Prison: Support for Dependent Children

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I take this opportunity to thank my noble friend for all his extraordinary work in this area, and for his generosity in acknowledging the work of my colleagues in the department. This is a great example of local innovation, and one that we will share with the National Centre for Family Hubs, which seeks to share examples of best practice. I will make sure that it is also taken back to our work with the Prison Service, and more broadly the Ministry of Justice.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure we all wish to congratulate the Minister on her sympathy for such children in this situation and the long-term effects that can occur. Does she not feel that what we voted for last night somehow has a kind of parallel in this House, when we see that children who have been affected terribly by various tragedies in their families may be separated from their parents? Do the Government not need to consider every care for those children, particularly when they may be effectively incarcerated in a kind of prison on a boat?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government have sought to explain just how seriously they take the safety and well-being of those children. Being complicit in some way with people traffickers is not the way we plan to do it.

Childcare

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a good point, which really goes to the issue of the affordability of what in the jargon is known as “wraparound care”—outside conventional hours. One of the initiatives the Government have taken is to introduce what is known as tax-free childcare, which subsidises the cost of childcare for children between the ages of nought and 12. That programme historically had relatively low take-up, but I am pleased to be able to tell the House that the number of families using that tax-free childcare has more than doubled in the last four years.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister seems to have given an inadequate answer to my noble friend about Sure Start. The research shows very clearly that Sure Start changed and improved the quality of collaboration between children, their sociability and indeed their intellectual development when they started at primary school. Why have the Government left this in the way that they have?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sorry if the noble Lord thinks I gave an inadequate answer; that was certainly not my intention. What I was trying to say was that the Government absolutely recognise the importance of support for families, both in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life but also in the longer term—since, in my experience, families do not work in a straight line—as children grow up in the family hubs. All I was trying to say was that there is more than one way of achieving the same objective.

Music Education in State Schools

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We believe that the network of music hubs we have set up gives children choice, including specialist individual music tuition in an individual subject, and for other children perhaps group singing or other activities.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Black, has had the same answers in the same kinds of debates for many years, since he has been asking this really important question. It is very clear that music education enhances memory, improves dexterity, includes collaboration and is a major part of learning. Indeed, it has been shown repeatedly that it improves and facilitates learning in other subjects. However, not even sufficient instruments are available in primary schools, despite what the noble Baroness asserts. There should be far more done to ensure music is an essential part of the curriculum. Does the noble Baroness agree?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolutely agree that it is an essential part of the curriculum: that is why it is compulsory in all maintained schools. I go back to the work of the music education hubs, which have had fantastic outreach into schools but have also linked schools and the children in those schools with music groups in their communities, so they can expand their interests.

Education: Music A-level

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I accept that there have been declines in the area that the noble Lord pointed out. However, as I mentioned in my earlier reply, music can be taught in various different ways, and the number of hours spent on music education have remained pretty stable over the last nine years.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, research clearly shows that teaching music improves cognitive ability, memory, manual dexterity and emotional development. The noble Lord, Lord Black, is absolutely right to ask this important Question. If we do not have enough teachers—perhaps the Minister can tell me how many music teachers are currently practising in state schools—how can we manage the decreasing verbal ability of so many British pupils in the state sector?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I do not have the specific number of music teachers in the system but I know that the vacancy rate is only 0.5%, so I do not see that as a crisis. We have seen pressure on some schools crowding out subjects—for example, in key stage 2 by elongating key stage 4—but the new framework for Ofsted inspections starting from September will put more emphasis on a broad and balanced curriculum, of which music is a part.

Free Schools: Educational Standards

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, it is not often one has the opportunity to join an evangelical meeting in the House of Lords, and I am very grateful for this debate. First, I declare an interest as president of the outreach programme at Imperial College London. I do not know how many schools I have visited in the past 12 months, but I have spoken to about 55,000 school children and at numerous teaching conferences, as well as visiting three schools a week on average across the country. I have focused mainly on the poorest parts of England, including the south coast, the area 50 miles east of Cambridge where it becomes a complete desert, some parts of Essex, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, the north-east and the West Country—I spent some days living there and talking in schools, mainly in Devon. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, is to be deeply congratulated on securing this important debate. I want to pay tribute to him as a respected Minister for Education and somebody who I like and deeply admire for what he has done. I also pay tribute to him for his notably successful free school, the Pimlico Academy; I think I was the first Pimlico lecturer some years ago, as he will remember.

