Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

That is one group where there are perverse incentives built in by historical cock-up. Surely we have a duty to start looking at this in the round. We have a situation where an entire section of the population does not know what is going to happen and we have not started to address some of the historical anomalies that are out there. Surely we should be doing slightly more. I beg to move.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to the amendments submitted by my noble friend and I have one that I believe complements his amendments. I remind your Lordships’ House of the amendment on the role of the Director for Fair Access and Participation, when we were debating—and I used as an illustration—the responsibility of the director for ensuring that the responsibilities regarding disabled students were being appropriately delivered by institutions.

It is worth reminding ourselves, going back nearly two years to when the Government began their consultation on the cutting of funding for disabled students’ allowance and transferring some of the funding to institutions, that at the time this was heralded a great thing for better targeting disabled student support. Many of the specialist organisations that work with disabled students provided evidence to the contrary at that consultation. The National Deaf Children’s Society gave a case study of Isla, a young woman at the University of Edinburgh who asked the disability office repeatedly before she arrived for support. The case study says:

“She arrived early for lectures and asked tutors to wear the loop-system microphone, but found that microphones rarely worked or tutors forgot to use them. In a laboratory session she asked to be allowed to sit near the front so she could lipread, but the tutor was not supportive”.


Isla said:

“She said to me, ‘Well, you’ll just have to sit through it for this tutorial, this lab, but for the next time I’ll have you down the front’. Next time I went in, she still hadn’t changed it. I was raging. I was like really angry”.


The case study continues:

“As time went by, Isla realised that she was missing out on most of the content of her course. She dropped out at Christmas”.


Isla said:

“We had a couple of big papers coming up. I had started them. I had no idea where I was going with it. I e-mailed my tutor and said, ‘Look, I’m not coming back. I can’t. I can’t hear anybody, so I can’t’. He said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that’. That was it”.


That may be one example but I know from my time working in an institution some years ago that a lecturer refused to wear a microphone so a deaf student could hear, on the grounds that she might record the lecture and so infringe his personal copyright. I am pleased to say that the university dealt with that matter expeditiously. Putting the responsibilities on universities and reducing funding cause problems. That is why I support the comments made by my noble friend that we are now two terms into the new system and there is no clear guidance for institutions. That is deplorable and lies at the hands of the Government.

I want to go back a step from that to our responsibilities as a state. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is very clear about the responsibilities that we have as a state and as education institutions to provide support for students. It notes a:

“Lack of disaggregated data and research (both of which are necessary for accountability and programme development), which impedes the development of effective policies and interventions to promote inclusive and quality education”.


It also notes that there are:

“Inappropriate and inadequate funding mechanisms to provide incentives and reasonable accommodations for the inclusion of students with disabilities, interministerial coordination, support and sustainability”.


I worry that we are moving into that world at the moment where we do not quite know what is going on between institutions and the department. But the department has already handed over the responsibility for the support of disabled students to institutions.

The convention goes on to say at paragraph 12(i):

“Monitoring: as a continuing process, inclusive education must be monitored and evaluated on a regular basis to ensure that neither segregation nor integration are taking place, either formally or informally”.


Isla’s story is segregation writ large. Later on the convention talks about implementation at a national level. This is the responsibility of the Government, even if they choose to devolve the power down. Paragraph 63(d) speaks of:

“A guarantee for students with and without disabilities to the same right to access inclusive learning opportunities within the general education system and, for individual learners, to the necessary support services at all levels”.


Paragraph 63(g) speaks of:

“The introduction of accessible monitoring mechanisms to ensure the implementation of policies and the provision of the requisite investment”.


Finally, on my personal favourite topic of training, paragraph 73 says:

“Authorities at all levels must have the capacity, commitment and resources to implement laws, policies and programmes to support inclusive education. States parties must ensure the development and delivery of training to inform all relevant authorities of their responsibilities under the law and to increase understanding of the rights of persons with disabilities”.


With the introduction of the new system, there are some real concerns among student assessors about the arrangements for professionals under the new quality assurance framework for the non-medical helper support funded through the DSA. Higher education providers are reporting that it can be difficult to find interpreters for sign language due to the new requirement for freelancers and agencies to have to register with the DSA-QAG. This is an important issue and we are already getting comments, such as this anonymous quotation from a discussion forum of student assessors trying to help deaf students before Christmas:

“Already running into problems finding support that meets QAG requirements – I’m already starting to draw a blank for some students who need e.g. specialist note-taker, language support tutor as agencies – despite listing this in their range of support on the QAG site – are saying they can’t recruit people who meet the required qualifications (as set by QAG). Anyone else having this problem? Any possible solutions on the horizon??”.


