question they ask when they get off the bus is about toilets. The closure of public toilets is an example of austerity at its most acute.
The squeeze on school budgets means that teachers in marginal subjects are not replaced and, with the EBacc, music now looks like a marginal subject. The Minister said yesterday that there are few vacancies for music teachers. But that is because there are fewer posts to appoint them to, and that is not something about which we should be proud.
Last Saturday, in the Yorkshire Post, there was a story on the decline in musical education across Yorkshire. It focused particularly on Foxhill Primary School in Queensbury, in Bradford. As I am sure noble Lords will all know, that is home to the Black Dyke Mills Band. The primary school, therefore, does its best to maintain its own introductory brass band, as well as a school choir. How is it funded? The band play outside Tesco for the four weeks before Christmas, and the school depends on that collection and other donations to support what it wishes to include in its curriculum but cannot otherwise afford. That is the sort of thing schools are having to do to maintain the music.
The evidence of the value of music in schools is overwhelming, and not just from the University of South Carolina, as the Minister cited yesterday. The Institute of Education at the University of London has done research on this in collaboration with my charity, and I am happy to supply that to the Minister if he has not seen it. Collective singing and playing develops discipline and concentration, and is demonstrated to improve numeracy, self-confidence and performance. People often say to me how good the Parliament Choir is. That is not terribly surprising. What basic qualifications do you need to go into politics? You need self-confidence and the ability to stand up on a platform and project your voice. And what do you get from music, particularly from singing? It gives you some of the basic qualifications that you need.
In the context of the charity I am involved in, I watch, for example, the acapella groups we have created in the Grey Coat Foundation schools performing songs written by their members. That is wonderful. It shows self-confidence among teenagers. The other week, I watched the Shoreditch academy choir perform in St Anne’s on Gresham Street, which is our centre. Seeing these mostly young girls singing their hearts out, I know that we are doing something for them. To neglect this dimension of education in order to cut taxes and public spending would be as irrational as cutting spending on the police while claiming to support the principles of private property and secure communities. I am sure that the Government would not think of doing that.
The charitable sector is having to take over more of what the Government previously funded. We are doing that, but the demand is enormous and more than we can cope with. My charity is now involved in training for schools where no teachers have any basis in music, providing them with the core skills to be able to manage a school singing together. The quality of this country’s cultural life matters. The quality of our education matters in the broadest sense.
Yesterday, the director of education for Voces Cantabiles Music at the Gresham Centre sent me a cutting from Singapore. It said that the Singapore authorities are more and more clear that exams and maths are not the full story. When educating children, you need also to inculcate imagination, independent thinking, self-confidence and the ability to work with others. Music does that, and that is why it is a core part of education.
Education: GCSE Music
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
To answer the noble Baroness’s first question, about where the research I am using comes from, an initial five-year study by the University of South Carolina showed that music instruction appears to accelerate brain development in young children. I entirely accept that, but let us also talk about the amount of time that is being devoted to the teaching of music in schools. Music as a percentage of teaching time in secondary schools has remained broadly stable since 2010: 2.4% in 2010 and 2.3% in 2017. I get that data—I am conscious of noble Lords saying that we are loose with our data—from the school workforce census, a survey of 76% of secondary teachers and 85% of secondary schools.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of a musical education charity which is overwhelmed by requests from schools and music hubs for us to collaborate with them because the number of teachers with training in music teaching is declining and is expected to decline further in the next two or three years. Do the Government accept that music is going to be pushed aside as an extra subject and is likely, in state schools, to be provided increasingly by volunteers and charitable bodies?
Lord Agnew of Oulton
My Lords, the vacancy rate for music teachers in schools is currently 0.6%, so I do not believe that there is a crisis. I am glad that the noble Lord raised music education hubs, which are supporting more than 650,000 children learning to play an instrument. More than 340,000 pupils took part regularly in area-based ensembles and choirs, of which more than 8% were eligible for pupil premium. Music is an important part of our system and the Government are supporting it.
Schools: Music
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of a musical education charity, the VCM Foundation. Can the Minister give us figures on the numbers of music teachers in schools? We as a foundation have discovered that large numbers of primary schools, in particular, now have no teachers with any musical experience. We and some others are now helping to train teachers without musical experience to ensure that all schools have the opportunity to sing together and to learn to work together in the way that one can do through music.
