Post-18 Review of Education and Funding

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome this report and I congratulate Dr Philip Augar and his team on many of their recommendations. There was one thing that hurt me a little in the foreword, where Dr Augur claims:

“No prior government of any persuasion has considered further education to be a priority”.


I refute that. When my noble friend Lord Blunkett was Secretary of State and I was the Minister of State responsible for post-16 education we gave a great deal of priority to further education. Indeed, we increased spending on FE by 12% per annum, so I hope that that can be noted.

I am particularly glad that further education has been given so much attention by this report, because it has been greatly neglected by this Government and their predecessor. I was amazed by the Prime Minister’s statement that she considers this to be a very important sector for social mobility, technical education and so on. Given that she said that fairly recently I cannot imagine what she thought she was doing in allowing the huge cuts that were implemented by the Government and by their predecessor. I want to pick up on the point about “the headline issue”, as my noble friend Lord Bassam called it, of the £7,500 fee. I was always opposed to the £9,000 fee and I support this reduction; however, I very much hope that the debate about this report will not focus on higher education and what we charge students. That seems to me to be a secondary issue compared to how we restore FE to the state it needs to be in if we are to improve the productivity of our economy through higher skills of young people and adult learners in further education.

Can the noble Viscount give us some indication of a timetable for the implementation of these proposals? I fear there is a grave danger that they will sit on a back burner for many months, given the state of the Government at the moment and the lack of a new leader yet. I hope that some of these proposals can be considered for implementation as a matter of urgency, especially the funding of FE but also the outrageous level of interest of 6% charged to higher education students on their student loans.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I accept what the noble Baroness said and I note her point that we are not the only Government to have focused on education. Her point is noted and I will go back and read the part of the Augar review that she pointed to. On her point about the proposed reduction in fees to £7,500, as I said before, we are going to look carefully at the proposal. Of course, what we are trying to do is create a balance between how we fund higher and further education and how we give value for money for students and more focus on courses. The quality of courses is terribly important, not just for the students but for Britain as a whole and for helping with productivity.

On the timetable, as I said earlier, the pledge is that the Government will conclude this review at the time of the spending review, which is sometime in October.

[Baroness Blackstone]

Would it be possible just to say when the spending review is likely to take place?

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, like others I welcome the review, but I have two concerns. One is that I do not believe that the quality of careers guidance is anything like as high as it should be, a point touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. Nor do I believe that citizenship education is of a quality that the country deserves and should demand. Will my noble friend agree to talk to the Secretary of State and others in his department and tell them that unless we get these two things right, many of the other admirable proposals in this report will in fact come to naught?