The silence from the department is deafening. Unfortunately, the impact for students in our system means that it is not working. That is why I repeat my earlier statement, when we discussed the role of the Director for Fair Access and Participation, that there must be a specific role for monitoring support for students with disabilities. These are probing amendments, but they pick up the point about monitoring and evaluation to ensure that our students are not deserted by this nation state in contravention of the United Nations convention.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, I support these amendments and would like to speak briefly about the very important points that have been made. For a number of years I chaired the disability and additional needs committee at Loughborough University, and was very aware of the importance of adequate support for disabled students and how difficult it is when that support starts breaking down. I am very out of touch with it now but I was shocked by what was said about the guidance, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give a firm assurance that there will be no further delay in issuing that guidance.

I have a broader point to make about equal opportunities, as some of these amendments go beyond disability. The staff body is as important as the student body. I am prompted to say that by a report, which I think I read last week, about the complete absence of senior black staff in universities. If there are no senior staff and very few lecturing staff, and all the black members of staff are cleaners or porters, what kind of signal does that send to young black people who might be thinking of going to university, if they see those institutions as purely white ones? When we talk about equality of opportunity and access for students, we must bear in mind what is being done in relation to staff in the examples and role models that are being provided.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

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

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, this is day 2 of our Committee proceedings. It might be interesting to reflect for a second on how we are proceeding. It seems that the Minister’s game plan is to resist with a very straight bat—a Boycottian bat—the balls, googlies and other things that we throw at him. I am not very good at sporting metaphors, so I have probably lost the plot already, but I think that we get the sense of it: we are not getting anywhere with the amendments that we are putting forward.

I put it to the Minister that there is a case for his giving us a little more to work on, otherwise I suspect that the frustration that I already sense around the Chamber about the inability even to engage with him in intellectual debate on some of these issues will cause him problems later on. I have worked with him before, and he knows that there is a way of working which allows a little more freedom than the Government are currently giving. I appeal to him to think hard about what happened on Monday and to reflect a little more on what may happen today before we get too far into the Bill, because otherwise I sense trouble.

There is of course another strategy in play, but I cannot think of a game that I would be able to use as a metaphor for it. This time, the Minister has got his retaliation in first. On the basis of a not very long but certainly important section of our debate at Second Reading, he has conceded on the powers of the Director of Fair Access. The Government have come forward with amendments, which are in this group, in relation to that. It is interesting that, although we have not had a chance to go into the detail of it, we have seen a shift of position on the part of the Minister. The Director of Fair Access is now to be given a designated space in the structure and certain powers and responsibilities are placed to him or her. I do not want to steal the noble Lord’s thunder—we all want to listen to him, do we not?—but in constructing our amendments around this we have taken into account the position now being adopted by the Government.

Although I have put my name to the amendments of a number of other noble Peers, including that of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton—whom I look forward to hearing, since she has great expertise and knowledge in this area—I draw the Committee’s attention to Amendments 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225 and 234, which effectively provide an alternative model for how the Director of Fair Access could operate. In this set of amendments, which I will not go into in detail because it probably needs to be contrasted with the general approach taken by the Government, there is a specific duty placed on the Office for Students to create a post designated as the director, which is lacking in the Bill at the moment. There is a responsibility on the OfS to make sure that that person is well resourced and supported and has access to the material he needs.

It is given to the director to have direct responsibility for dealing with institutions; it is not filtered through another body or organisation or bureaucracy; it will make sure that the Secretary of State’s regulation powers apply directly to the director and do not get dissipated by general directions to the office. It would also allow for the director to appeal a decision, because there is no one at the moment if it is necessary to do so on an issue about widening access. I will not go into these in detail—they are there for anyone to see—but they offer an alternative approach, one which preserves the status quo ante of the existing arrangements, it could be argued. That approach will become increasingly prevalent as we go through the Bill, I think.

Some provisions in the existing procedures for the organisation and structure of higher education in this country will be lost in the move to a single body which is at the same time a regulator, a validator, an assessor of quality and a provider of access—a mixture and medley of activities which would not be found in any other sector and which I put it to the Minister should not be acceptable in this process. In approaching how higher education operates, it seems important that the elements that make up the supervision and control of one of our most important and very highly regarded assets are dealt with in a way that does not cause confusion and difficulty and is not, at the same time, capable of causing damage.