Lord Agnew of Oulton
My Lords, the most recent figures I have for 2016 show that there is only a 0.5% vacancy rate for teachers of music in state schools.
Education and Society
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, many of us will have noted the 2017 report of the Social Mobility Commission published last week, with its sobering analysis of Britain’s alienated and socially marginal communities. It documents the widening gap in educational attainment between London and the English regions, with the worst “cold spots” for social mobility now in former industrial towns and coastal communities. It is striking that the map of low attainment, and of high levels of young people not in employment, education or training, matches so closely with those areas which voted heavily to leave the European Union 18 months ago. These areas, the report concludes,
“feel left behind, because they are. Whole communities feel that the benefits of globalisation have passed them by, because they have”.
We have become a more socially divided country, not so much along ethnic grounds as between the more successful and better educated cities and suburbs and the unskilled white working class. Worse, sections of our media and some of our politicians have written these British citizens off as a feckless underclass sponging off benefits and reluctant to work. Furthermore, part of our country’s dependence on immigration from the rest of Europe has come from employers’ preference for recruiting already trained and motivated workers from abroad as against the harder task of training and motivating poorly educated local people.
Broader and better-quality education will not be enough on its own to bring those depressed and deprived communities back into harmony with the rest of Britain. We need, as the Social Mobility Commission also remarks,
“a more redistributive approach to spreading education, employment and housing prospects across our country”.
We need a reinvigoration of local government and local democracy. We need investment in transport links outside the south-east. We need local industrial regeneration, and we need locally available finance to support the growth of local enterprises, which our banks have been so poor at fostering. It goes without saying that Brexit will do nothing to better their chances and is likely to make their situation worse.
However, education and training are essential to social as well as economic recovery, and early years education is the most important priority for children from poor and often vulnerable families, often with only one parent and without the support of a wider family group. I am proud that the Liberal Democrats in coalition successfully introduced the pupil premium, which teachers in these areas tell me has made a real difference to the resources they have at their disposal. I regret that the Conservatives managed to cut back on the Sure Start programme, and I am concerned that continuing cuts in local authority grants have led to some places that most need to provide early educational support leaving many vulnerable children without it.
I say to the Labour Party that increasing public spending on the 50% who do not go to university, all the way through from nurseries to apprenticeships and continuing and further education, should be a higher priority than cutting fees for university students. I dissented from my party’s official line on tuition fees for this reason more than 10 years ago, and I hold to the same view today. Any progressive politician should put improving the life chances of the least advantaged first, before answering the pleas of the more confident and more successful.
There are many other measures we should be pressing to encourage children from those communities to learn, to gain life skills and employment skills, and so to grow up feeling that they are included in our national community. Teacher turnover in such areas is too high; we need not only to grant them more respect but to offer them higher pay and perhaps bonuses for extended service. Teach First has shown how to bring bright graduates with enthusiasm into schools; we should extend that, perhaps by writing off student loans at a progressive rate for those who teach in priority areas.
School partnerships are clearly important in encouraging teachers to stay and in lifting performance. Multiacademy trusts are one way to provide such partnerships, but local authorities should also have a wider role in encouraging schools to work together. The independent schools sector should also do more to support school partnerships, partly, but not only, to justify the public benefit obligated by their charitable status. I have seen some excellent independent/state school partnerships in action, but I am conscious that best practice does not extend across much of the independent sector.
Schools do not operate all year round: disadvantaged pupils fall back every summer. Liberal Democrat councillors in north Bradford have been running a summer school for children between primary and secondary school over the past two years, with, so far, excellent results in helping them make the school transition successfully and continuing to grow and learn. We need both non-governmental groups and local authorities to provide more opportunities for disadvantaged children out of school hours and terms to widen their perspectives and raise their aspirations. Middle-class children benefit, after all, from a range of out-of-school activities from an early age; working-class children miss out on that. I was saddened to discover that the visit to the Lake District which the north Bradford summer school included was for some children the first time in their life that they had been outside Bradford.