As children progress from primary to secondary, and then on to Year 12, they are increasingly channelled in school. Irrespective of the subject, young people are required to learn more and more about less and less. The curriculum encourages knowledge of facts, but so often their school subjects are not brought into a wider context or focus. For example, in science, they may learn a great deal about physics, chemistry and biology, but they are not able to put this into an ethical or societal context. Science literacy is not merely a matter of knowing a great number of facts about physics; it is much more about understanding the relevance of that science—for example, understanding the societal issues involved. Because of the narrowness of the curriculum, science literacy is even worse in students not studying science. This is important, because in a democracy, we need to make wise decisions about how science is used. These decisions cannot be left to scientists, or—worse still, dare I say it—to politicians. Every piece of modern technology may hold great promise for us, but it is often undercalculated, and the significant threats are usually forgotten and ignored until too late.

I have explained what kind of schools I mostly visit. Many teachers in these parts of the world seem very deeply depressed, and I travel long distances on the train back to London in the evening feeling equally depressed about what I have seen and discussed. So many teachers feel they are undervalued and are unable to offer a real education because of the juggernaut of the curriculum. The idea of establishing free schools, which are not so heavily bound to the curriculum, where teachers can choose more what they teach, is really valuable—I have no doubt about that. Replacing much-constrained local government with the increased involvement of parents is also a brilliant notion. It should work because so much of education depends on family background. In many parts of the country, there are excellent teachers but children go home to houses where there are no books, no interest in education and no understanding of what success it might bring in the future. This is much more difficult in schools where there is not a sufficient budget for a mix of A-levels; for example, mixing science and humanities subjects, which is important for making these things contextual.

In my view, funding for education is more important than funding for the health service. I say this in front of the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, who was a Health Minister for the past few years. We are grateful to him and sorry to see him leave his post. We spend too much time considering the NHS but not nearly enough considering the underfunding of education, which I am told about again and again in state schools that I visit throughout the country.

The interesting ideas behind establishing free schools should allow flexibility, but what we observe, on the whole, is far from a massive success. There is very little hard, peer-reviewed evidence that in the majority of free schools children have a better idea of how their learning in science or humanities fits the societal context to make them better citizens. In my visits, I have seen insufficient capability for debate and discussion. Moreover, teachers tell me that it is often extremely difficult to get parents really involved. Indeed, the statistics published recently by the Sutton Trust suggest that the involvement of parents is decreasing, not increasing. It is probably true in two-thirds of those schools.

At Imperial College we had a very close relationship with Harris academies. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, did not mention this but he will remember that for three years we taught science in a special context to his students who came to our Reach Out Lab. We did the metrics, with proper educationalists measuring the impact on those students. We found that it changed their aspirations and the way that teachers thought about how they might teach their science, but at the end of the three years, we had an unfortunate message from the finance officer, who told us that working with the Reach Out Lab at Imperial was no longer possible because they could not afford the luxury of working with us. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, has pointed out, there is not sufficient money in the system, but our metrics demonstrated that improved science capital is not a luxury. It is desirable. Nick Gibb said that the schools represented,

“a renaissance … of intellectual thought and debate about pedagogy and the curriculum that used to be vested only within the secret garden of the universities”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/12/18; col. 359WH].

That is counterproductive to what we were trying to do. There seemed to be no understanding that that was very far from the real case, so I regret that statement.

When free schools start to fail to attract pupils, their £4,000 capitation fee starts to reduce as well. Eventually such a school with failing pupils may end up with inadequate finance and may no longer be financially viable. As your Lordships know, a number of free schools started with great verve but have collapsed. This is a disaster, not only for the children but for the teachers and the system. It is really shocking when teachers are already dispirited.