I look forward to the debate that these amendments should provoke, I hope that the Minister has listened a bit to what I was saying. I am not expecting him to concede, because these are not amendments that could be taken as they are. I accept that the drafting requires to be looked at, but we would be happy to discuss further with him or his officials the arrangements currently proposed, to contrast them with those proposed by others. I beg to move.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 14 and 16. I thank the Minister for the amendments tabled in his name. I have a couple of questions on them, but I reiterate the importance of the role of the Director for Fair Access and Participation. I think we can say that all parties and the Cross Benches in this Committee agree that widening access is a goal that we all want. In coalition we certainly pushed that quite heavily and there was some limited success—the bursaries, scholarships and supports for students from low socioeconomic background —which sadly now looks as if it is going downhill again. However, the figures on improving access for those least likely to apply to Oxbridge and to the Russell group universities had not significantly improved, and it must remain a priority for the Government and for the Office for Students to make sure that this changes as we move into the next phase of the Bill.

That is why when the White Paper came out I was really rather encouraged by the tone and the language, which talked about,

“an OfS executive board member with responsibility for fair access, the Director for Fair Access and Participation, whose role will be enshrined in law”.

It said that this person would take on responsibility and that it would be,

“a continuation of the current approach”.

There was real concern when the Bill was published to see that this role had been significantly downgraded. I am grateful that the omission has been rectified, but I just want to rehearse the reasons why it is so important that the Director for Fair Access and Participation is a senior role enshrined in law. This person must have the power to negotiate with institutions, which would undoubtedly be compromised if he or she could not approve or refuse access and participation plans. The person recruited needs to be someone with a high profile in the sector, who will have senior-level respect within our institutions. I know from working at a college for mature students—the previous debate was about distance learning, mature access and part-time—that all the institutions need to take this on board. It should not be the specific responsibility of one or two parts of the sector. The only way that the Director for Fair Access and Participation will be taken seriously is if he or she has credibility within the sector. That comes back, absolutely clearly, to the director having the power to approve or refuse access and participation plans. That is why our amendments refer to the director being “responsible”, echoing the language of the White Paper.

My questions for the Minister are as follows. What is the difference between being responsible for and the words used in the government amendments, which talk about “overseeing the performance”? For me, there is a distinction and I wish to understand exactly why that is there. In Amendment 27, it seems sensible that any OfS annual report should report on,

“the period or periods in that year during which those functions were not delegated to the Director, and … the reasons why they were not so delegated”,

but what might those reasons be? Clearly it could be if the director were away, off on sick leave or other things, but I want to be absolutely clear that this is not a backdoor power-snatching route by the Secretary of State or the director of the OfS.

With those details satisfied, I will stop carping on about the distinction between the two but we must make it clear that the role of the Office for Students is as important in widening participation because it remains a consistent priority. Anything less than that will tell the sector that access and participation is no longer a priority of the Government.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly comment on the very interesting interventions we have already had, which reflect the shared belief across all sides of the House in the importance of access and participation. Since the original Blair Government fees and loan system and the increases that we introduced, despite all the fears, we have seen a doubling of the proportion of people from the poorest backgrounds going to university, but there is still a lot more to do.

I did not completely agree with the point that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, made that this was about restoring the status quo as it has so far existed. I will try to explain why I do not think that that is quite the case. There have been proposals to get rid of OFFA and make it part of HEFCE. The report of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, in 2010 envisaged something rather like that. I was one of the many who did not want to see OFFA, with its distinct responsibilities, disappear into some wider body. However, there is a dilemma here and it is made more acute by the wider responsibilities that go with access and participation.

One thing that can easily confuse us is that “participation” is now being used in this Bill in a rather different sense from how it has been traditionally used, where “access” meant getting through to the most prestigious universities and “participation” meant getting through to higher education. My understanding is that in this Bill “participation” is used in the rather different sense of continuing engagement with the student experience so that, through their years at university, students from more disadvantaged backgrounds continue to get help. I know from my conversations with the excellent Les Ebdon that one of his frustrations was that his remit on access agreements was quite narrowly defined, and there were some initiatives that might have been very worth while but it was not totally clear that he could press for them.

I am not at all clear how this example would apply in the current legislation but if there is an internship programme—a very good way of getting into some job or profession—which requires that you live in London during the summer holidays at the end of your second year, is it legitimate to help meet the housing costs of a low-income student so that they can participate in that internship programme? Is that part of an access agreement or is it going beyond getting into university and something different? My understanding of this new role of access and participation is that it is an attempt to broaden responsibilities so that as well as focusing on getting into university, it is about the nature of the support that disadvantaged students get during their three years, or whatever, at university.