Low aspiration flows from low expectations of worthwhile jobs to work for, so the transition from school to work is a vital aspect of successful secondary education. Some employers and chambers of commerce now work closely with local schools to provide work experience and the prospect of training, but, again, best practice does not extend far enough across the country. Further education colleges, which should work in partnership with schools and employers, have been, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, and my noble friend Lady Garden have said, financially squeezed and sidelined. We also need to strengthen the idea of continuing, lifelong education for all, which means strengthening the role of FE colleges in providing it. I wish I could believe that the apprenticeship scheme will help in this respect; much of what I have heard suggests that it will fail to provide the most crucial element, which is a path into skilled work for young people.
The Church of England already plays a constructive part in limiting the disintegration of our divided society. I too recall the Faith in the City initiative, which I understood as an appeal to middle-class and rural congregations to care about and support the Church’s work in deprived communities. Church schools have a good record in providing more than just the national syllabus in education and in providing children in schools with a wider sense of community. I thank the diocese of London in particular for the support it gives to the musical education charity which I chaired for 12 years, which takes singing into state schools that have lost their music teachers and takes musical children out of their neighbourhoods to sing and perform with others—to raise their eyes and voices beyond what they thought was possible.
The Church of England, and many other institutions within our civil society, have much to contribute to repairing the weaknesses of our country’s education and so in rebuilding an inclusive society, but the prime responsibility lies with our public institutions, our state and our Treasury to invest in the quality of education needed to rebuild a flourishing and inclusive national community.
Armed Forces: East of Suez
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proportion of the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces will be deployed east of Suez, in the light of the Foreign Secretary’s speech in New Delhi on 18 January.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My Lords, a significant proportion of the UK’s Armed Forces are deployed in the Gulf. As the Prime Minister said last December, Gulf security is our security. This figure fluctuates according to operational demand. However, with the advent of major exercise programmes, British defence staff in Dubai, the regional land training hub in Oman and the UK naval facility in Bahrain, we will have the permanence and presence to deepen our partnerships in the region.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, it is 50 years since the then Government announced that we would withdraw from east of Suez. They published a White Paper and there was substantial debate in the Houses of Parliament. The Foreign Secretary, first in Bahrain and then in Delhi, has spoken of deploying an aircraft carrier group to the Indian Ocean and of Diego Garcia being a major UK and US base. I am told that to maintain an aircraft carrier group in the Indian Ocean would take almost half the surface vessels available in the fleet. Presumably, there would be a significant air and land element on Diego Garcia. Will the Government bring this major shift in policy to Parliament, or does the MoD think that the Foreign Secretary was speaking a little out of turn and a little unbriefed?
Viscount Younger of Leckie
My Lords, there is no question but that the UK and US military facility in Diego Garcia contributes significantly towards regional and global security. The UK footprint may not be major in size, but it represents a significant contribution to our bilateral defence and security relationship with the US. At the moment the Royal Navy has 41 personnel permanently deployed in Diego Garcia, with a capacity to surge that for contingent operations in the wider region from 2021. That could include a carrier strike task group, should the situation change.
Education: Maintained and Independent Schools
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interests: I am chair of a musical education charity, Voces Cantabiles Music, and my wife is a director of a multi-academy trust in Bradford.
I became involved in this issue partly because I had to answer for charities and I worked with charities when in the coalition Government, but I also followed the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, in tabling an amendment to the charities Bill in 2015. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has asked me to give his apologies today as he is unfortunately not able to be with us as he has to leave for a foreign visit this afternoon.
Since then, the situation has moved on. The Prime Minister made an astonishingly strong speech last September:
“Through their charitable status, private schools collectively reduce their tax bills by millions every year. And I want to … enact a tougher test on the amount of public benefit required”.
She noted that,
“these schools have become more and more divorced from normal life”,
with a rapidly rising percentage of pupils with rich parents from overseas countries.
Paragraph 7 of last September’s consultation document, referring to independent schools, states:
“We should expect these schools to assist the state-funded sector more directly … by building capacity in the sector”.
A later paragraph states that,
“these requirements will be built into existing agreements, so that … the ability to … maintain the key benefits associated with independent schools’ charitable status, is explicitly linked to doing more”.