Another issue is the employment of untrained teachers, which nobody has mentioned. Of course, it could be argued that I am untrained teacher. I do not regard myself as being capable of teaching in a school. I could not do that job. I can come in and give a short lecture but what people want from me is the expertise to raise the morale and the profile of a particular subject, perhaps briefly, once a year. The Government’s acceptance of the failure to have trained teachers in these schools is massively disrespectful to the teaching profession. The qualification in teaching is the lowest standard with which we need to start. When I qualified as a doctor, I was not really able to do very good medicine—I needed time to continue training in order to get to the right level, just as teachers do. We should never forget that in relation to our training system. It is important that teachers acquire the ability to communicate. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, has given an account of how successful these schools are, but the metrics are dubious. The Government’s own reports suggest that we do not yet have a clear idea of whether the free schools have been truly successful: more research and details are needed.

My first question for the Minister is: what peer-reviewed research into the metrics is currently being carried out by the Government, and which metrics are being used? If he cannot answer that, perhaps he could write to me. Secondly, will he tell the Committee what money has been spent on schools that have failed, or that started but did not finish? It would also be helpful to know whether he agrees with the Sutton Trust’s report, which states that on the whole the free schools that have been established do not attract the most needy and deprived children in those areas. One problem is that the competition that everybody has talked about is not a good idea in relation to our education system. Education should not be about competition but about collaboration, and to introduce competition into our education system is not sensible. The success of individuals depends not on those individuals themselves but on how they work with each other.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Earl is right in saying that in this country Ofsted seems to command more influence in the sector than happens in other countries. This is a cultural issue, and one of the first things my Secretary of State did when he arrived last year was to produce a video that showed him and the Ofsted chief inspector on a panel trying to slaughter some of the myths about inspection outcomes and so on. It is a cultural issue that we will not be able to deal with overnight. However, I accept his concern.

I am conscious that I am running out of time. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, is correct: we have cancelled some projects during the pre-opening process. In my view this demonstrates our rigour in ensuring that the quality bar is kept high. The point made by the noble Baroness about good governance is also correct. As the noble Lord, Lord Nash, said, however, 50% more free schools have achieved “outstanding” judgments than the average in the state school system—so something must be going right.

Of course, along the way not everything has gone right, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, among other noble Lords, mentioned. We have closed some 13 free schools, seven UTCs and 21 studio schools, and where failures occur we take swift and decisive action. I agree with my noble friend Lord Popat that we cannot shy away from failure and that we should address it and learn lessons from it.

I finish by quoting the motto of the academy trust of my noble friend Lord Nash: “Libertas Per Cultum”—freedom through education. Education provides the stepping-stone to improving people’s lives. Free schools play an increasing role in that work.

[Lord Winston]

I thank the noble Lord for his comments. I do not want to extend the debate beyond the time allotted. Listening to it, however, is one of my PhD students who is a qualified teacher with a Cambridge degree. He is evaluating some of our work. It seems to me that we need to be evaluating not just entry to Oxford and Cambridge but the wider issue of the scientific and cultural capital of school leavers who may not go to Russell group universities such as the one where I teach. This is not a party-political thing for me—I do not go to schools as a member of the Labour Party but as someone who wants to help people have aspirations. I hope that we can persuade the Minister to say how we can look at the metrics on things that do not involve merely exam results, because education is so much more important than that. I hope that we can collaborate in that.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I would be very happy to meet the noble Lord’s PhD student if that would be helpful in pushing the discussion on. All noble Lords present, particularly on this side, got into this for no other reason than to improve the quality of educational outcomes and the lives of the less advantaged people in our society. We all share that passion. We will have vigorous debates about how it works, but I am absolutely up for learning from the mistakes we have made. Some schools have closed. We backed some of the wrong promoters in the early stages and we have learned from that and moved on. Therefore, if the work that the noble Lord’s PhD student is doing can shed any more light on how we can improve going forward, I would be delighted to be part of that.