There comes a point when these responsibilities are so broad that trying to separate them off as a distinct function within the Office for Students, when they are such a significant part of the student experience as a whole, becomes less and less viable. My understanding of the proposals and the compromise in the excellent amendments proposed by the Government is that, while they are of course intended to recognise the distinct importance of this agenda, they make sure that the Office for Students as a whole can look at the student experience as a whole. There would be recognition that once one is looking at access and participation in its new sense, it is hard to put that into a highly distinct and separate organised entity. Several of us in this House have wrestled with this dilemma but that is the thinking behind the proposal before the House today.

[Baroness Brinton]

Might I use an example to try to answer the question that the noble Lord raised? I have amendments later on in the Bill about the support for students with disabilities; they have issues about both access and participation. I would welcome a director who had responsibility for overseeing support for a specific group who have problems with participation, whether that is financial support or extra support because they have a disability and might need support in different ways, rather than those students being subsumed into a general participation pot.

[Lord Willetts]

It is certainly the case that mainstreaming can be a euphemism for a solitary and nasty death, delivered invisibly. A lot of programmes get mainstreamed and it is a euphemism for their disappearance. My view is that when the Office for Students has the kind of ambitious responsibilities for the student experience envisaged in the Bill, it is reasonable to expect participation—in the sense that it is used in these clauses —to be a responsibility for the OfS as a whole. I would argue that that is a better way of ensuring that the noble Baroness’s concerns are met than narrowing it down to one specific function within one part of OfS.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I understand that the Director for Fair Access and Participation will have the right to find these statistics, which will assist him in his role. I cannot envisage a situation where he would not wish to be aware of the bigger picture to carry out his role effectively.

[Baroness Brinton]

I asked a question about Amendment 27 and the fact that when the Director for Fair Access and Participation is not responsible, that has to be reported in the annual report. I asked for some specific examples other than, obviously, when he or she would be away, to try to understand why that wording was used in the amendment.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

It would be better to write a letter to clarify that in detail.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, so far as the concepts which are in issue in these amendments are concerned, I am entirely in favour of the autonomy of our higher education institutions, but autonomy does not mean they can do what they like. There is a severe restriction on that autonomy in the provisions for academic freedom, because they prevent universities trenching on the freedom of their academic staff in the way described.

This question of academic freedom is grounded on my heart. As a new Lord Chancellor I had been given the rather unpleasant responsibility of taking the universities section of the 1988 Bill through this House. There were about as many chancellors of universities then in the House as there are now. It was rather a difficult task. One of the things I was determined to have was protection for academic freedom in view of the provisions relating to university tenure. I therefore promoted in government an amendment to deal with academic freedom. When the Bill came to Committee, at a very early stage Lord Jenkins decided he had a good definition of academic freedom, which he put to the vote. From my point of view, it had the great effect of not requiring further consultation in the Government.

Academic freedom became a statutory provision then and remains, but it is an innovation on the complete idea of autonomy. One of the other things we have to remember relating to autonomy is a matter raised in the debate this afternoon on the governance of universities and higher education establishments. The form of the governance can be extremely important.

I was involved long ago in litigation about the governance of Scottish universities where they have a rector. For the first time in the history of Scottish universities, a certain student was nominated to be a rector of Edinburgh University—it does not take a lot of guessing to know who that was. He graduated to be the rector of Edinburgh University notwithstanding the judicial proceedings and later became the Prime Minister, so he had excellent preparation for that office. It has therefore to be borne in mind that autonomy does not necessarily mean that you can do exactly what you like, but it means that there is considerable freedom in how you do what you are there to do.

One issue raised by the first amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, was that of profit. As he said, every institution that wants to be ongoing has to ensure that its income is at least somewhat greater than its expenditure—as Mr Micawber pointed out to us long ago. Every institution that is a university or a higher education establishment has to have that. Why should it make all the difference that the people who set that establishment up want a return on the capital that they put into it? I agree with the noble Baroness who said that exploitation is quite wrong—nobody, I think, could dispute that—but it does not necessarily follow that because you run an establishment for profit you will exploit those who come to it. In a free-market situation, which is what we had until fees were controlled by the Government, universities were free to charge what they thought appropriate. I imagine that if a university is fee-paying, as is one of the institutions of which the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, is chancellor, it must have some effect on the fees that are charged to the students.