If a Labour Government had said that, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph would have been all over it, but I note that this was a Conservative Prime Minister, and I agree with her. The Independent Schools Council has depicted this as a threat: I would call it much more a reminder. If a school is a charity, it should be fulfilling charitable purposes. A great many of our best independent schools were founded as charities and have moved some way from their original objectives at their foundation.
Independent schools have responsibilities, apart from being charities, to the well-being of this country—their corporate social responsibility, if you like—and to their communities. The best independent/state school partnership I have seen, in York, is partly because the independent schools in York are Quaker and have a very strong sense of their social responsibility and of their responsibility to their community in particular.
I am conscious that there is a great deal of variation across England. The situation of independent schools in London and south-east is very different from that in Yorkshire and the north of England. I am also conscious that the partnerships I have seen and heard of depend very much on individual leadership. A good person pushing something does extraordinarily well and then when he or she retires things very often fall away. It is a patchy record, but I welcome the Government’s encouragement of more active engagement. I hope the Minister takes that fully on board.
There is resistance on both sides. We have seen that, and I have heard from people in independent schools about unfortunately or unintentionally giving the impression of being patronising. I have heard from left-wing teachers in state schools that they do not want anything to do with the independent sector, et cetera, but in a number of places, partnership now works extremely well. The one I know best is Westminster Grey Coat—a foundation of two state schools and three independent schools—in which the director of the foundation says very strongly that they have mutual benefit and learn from each other all the way across. I was at Emanuel School the other week for the foundation’s sixth-form essay prize, in which the boys from Westminster City School, a state school, won more prizes than any other school. It was very impressive and pleasing. That is precisely the sort of thing one should be citing.
Social awareness and social integration within our divided national community are part of what this is all about. There is no single model. Different forms of co-operation will fit different communities and different circumstances. The best model is certainly not to sponsor academies or to offer free places, although in some areas where sixth forms are in short supply, experimenting with providing free places for sixth-formers might be part of the way forward. Jointly funded bursaries are not a priority either, although, again, in rural areas for able students one might perhaps experiment. Fundraising for bursaries at independent schools is part of the way forward. Those that have endowments are, in a number of cases—Eton College being the most striking one—funding a number of scholarships of this sort and perhaps more should be done in this way.
There is excellent best practice from, for example, Rugby, Eton, York and Wimbledon: specialised teaching; extra subjects and topics, such as “masterclasses” in York, which I have sat in on; shared music, drama and sport; shared school governorships, as in the model of Rugby and others; and sharing of teaching best practice. This could develop further, with shared careers advice, shared attachments to local employers for work experience, and so on. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, said, there is resistance from parents and governors in what one might call the second division of private schools—I will not name the schools where I have heard this. They say that they have paid good money to buy educational advantage and they do not see why others should share it for free. It is a sentiment that I have heard particularly in Yorkshire, which would probably not surprise noble Lords.
There is a schools partnership across Bradford, but when I was talking to head teachers at state schools there, they said, “That’s fine; if a private or grammar school wants to come and join us it is welcome—but it had better ask first”. In fact, independent schools in the north of England are not as well plugged into this network as one would like. I regret that we do not have as much evidence as possible on what is going on— I look forward to the ISC survey coming out.
I was upset, I have to say, when talking to the head teachers of a number of state schools, to hear them saying things such as, “If I had the spare capacity or the spare money for this, I would love it, but I am more concerned about how I prevent my school going bankrupt in the next three years and how I avoid losing half a dozen teachers because of the squeeze on our budget”. Of course, there are similar pressures on a number of independent schools, particularly those outside the south-east, and boarding schools.
I conclude from this that we are in a changing situation—the structure and situation of independent schools are themselves changing—but we nevertheless want to encourage partnerships of this sort as much as possible. I am glad to see that the Government are doing this and that charitable status—charitable schools—is a part of this. But it is not the only part, because we expect all schools to share the responsibility for what happens in their communities and in our society as a whole.