Health: Spectrum Conditions

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the document to which the noble Lord refers recognises that early identification and intervention is important to meet the needs of children and young people with literacy delays. On the necessity of a dyslexia diagnosis, I do not have expertise in such matters. However, the noble Lord and the British Dyslexia Association do, and I would encourage Warwickshire local authority to consider carefully its advice on this point, and on the document generally. I share the noble Lord’s frustration that it has not responded to the British Dyslexia Association’s letter written over two and a half months ago.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am astonished that the Government do not know the figures for the relative incidence of the spectrum disorders in schools. I declare an interest as a member of staff of Imperial College. Is the Minister aware of our programme where we have managed, hugely successfully, to encourage dyslexic students, in particular, to gain very high educational qualifications? But of course, if the condition cannot be identified, it is very difficult to do that.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I acknowledge the great work the noble Lord, Lord Winston, is doing. I am clear that early diagnosis makes a huge difference; it helps the self-esteem of the child in question, and also enables earlier interventions to take place, helping to establish that child on a strong educational pathway.

Primary School Children

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I do indeed. The noble Lord is right that stereotyping happens at a very early stage and research shows that it is more pronounced among the lower-income groups. That is why I am so pleased that we have initiatives such as STEM Ambassadors, which sends volunteers out to visit children in primary as well as secondary schools. Some 42% of those ambassadors are women and we had over 30,000 volunteers last year. Indeed, I discovered at the weekend that my own daughter, when she was reading chemical engineering, was one of those STEM ambassadors and she visited schools to do as the noble Lord suggested.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as President’s Envoy for Outreach at Imperial College. In the past six months, I have visited between 20 and 30 primary schools dealing with basic scientific issues for children between eight and 10. It is astonishing when you ask them which is the commonest gas in the atmosphere. They might come up with oxygen; they mostly come up with carbon dioxide and sometimes come up with hydrogen. Nitrogen is never recognised. Recently, when a child opted for nitrogen as the commonest gas, the science teacher told him in my presence that he was wrong. The problem is that the basic scientific knowledge of so many excellent primary school teachers is woefully inadequate. While the Government apparently recognise the value of primary school teachers, they do not do enough to ensure proper training in science, which leads children to so many of these careers. What can the Government do about that?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, what can I say? I accept that primary school teachers have to be generalists across a wide range of subjects. The noble Lord came across a disappointing example where the teacher was not necessarily explaining science properly. But we are doing more work on improving the curriculum in primary schools, and science is a key part of that.

National Curriculum: Litter

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, given the high rate of illiteracy in many of our primary schools and the low rate of numeracy among 11 year-olds, which affects their subsequent education, does the noble Lord not agree that it would be far better to concentrate on the essentials of a good education and not expose our children to unnecessary danger doing foolish things that are not part of the curriculum?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, litter is a symptom of children’s respect for our society and environment—so a good education will address these two strands, which is what we do on the people side through the citizenship programmes and PSHE, and through the recent Tom Bennett review of behaviour in schools. As the noble Lord knows, on the environmental side we have just released the 25-year environment plan. We have the Eco-Schools project that I mentioned earlier. The Great British Spring Clean is under way and has been extended because of the bad weather. So I think the noble Lord’s judgment is a little harsh, because not having litter is a symptom of a good society.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I wonder whether I could tell your Lordships’ House a story, which follows on entirely from what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said. I was chancellor of the University of the West of England and took a group of professors to China. We went to prestigious universities and to some that were less so. I met the deputy Minister of Education. Everybody in China was with us; we were about to do all sorts of work. However, an assessment came out that showed that, according to the Times, we were below the 50 number. China said that it would not work with any of us and so we retreated. That is exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said in relation to those who might be bronze. It really will not do. We had already been working with China in the various universities, including the University of Peking and the University of Tsinghua in Beijing, but because of our rating, which came out after we left, we no longer did business with them.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I, too, support this group of amendments. Rather bizarrely, just as this debate started—it is not because he knew that I was sitting in the Chamber or would be talking about higher education—I had an email from Professor Colin Lawson of the Royal College of Music to tell me that the Royal College of Music has just been rated second in the world for music education. He says, “Notwithstanding my disdain for these rankings, this is something I am very pleased with”.