I think that the law is that the purpose of education is a charitable one, but it does not follow that every institution set up as educational is itself a charity, because to be a charity you have to be established for charitable purposes only. One purpose that is not charitable is distributing profits to those who set the establishment up, so that university and any others that might follow in the same pattern would not be charities. I do not think that that matters too much; what matters is whether you can guarantee the quality of the teaching and research—if it does research—that such an establishment can bring forward. I do not feel that the provision that was made by a previous Government is necessarily incorrect. We have had a good example of what such an establishment can achieve. I think I am right in saying—I am depending very much on my recollection—that at least some of the examining boards are now set up by organisations that are for profit.

Protection from government of the autonomy of an institution strikes me as fundamental. I do not think that the Bill infringes on that directly, but I can see the advantage of making sure by way of negative provisions that it does not happen in the future, because we never know who may come along after the present Government. Proper protection for autonomy strikes me as highly appropriate, although there may be some dispute with my noble friend the Minister about the extent to which it is necessary. Such principles seem fundamental and I hope that they will be followed in consideration of these amendments and many later amendments.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, the autonomy outlined in both this and the previous debate has been one of the guiding stars of our universities in this country for hundreds of years. The balance in their relationship with either the Government of the day or other local interests has been vital. That is why I support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, spoke about profit and not-for-profit and why whether a university or institution might be a charity was irrelevant. I spent more than a decade as a Cambridge college bursar and I know many other finance directors of universities. Getting into a debate about charity and about trading arms ends up being a debate about VAT. That is not the business of this House today, but I could bore your Lordships in some detail on that. It is available to most large charities to find mechanisms that allow them to trade, but the big difference is that they then reinvest profits from any trading arm into the charity. That is why I prefer the word “surplus” to “profit”. That has been the guiding star of our university sector for some time.

I was rather taken with the idea put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, of a probationary period. I hope your Lordships will forgive me for coming back to my own experience, but 20 years ago this year, Lucy Cavendish College achieved full college status with its own statutes—which went through the Privy Council—and part of my role in the preceding five years was to ready the college for that and to prove that the college would be here in a hundred years’ time. That included demonstrating the standards that everybody has talked about—making sure that the base finances were solid enough and that access to students and provision of courses met the demands of Cambridge University. The problem for Lucy Cavendish was that it was a 30-year probationary period, but we are talking about the University of Cambridge and perhaps time moves slightly more slowly there than for others. However, the key lesson that the college learned as we prepared for getting our own autonomy was that we had to be able to demonstrate a whole range of standards that would ensure that provision, and then we could accept the responsibilities that come with the autonomy that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, outlined.

I think that the reason that this debate and the debate on the previous amendment have gone on so long is that there is a great fear that in the Bill as outlined, such autonomy is undermined. That is the debate that we need during the passage of this Bill in order to negotiate our way through difficult words such as public and private. I have a slight concern—I would never have described myself at university as being part of the public, but I accept that there was a duty towards the public. It is that language that we need to look at.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I would not have spoken again but for the fact that I should have known the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, had been so heavily involved with Lucy Cavendish, of which I am an honorary fellow and, I hope, partly responsible for its financial stability. One thing is being missed out of this debate on autonomy—it is my fault because I have not mentioned it: we find ourselves heavily constrained by the role of the academic council. We also find the role of our owners and financiers considerably stood off by the role of the academic council. The academic council is a great defence against anybody trying to tell us to do things—not that our owners do that. It stands firm. I am sure that this must be true for other universities. It is an important part of autonomy. We do not seem to have discussed academic councils. Perhaps they will be mentioned later in the Bill.

Private Colleges

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

There is a balance to be struck here. We are very keen to encourage the setting up of new providers, examples of which include Ravensbourne College in east London and the Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design, but the key point that he is really alluding to is quality. If new providers are setting up and are given provision for degree-awarding powers from day one, it is critical that the quality conditions are met. Perhaps I may reassure the noble Lord that the bar for these conditions is set very high.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, the Centre for Global Higher Education report published earlier this year entitled, The Entry and Experience of Providers of Higher Education in Six Countries, states:

“Private providers are quick to suffer the consequences of diminishing demand, forcing institutions to close. This can have serious educational and financial consequences for students at failing institutions who sometimes can be left in limbo”.

Given the current arrangements, with HEFCE as a regulator and the high hurdle of a royal charter for a new HE institution, what will the Government do to ensure that any new private providers in the UK do not become at risk of this happening?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

One of our reforms is to set up the Office for Students, as I mentioned earlier. It will provide one register to set a level playing field. This means that if, in what would perhaps be an unusual case, a private provider does not meet the standards required, there are student protection processes in place. That is an important part of our checks and controls.