Social Mobility Committee Report
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, it has been an excellent debate and I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Fraser, in his maiden speech. I came to the debate, having read this excellent report alongside the State of the Nation report from the Social Mobility Commission, from a concern about the “left behind” and a set of questions about why so many of the left behind whom I have canvassed over the years in Bradford and Leeds voted to leave the European Union as a sort of, “Sod off to the lot of you; we get nothing out of globalisation and nothing out of the state. We are fed up with the world as it is”.
I have to say that I share very strongly the views of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that I am not sure social mobility is what we now need to talk about. My father-in-law is a classic example of the old social mobility. He was the youngest child of a mill-working family who got a scholarship to Bradford Grammar, became a schoolteacher, then an Army officer and then a university teacher. That was the old social mobility—one or two people out of each working class community got out and up.
That is not what we want any longer. What we want is to teach life skills to everyone, including the left behind. We need to recognise that these are not the undeserving poor—a phrase that, as the right reverend Prelate rightly said, is creeping back into our discourse these days. They are part of our national community and our citizens, and we have to make sure that life chances for all in a national community which consists in its turn of strong local communities is what we are about. There will be some social mobility. We have to tell the people at the top, incidentally, that they also belong to the national community and have obligations to the national community, starting with paying tax. That is the different discourse that we need to talk about.
A number of other reports have been mentioned in this debate which are highly relevant—the State of the North and Growing Up North reports and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation studies. We will be debating some of these—on 12 January we have a Question on the State of the North report—and I hope this House will continue actively to follow the debate. In terms of sessional committees, I am aware that there are two proposals to look at the content of citizenship as such, and I think it right that we ought to look at some other aspects of life chances because these are all fundamental issues.
There are four key points in the whole transition area. I have been most concerned with two to five year-olds. Children in north Bradford arrive at school already a long way behind their fellows from the middle classes in literacy, social skills, numeracy—the lot. If you have lost out by the time you are five, you start structurally behind. Then there is the transition from primary to secondary school. I visited a summer school being run in north Bradford this summer by local Liberal Democrats, dealing with 10 to 11 year-olds from vulnerable families who do not get regularly fed at home. They had not learned to read or count properly in their primary schools and there is a lot of evidence that that is the point at which aspiration and ambition begin to drop off—as they go to secondary school—if we are not careful.
Then there is the transition from school to work which this excellent report is about. We must not forget—maybe this is a subject for another sessional committee—the very difficult transition from a first career to a second. People in their 40s and 50s will lose their jobs because of technical change but will be expected to go on working until they are 70 in our new world. They will need the opportunity for part-time education and retraining—all the things they are now dropping. The number of people in part-time education has dropped quite radically in the last three or four years. I had some interesting figures from the Open University the other day and it is something to which we absolutely need to pay more attention.
My concern here is with intermediate skills in particular. I noted paragraph 73 of the report, which says:
“The most recent UK labour market survey found that ‘Jobs with intermediate skills demands tend to have high shares of skills shortages. These include skilled trades’ roles in manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail, and hotels and restaurants. This partly reflects longstanding shortages of skilled construction trades workers such as plumbers, electricians and carpenters, and skilled chefs within the hotel and catering industries’”.
That is a scandal, and we have come to rely on immigrants to fill the gap. I tried to interest Migration Watch in looking at the linkage because I am conscious that the pull factor in immigration, particularly from eastern Europe, is precisely in the intermediate skill areas—above all in construction and building.
The apprenticeship scheme I know best is the Bradford social housing association Incommunities, which now trains 10 apprentices a year. Last year it had only 400 applications; the previous year it had 500 applications. That is 40 applicants per place, compared to Oxford and Cambridge, which have six to eight applicants a place. That is absurd. The figures on the overall apprenticeship scheme in the report suggest that in 2014-15 there were 1.5 million applications for just under 200,000 apprenticeships. That is an 8:1 ratio, which is higher than the ratio of applications to most Russell group universities.
It shows that the demand is there from people who want to have apprenticeships, but the supply is not there. We know from the extent to which companies are recruiting directly from abroad that the demand is there. It is not quite such an hourglass. Agencies do recruit from Slovakia and Poland for builders, long-distance truck drivers and for nurses, chefs, and others. There are some interesting questions about why companies find it cheaper and easier to recruit from abroad than to train their own. Incidentally, I was told this morning that in British universities 20% of technicians are from abroad—above all from eastern Europe. That also suggests that universities should be looking at how much they train the people they require for their intermediate skills—perhaps paying more attention themselves.