There is a real issue here. To follow up on what the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that you can assess arts teaching by this kind of approach of rankings. Music is interpreted in all sorts of ways. Just as art colleges are rather similar—I believe that drama colleges are as well—all sorts of endeavours such as this cannot be rated in the way that the Government propose. This is extremely dangerous, particularly for the conservatoire, which attracts a large proportion of its students from Asia and depends very much on them.

Perhaps I may briefly declare an interest. I am professor of science and society at Imperial College. The reason I was not involved so much in Committee is that I had been teaching in schools on behalf of the university in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lincoln and Avon in the same week as the Committee stage and trying to get back to London in time on the train service, which is rather difficult. We teach practical science in the reach-out lab and have had PhD students coming through assessing the teaching. It is very clear that it is one thing to be able to assess learning, but teaching assessment is extremely complex. None of the ways in which we are doing this at the moment is nearly adequate. It is a major problem, because if we get it wrong the risk of damage in these cases is massive.

I shall give just one example, because I recognise that this is the Report stage. Some years ago, on two occasions, I ran a free communications course for students at Imperial College. The courses lasted for one and two days, students signed up on a first come, first served basis, and they were massively oversubscribed because undergraduates wanted to learn how they could communicate their science better. What was really interesting—I do not say this in my favour—was that the British and EU students almost universally gave us a rating of nine or 10 on the assessment of the course afterwards. The Chinese and other Asian students were not giving us anything like that rating: they gave us four, five or six, averaging about five. The reason for this, when we did a questionnaire with them, was that, unlike the British students, they said, “This is not going to get me a job anywhere; this is not going to be of any value to me commercially”. Yet, of course, in terms of the education of a student, it is vital.

I beg the Government to think about this rating system extremely carefully. If we get this wrong, we will damage not only the very top universities but other universities that are coming up at present. That would be a disaster for the United Kingdom and for our education.

[Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support the amendments moved by the noble Duke and spoken to by the noble Lord. I declare my interest as Master of Pembroke College in Cambridge. I want to make three very quick points.

First, everyone on all sides of the House agrees on the importance of promoting the excellence of teaching in universities. The emphasis that the creation of the teaching excellence framework places on teaching to sit alongside research as the benchmarks of what universities should be all about is something that we all want to welcome, but the practicalities of how the Government are going about it leave, to my mind, something to be desired.

Secondly, there is going to be an inevitable crudity about the metrics that are used. The metrics that the Government are suggesting now are somewhat better than those that originally appeared in the Government’s Green Paper, but none the less they are still going to be a very crude measurement of how well a university is doing its teaching. The process of assessing research quality at universities, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said, is detailed, analytical, nuanced and looks in a very serious way at the quality of research that a university does. The teaching excellence metrics that are proposed are totally different and they are crude.

Thirdly, there will be an inevitable crudity of perception about the ratings given. The noble and learned Baroness gave a very clear example of this. I use a very obvious analogy: the curse of star ratings in theatre reviews. When we look at the top of the theatre review, we look at whether it has one star, two stars, three stars, four stars or five stars and that is, in most cases, all we look at. We do not then look down and read the analysis of how good the play really was. Exactly the same is going to happen with universities. Are they gold, silver or bronze? If they are bronze, we are not going to look at them. This is, to my mind, an impossibly crude way of assessing, as we ought to assess, genuinely, what quality of teaching is being offered by our universities. I really urge the Government to think again about this imposition of ratings, which will have a perverse effect.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

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

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I welcome this brief debate. It is crucial that we should turn our attention to different forms of access and to lifelong learning in its widest sense. The publication from the four years that I was Education and Employment Secretary that I remain most proud of is The Learning Age Green Paper. I am proud of the commitment of the then Government to the whole range of opportunities for lifelong learning.

I deeply regret that universities as a whole in this country countenanced the demise of their extramural outreach at a time when more utilitarian delivery was uppermost in people’s minds. I pay tribute to Sheffield Hallam University for its outreach, embracing those from a whole range of disadvantaged backgrounds. I declare an interest: I have a close relationship with the University of Sheffield, where I hopefully deliver some pearls of wisdom and experience from a lifetime engaged in education, and I welcome its renewed commitment to lifelong learning. However, universities using resources, expertise and facilities to reach out is still in embryo.