Education: A-levels in Creative Subjects

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Brinton]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they intend to take to ensure that exam boards continue to offer a range of creative subjects at A-Level.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I asked for this debate because of the decision of the awarding body AQA to discontinue its offer of A-levels in history of art and archaeology, as well as a reduction in the offer and take-up of certain creative and arts subjects at A-level, which has sparked a fresh debate on what is offered in the current curriculum. Does the Minister agree that a good range of subjects being taught in schools and colleges is very important to broaden the learning horizons of all our young people? His own Government’s current mantra is “a Government that works for all” so we will assume that that means an education that works for all, too.

How important is it, therefore, that the offer includes creative subjects? Part of the UK’s problem has been a narrowing down of the curriculum post-16 because of the gold-star standard of A-levels compared with other international comparators, which in the past has resulted in far too many students choosing either arts or sciences. To some extent, AS-levels broadened that base for year 12 but, compared with the USA, France, the Netherlands and Scotland, with its Highers system, the English system remains narrow in its offer. David Laws, as Schools Minister, introduced Progress 8, an accountability measure, to ensure that schools are rewarded for offering a broad and balanced curriculum. But the reality is that the opposite is now happening.

It is worth looking at the specific problem of the history of art A-level. It is true that numbers for the take-up of history of art are low, especially from students in state schools. AQA says that in 2016 there were 719 entries at AS-level and 834 at A-level. These entries were from a total of 99 schools and 20 further education colleges. A mere 16 out of more than 3,000 state secondary schools, plus a further 15 sixth-form colleges, currently offer it. By contrast, more than 90 fee-paying schools offer the subject. Michael Gove was quick via Twitter to claim no responsibility for history of art’s demise.

The history of art A-level content was reformed and it exists if another awarding body decides to offer it. Other creative subjects have also been reformed and are ready for teaching. Their respective creative communities will be promoting them to schools, no doubt, but is this enough? Surprisingly—and perhaps ironically—it was Mr Gove who posed the very serious question in last week’s discussions on history of art. He said:

“Why were so few state schools offering the subject? Why aren’t more heads anxious to promote it? Who on earth thinks it’s ‘soft’—not me”.

Perhaps for Michael Gove nothing with history in its title can be soft—not sure about the art bit, though.

However, there is a larger and more strategic picture here. Frankly, I think it arises out of the EBacc culture, the Government’s focus on STEM and, perhaps most critically, the funding mechanisms. Since the introduction of the English baccalaureate—compulsory in state-funded secondary schools—the take-up of creative subjects has declined. Why? The culture of targets that has been set by EBacc means that far fewer students now take those creative subjects at GCSE. Music is a case in point. The Incorporated Society of Musicians carried out research earlier this year which found that just over a third of our secondary schools have no pupils taking GCSE music at all. As a pupil, you cannot do A-level music without a good A* to C grade in GCSE music; nor will a school attract excellent music teachers without a keen commitment to providing the academic qualifications for students with musical aptitude, not just some general music provision. The root of the problem is that music is not an option within the rigid EBacc. Other qualifications, such as the international baccalaureate, are as rigorous but more flexible in subject matter, allowing students and schools to choose topics and subjects within a framework. That is why the Bacc for the Future campaign championed by the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, and many other professional musicians and teachers is so vital.

One in 11 of jobs in our society is creative but this year alone we have seen an 8% drop in the uptake of arts subjects from the previous year. When I was chair of the Cambridgeshire Learning and Skills Council just over 10 years ago, there was already considerable concern that school sixth forms might be too small to offer a broad enough A-level curriculum. The development of effective and larger sixth-form colleges seemed to be a good response. The economies of scale meant that students could mix and match A-levels and AS-levels across the arts and sciences. But recently the further education sector has been managing severe and continuing budget cuts. The Sixth Form Colleges Association reports that the sector’s funding is 20% lower than funding for 11 to 16 year-olds, and nearly 48% lower than for universities. A recent survey it carried out showed that the cuts in funding have resulted in the majority reducing or removing the extracurricular activities available to students, including music and drama; two-thirds believe that the funding will not be enough to support students who are educationally or economically disadvantaged; and colleges are struggling to provide 15 to 17 hours a week of tuition per student, whereas funding in Singapore provides for more than 30 hours a week. Inevitably, this reduces the range of courses in the UK.