My anecdotal impression from across Yorkshire is that companies have been finding it much easier to recruit people already trained abroad than to put the effort into training and motivating people from this country. I am sorry that Migration Watch has not taken this up because it does not fit its anti-European narrative. This applies to the public sector as well as the private sector. I am very grateful that, when I was ill in June, Portuguese nurses in St Thomas’ looked after me very well and Polish physios in St George’s did my rehabilitation afterwards. But there were not many British-trained nurses there. The Government’s new scheme for training nurses has lifted the cap, which left us structurally short of trained nurses, and has imposed loans instead, which has apparently led to a reduction in young British people applying for nursing.
The report talks about the underlying bias in the English education system—the cultural preference for arts and finance as against engineering and crafts. That is not new. When I first became a university lecturer in Manchester, I remember the dean of my faculty telling me how he was trying to close down our evening degree because it was only really for teachers and was not what an international university should be doing. Since I had spent five years at an American university which had several Nobel Prize winners on its staff and a department of home economics and a school of hotel administration, that seemed a little odd to me—but it is there in too many of our universities. Happily, some few of our new universities bridge the gap between the academic and the vocational.
As several noble Lords said, we neglect our FE colleges and we are squeezing the funding for them further. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, is quoted in the report as suggesting that we may be facing a “downward spiral” in the ability of the further education sector, which would be disastrous for all these people who need to train, and for the secondary schools, some of which, certainly in my part of West Yorkshire, rely on their partnership with FE colleges to offer the spread of courses in the sixth form that they want to offer.
Some of this is down not just to the Government but to corporate responsibility. We have to say to companies that it is their responsibility to train our own—to train young people. I am horrified by the cynicism that I have heard in West Yorkshire about the new apprenticeship scheme: that it will be used by large companies to rebadge their existing management training rather than bringing in new youngsters and giving them new skills. I hope that that is not the case, but the cynicism is out there, and I hope that the Government are aware of it—that it will be about quantity and rebadging and there will not be much that is new or that improves skills or, crucially, brings in new young people from the left-behind and equips them with the skills that they need.
The report is very valuable. The Government have provided, as all noble Lords have said, an extremely inadequate answer. They are a Government for whom reinventing grammar schools is a greater priority than funding secondary schools, particularly in their sixth form, or thinking about the future of FE colleagues. This does not provide the right incentives. What we need is a partnership between schools, FE colleges and companies, large and small. That, I hope, would provide an answer to our problem of the structural skills shortages that leave so many of our youngsters behind.
Independent Schools: Free Places
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Lord Nash
This proposal is about encouraging independent schools to help the state sector, and the money will therefore be flowing towards the state sector, not away from it. As the noble Baroness knows, we have protected the core schools budget, but we will be talking about the national funding formula shortly.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Minister will recall conversations with the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and myself about encouraging independent schools to demonstrate their public benefit by sharing their facilities for sport, drama, art, music and so on with their local state schools. I understand that a survey is being undertaken to see what the best practice is in the sector. Is his department following that survey, and will he repeat in public his private promise that, when it has been completed, we will have a debate in this Chamber on its results?
Lord Nash
We are certainly following these issues, but I cannot promise a debate because it is not in my power to do so. We have encouraged the independent sector to show its good practice and we have helped it to set up an interesting website called Schools Together, which now has more than 1,200 examples of co-operation between the state and the independent sector. Clearly, a lot is happening in this area.
Education: Polish A-level
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, spoke of the deep historic ties between Britain and Poland. I recall that the Poles produced the largest non-British contingent of pilots in the Battle of Britain, and several squadrons in the RAF and at least two armoured divisions in the Second World War. Britain seems almost entirely to have forgotten about that. I understand that the Prime Minister was unaware of it when he visited Warsaw last time. Could we not do something to symbolise the contribution that Poland made to the British victory in the Second World War, for example by encouraging a visible Polish presence at the next Remembrance Sunday commemorations?