Digital platforms now allow us to communicate at a distance. Over past decades, the Open University has been able to link that effectively to collective study and engagement; that is a crucial part of a rounded education that we can all welcome. I hope that when the Minister responds, he will, in a wider sense than just this Bill, encourage and support universities to use those resources to reach out and become essential parts of their own community, as well reaching out internationally.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness’s amendment. This is a particularly important issue which, regrettably, has been repeatedly neglected in this House, except by my noble friend Lady Bakewell and a few others who have, from time to time, tried to cudgel the Government in debates that perhaps do not have quite so much impact as this major debate on higher education today. I have an interest as chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University which, together with the University of Sheffield, has transformed Sheffield and its workforce in the last 15 years. Many of the people who have transformed that place have of course been those who have come in part-time.

I do not want to repeat what I said in the previous sitting on Monday, but I pointed out—during the Tube strike—that we are going to have to look at driverless trains and at automation, which will happen right across the whole of industry. It has been calculated by some people that perhaps as many as nine out of 10 of the workforce will be out of their current work in the next decade. I am not quite certain whether the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, in moving her amendment, pointed out that a large proportion of the people who undertake part-time degrees are over the age of 30 and under the age of 60. We need to be skilling people as they grow older because we are now living longer. We need to ensure that that middle-aged group is educated. It is important to recognise that as long as we learn, we are useful. It is vital to support learning in an ageing society.

I wish to relate a personal story about a PhD student who I met at Imperial College last year. I asked her about the subject of her further degree as she was undertaking a very intricate project on global warming, looking at rare earth radioisotopes two miles below the seabed. She was tracking sea movements from 50 million years ago and providing crucial information on climate change using the most sensitive instruments. I thought that she must have the most splendid degree from one of the Russell group universities. When I asked her where she had taken her first degree, she said, “I was in an office and started an Open University course, which led directly to this PhD studentship”. We need to ensure that we fully support people who have the capacity to contribute to our society intellectually. At the moment, that is not happening enough.

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and Amendments 32, 41, 46 and 172, to the latter of which my name is attached. I have already spoken on this issue several times, as it is of pressing importance to me. I am president of Birkbeck, which caters for part-time study. However, I emphasise the tenor in which this concept sits within the Bill. Constantly, amendment after amendment states the purpose of the relevant clause or schedule and then says “including” part-time and lifelong learning. It is almost as if the concept were an afterthought. It would be churlish of me not to recognise that the Minister has acknowledged how important such learning is, but given its presence at the tail end of those amendments, it is as though this kind of learning were in some way an add-on, a second thought, something we had just remembered. I would like to see it elevated to a much stronger role.

At the moment, 570,000 students are studying part-time in this country, of whom 62% are over 30—it is usually that number. Of that number, 60% are female, so we are talking about students who are largely women over 30, who may have missed out on studying for a variety of reasons such as lack of ambition or motivation, childbirth or changing career patterns. That very important sector plays to the Government’s ambition to offer access to training to non-traditional students as opposed to younger students aged 18 to 20. These statistics bear out the Government’s ambition to serve people. I would also refer to another sector: the old. What are we going to do about old people who are isolated and may be depressed and live alone in the country? There is a major build-up of problems as regards how older people are to live their lives. I am proud to say that at Birkbeck the other day I handed out a degree to someone in their 90s. There is no doubt that continual learning nourishes the spirit of people who are getting older. I know of no evidence which claims that learning helps avoid dementia but I would not be surprised if such evidence came along soon. It seems to me that study and a project to enable a commitment to learning to come to fruition in one’s later years is a very good motive for lifelong learning. I ask the Minister to support it at every level.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, I said that these are complex matters and, as I said, I do not intend to lead the Committee or be led into this particular trap. Perhaps I may stress the point made by my noble friend. The Government are extremely aware of the issues in some areas of the country as regards broadband support. The Committee will be aware that separately we are working very hard on this aspect.