There are many reasons for this decline and some of them are, as the Department for Education is keen to point out, cyclical. But we are in a perfect storm which is now severely impacting on arts and, more specifically, creative subjects post-16. Head teachers are thinking about their schools’ performance tables. EBacc subjects get priority because they know that is how their schools will be judged, reducing options for post-16 students whose options were limited at GCSE. Funding for teacher training on EBacc core subjects is also a priority, resulting in a supply crisis in certain arts subjects. Students and parents are told by schools that EBacc subjects are where they need to concentrate, without understanding the limitations on future options. Although Ofsted is open to the thinking that an outstanding school is one that also offers creative subjects, it has to follow the government framework. As the Creative Industries Federation’s report Social Mobility and the Skills Gap observed:

“In 2015, more than a quarter of students in academies (28 per cent) took seven GCSEs or fewer. If such students have to take the EBacc in future, there would be no space for other subjects, even if these subjects were offered”.

A year ago, the DfE published its consultation on EBacc implementation and laid down a target of 90% of students taking the EBacc. The education and creative industries communities responded to explain the negative impact that that target could lead to. We still await the Government’s response to this consultation.

The targets and focus within the EBacc are beginning to distort priorities, and the unintended consequence of its narrow focus is now having a direct impact on what post-16 institutions offer. Within a short few years, the capacity of our workforce emerging from apprenticeships and degrees will be evident in the labour market. So I ask the Minister: do the Government still believe that students studying A-level need the breadth of subjects offered, particularly in arts and creative subjects, given the current focus on STEM subjects? Will the Government drop the target of 90% of children doing the EBacc, as long as schools can demonstrate that pupils are achieving good attainment targets and progression? What are the Government doing to remedy the funding crisis in the post-16 sector, most particularly in sixth-form and further education colleges, which have been unfairly targeted compared to the rest of the education sector? Will the Government continue to press for Progress 8 in full, ensuring that schools are held accountable for a truly broad curriculum? Will the Government publish a progress report on the Henley review of cultural education?

In recent months, I have watched the dedication and skills of clinicians, healthcare and associated professionals who are caring for my granddaughter at the wonderful Evelina children’s hospital. Almost everyone I have seen, from consultants through to play workers, from speech and language therapists to teachers, visiting writers, musicians and artists all use creative skills and techniques in what they use to heal our children. It is not just medicine. The toys designed to stimulate children at some of the worst times in their lives, even if they are digital and engineering-based, have all been designed by people who understand arts and creativity. It is not just engineering. Creativity is everywhere about us and as important as the vital skills of science, technology, engineering and mathematics which we need in UK plc. There is one important letter missing from STEM; it is “A” for arts. Without a core place for arts and creative subjects, our country cannot steam ahead into the future. It must also be at the heart of our education system.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as an honorary fellow of Birkbeck College and a former director of learndirect, when it was owned by UFI. In today’s debate on the humble Address, I want to focus on social care but will also make some brief comments on a couple of other topics.

First, while I know that the prison education reform proposals will be debated more fully next Tuesday, there are inevitable links with education, BIS and welfare, through vocational and academic achievement as well as in-work learning such as apprenticeships. I am concerned that the proposals are being described by government spokespeople as the academisation of prisons. Yet again, we see a Government changing structures rather than focusing on the actual improvement of services.

Education and training for all prisoners do need real attention, but this is not new. When my late father was a Member of another place, he gave me the Second Report of the Education, Science and Arts Select Committee in the 1983-84 Session, on prison education, which says:

“The previous Committee concluded that there existed a profound confusion and lack of clarity throughout the Prison Service as to the purpose of the regime in general and education in prisons in particular”.

It goes on to say:

“The previous Committee clearly found that the prison service was in a state of crisis. Concerned as it is with education, this Committee believes that existing prison education departments, because of the fundamental indecision about objectives found by the previous Committee, are unable to operate with full effect and make their proper contribution to a rehabilitative prison regime. The consequence for public expenditure is waste”.

I have quoted that report at length because hidden behind the public reports of the current crisis in the general running of the Prison Service lie decades of crisis in education and learning in prisons. When I was a director of UFI learndirect about a decade ago, we had a large contract to deliver prison education. In many instances it was almost impossible to achieve this because the day-to-day regime conflicted time and again with the idea of any prisoner successfully completing a course. For example, prisoners had no access to internet exams, and records did not follow them when they moved quickly from one prison to another. I thought those days were long over, but I recently talked to a former prison tutor who finally resigned a few months ago after what they saw as deliberate blockage, with the day-to-day prison regime being used to prevent learning or to punish an individual prisoner or, worse, to prevent the education staff being able even to offer the training by there being no one to take them through security at the beginning of the day.