[Lord Winston]

Does the Minister not accept that one of the problems is the attitude to part-time learning, something that will become more and more important in our society? The Bill tends to see it as a second-rate form of education, which it clearly is not, and in the future will be even less so, particularly when we have distance learning, in which most universities are beginning to invest very heavily. The important issue is that part-time learning is not by its nature second-rate.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The noble Lord is right. It certainly is not second rate, but I must say again that many of the other types of people who want to learn—many were mentioned today, including lone mothers—must be considered as well. That leads into a completely separate debate as to who you give priority to. The whole point of our reforms is that the OfS will be given this broad scope to cover everybody who might fall into these categories. Far from being second rate, it is very important, and I hope I have made that clear to the Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

All the real surveys show that the figures for overstayers are very low, so I really cannot understand the policy. I know it derives not from this department, but from elements in the Home Office proceeding in a manner akin to the “Titanic” heading towards an iceberg. There will be a crash in due course, and we have to help them avert it. My noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendments are in some ways on the fringes of this, and other amendments have been put down, but of all the important things facing universities at the moment, almost the most important is to preserve their capacity to win their share of overseas students and to charge them economic fees where they can pay. It is a wonderful resource for this country and will continue to be so. I hope that your Lordships will remain adamant on this matter and that we may persuade the Government that they are doing, by accident I think, something which could be immensely dangerous.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, we are deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, for his remarkable contribution to the universities, particularly on this point, and to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for raising this issue. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned Imperial College, which has a very large number of students coming from Asia, but it is not just Imperial College. I have already stumbled over the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal—I suspect I am using unparliamentary language in saying that, so let me put that right now—but it is not just the universities. The Royal College of Music, for example, has one of the largest components of students coming from Asia anywhere in the country. We are funded by those students, and that great conservatoire, which is now one of the world’s three leading conservatoires in international competition, could not exist without that income. It contributes massively to our society and to our culture, and of course to the wealth of the cultural activity we have in great cities such as London. We should not forget the conservatoires, because they are part of this issue and very important. The director of the Royal College of Music has just left China and is now in Bangkok, where the college will undoubtedly be recruiting more students and getting the very best musicians—some outstanding—from countries in Asia.

When I was in America at various times last year, visiting Caltech at one point, the University of Southern California at another, UCLA and, briefly, New York, I would go into labs and see many Indian students. They said, “We would not consider now applying to Britain for a studentship. We would prefer to go to the United States, where we are welcomed. We are not actually welcome in Britain”. We need to knock on the head this issue about their being immigrants. It is of vital importance in the discussion of the Bill and I absolutely support the sentiments that have been expressed in this short debate.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I also express my strong, unequivocal support for my noble friend Lord Lucas and his amendments. I declare an interest as a senior associate member of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, which is a wonderful example of an international college. Many of our students come from countries all over the world, and many of them go back to senior positions of authority in government, the civil service and the diplomatic service—to many positions of leadership—in their own countries. They always look back to their days at St Anthony’s with pleasure and pride. We have the good fortune at the moment to have, in her last year sadly, a wonderful international warden, Margaret MacMillan, one of the great historians, particularly of the First World War. To those of your Lordships who have not read Peacemakers, or The War that Ended Peace, I commend them most warmly— I digress just briefly to say that.

What I want to do is to make plain my strong support and my, to be frank, incomprehension at the Government’s policy. This morning I sat on the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the EU Select Committee of your Lordships’ House, which received evidence from the Immigration Minister, Mr Robert Goodwill, and the Minister of State for the Brexit department, Mr Jones. Admirable people both, and in due course your Lordships will have a chance to read the evidence and to reflect on the report, but what I found completely difficult to accept was the fundamental contradiction in the arguments being put forward on the student front. My noble friend Lord Waldegrave, in his very brief but admirable speech, talked about the bogus colleges. If there was a justification for separating this, it was that, but even though others will crop up from time to time, the bogus colleges have gone, and we are now dealing with legitimate institutions of higher education, our universities in particular, to which students should be attracted from all over the world.

We were told this morning, and it has been said many times, that the Government place no limit on the students who come in. That is fine and good—we all agree with that—but if that is the case, why create a deterrent to those very students by lumping them in with those who seek to come as immigrants into this county? They have every right to seek to come, and I am deeply disturbed about all the aspects of Brexit, but that is another story entirely, and the fact is that students are different. They come not to stay but to study, and they go back to enrich their own economies and countries. Occasionally some do want to stay on for further education and some want to stay and work here, but what is wrong with that? What is the damage to our vibrant economy—which we were told about this morning by the two Ministers who came before us —in that?

My noble friend Lord Lucas has performed a signal service to your Lordships’ House in introducing his amendments as he did. It is quite clear from all those who have spoken so far that there is enormous sympathy for them. I do not want any votes tonight—I do not suppose any of your Lordships do—but I hope that if the Government cannot come up with a sensible way to accept the theme of the arguments we are putting forward tonight, your Lordships’ House will pass a suitable amendment on Report. We have not only a right but a duty to do that.

What the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, struck many a chord. This country, particularly after Brexit, is going to depend more than ever on its reputation as a centre of civilisation, a country to which all are welcome to come to contribute and learn and then go back to their countries. The respectable part of the imperial legacy is something in which we can all take pride. I sincerely hope that the Minister will be able to give us an encouraging response today even though, clearly, we accept that he cannot give a commitment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, referred to what happened to him in 1981. I say to him that not everyone in the Labour Party or the so-called liberal intelligentsia failed to support him; I was strongly in favour of the move to charge overseas students fees. I think he was right and we have all benefited as a result.

I want to go back to another point in my career. When I was responsible for the Department for Education and Employment, we launched the Prime Minister’s initiative to recruit far more international students, and to do so in a way that would be more effective than when individual universities just went out one by one and competed with each other in trying to recruit these students. We worked out a system, we set targets for the numbers that we would try to recruit and we met those targets before the deadline for doing so. This was one of the really important contributions that Tony Blair made when he was Prime Minister. It derived from a visit to China when he met some former Chinese students who had studied in this country and was impressed by their commitment to the UK and their pleasure in describing what they had got out of being students here. He realised that if you do this well, you actually make friends for life. That is what we should aim to do when it comes to recruiting overseas students in large numbers.

I was going to make many of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Smith, about the value to individual higher education institutions of bringing in a wide and diverse range of students from all over the world. It is of great benefit to British students. I disagree with him on one point, though: he referred to the “leading universities” doing this, by which I assume he means the research universities. No, it is not just about the leading universities; there are benefits to British students in all universities from getting to know students from around the world. In fact, the benefits are greater in those universities that do not have many advantaged students who have already been able to travel with or without their parents. When I was vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich, we had a great many students from inner London and outer London who had never been abroad. In my view, for them to be able to meet students from around the world was an enormously enriching experience.

We must look at this not just in a slightly elitist way in respect to the “best and the brightest”, a phrase that I do not like very much. It is about all students, including those who come from the developing world who may not have had a fantastically strong secondary education—they too benefit from going to British universities. This is why so many of the growing middle class in India have wanted to send their students to this country. As someone who has spent quite a lot of time in India and who believes that it is a great country with which we should associate in as many ways as we can, I think it is a disaster that as a result of the visa policies of the Home Office over the past seven or eight years we have lost huge numbers of Indian students. We will live to regret that. I strongly support the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and hope that we can put in the Bill a requirement that the Office for Students should report on the number of international students coming here and what they are bringing in terms of financial benefit, let alone all the other invisible benefits that we have all talked about.

I have one final point. I agree with those Members of this House who have said it would be rather a good idea to welcome some of these students to stay here in employment. We will benefit from what they bring because they will be skilled and hard-working and will have knowledge that some of the other young professionals who are coming out of our universities do not have, because they come from every corner of the world.

[Lord Winston]

Is it not a factor that the Home Office does not have proper data on which students go to which universities from these other countries, which makes it very difficult to explain what we are doing and why it is so valuable to both them and us?

[Baroness Blackstone]

I cannot speak for the Home Office on the care it takes in collection of data. Others will know better, but I suspect that it is making very foolish adjustments every day of the week about the overseas students that we have in this country and their potential threat. They are not a threat: they are a benefit and advantage to us all.