On their own, new buildings and new structures will not change anything at all. Unless there is a clear national learning entitlement for prisoners—with responsibilities on their part, too—and proper funding, which was asked for by the 1984 Select Committee, this clash of cultures in our prisons will not change and the learning attainment as a key part of rehabilitation that we all seek will not happen. Worse, this Parliament will still be debating this issue in 2045.

Mind you, with the speed of reforms in your Lordships’ Chamber, I may still be here to debate it. I am mindful of the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, about the primacy of House of Commons. I am sure that we will still be recognising the primacy of the House of Commons then.

On the Higher Education and Research Bill, the devil will be in the detail—as ever—but there remains a stubborn conflict in the Government’s approach to the sector, absolutely captured in the name of the White Paper: Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice. As a nation, either we want flexibility—both of subject and study mode—and priority for student choice or we want an HE sector which will supply our knowledge economy for the next 30 years. The lack of graduates in STEAM subjects—not just STEM, as the arts are vital in the knowledge economy—means that we risk losing that critical leading edge that brings major returns, not least profitability, to UK plc until we resolve this conundrum.

There has been talk of expanding privatisation. The newer private organisations that have moved into the university sector have been very restricted in their choice of subjects, such as law and accountancy. The White Paper relaxes much of the protective structure to ensure quality that has been one of the key reasons the UK’s institutions have an enviable reputation. The new degree-awarding powers mechanism must maintain that protection. We await the detail, to see how this will operate, but I have concerns that allowing start-up universities to set up quickly might not provide the security that students deserve. We already have a large number of institutions that need support, and we need to ensure that institutions offer decent teaching, are financially secure—along with the students—and provide new opportunities to their graduates.

Although I am encouraged by the reference to support for excluded pupils in the education for all Bill, there seems to be little in there about support for children who cannot attend school because of severe bullying. At present the mechanisms for the funding to follow these pupils into specialist support are woeful and based on very patchy local provision. We cannot have a position where only children who bully or have challenging behaviours get help, while the pupils who are traumatised, and often clinically depressed, through bullying get no support and, worse, their schools can hold on to them, over medical advice to move them elsewhere.

In the remaining short time, I want to speak about social care, but I cannot find a Bill or proposal in the Queen’s Speech that permits that. So I make my first point about this Government’s approach to social care: it is invisible. Worse than that, it is an invisible elephant in the room. My noble friend Lady Walmsley referred to the seven-day NHS and the increasing crisis of delayed discharges. What sits behind that is a social care system absolutely at breaking point. It is an almost perfect storm: increasing numbers of elderly people requiring care; local government facing the worst crisis in funding from central government for generations; and then the introduction of the living wage. The latter is essential for the employees, and generously set by the Government, but there is no funding for local government which would enable it to raise its rates to social care providers. Finally, slightly at a tangent, even some GPs trying to find cash have scrabbled around to find money and are now charging some residential homes for standard GP services to the residents, who should not be charged twice.

In coalition, we established the better care fund, as a pilot, to see if we could cut the Gordian knot between delayed discharges and social care, and make sure we could get people back home from hospital and prevent them from getting there in the first place. There have been some shining examples of success, but too many projects have sunk without trace since last year’s general election. The Government may not feel the need for a social care Bill, but the omission of social care from the gracious Speech as a priority should set alarm bells ringing everywhere, as A&E departments struggle and delayed discharges rise. This invisible elephant in the room requires funding and a joint commissioning approach, urgently. Without it, the system will collapse and we will fail our older generation.

Higher Education: Part-time and Mature Students

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister has alluded three times so far to—

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, I am so sorry to interrupt. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, would not have been able to see that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is trying to get in, and it is the turn of the Lib Dems.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, the Minister has said repeatedly in answering this Question that the Government want to stimulate the sector. If the issue is that employers will not provide support, what can the Government do to encourage employers to support part-time students, perhaps with some tax relief if they are supporting students gaining high-level qualifications which will benefit their businesses?

[Lord Nash]

I have already said that we have extended the loan scheme. The noble Baroness makes a very good point about tax breaks. We are looking at a number of alternatives and I will certainly take that point back.

Schools: Health and Well-being

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

We have provided £185 million for cooking facilities for schools and we are training cooks in this area. More schoolchildren have this opportunity. It is reaching 85% of schoolchildren. Not all take it up—not all have been in school on the day in question—but it is receiving comprehensive coverage.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, much of the focus has been on mainstream schools and children’s nutrition. The pupils at Critchill special school in Frome grow their own vegetables, have chickens and manage their own eggs. On the day I visited they were making a tasty soup from their own vegetables and using maths, English and other skills. Is this excellent example of whole-school nutrition in special schools being disseminated elsewhere in the country?