Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)]

My Lords, I have just three points to make. I shall be very brief, because many other noble Lords want to participate in this important debate.

First, many here will well remember the anxiety that many of us felt about the possible effects on student participation rates in higher education in 1998, when students became responsible for paying upfront tuition fees, and more recently—there have been many changes since then, but to take just one example of other changes—when tuition fees were raised to £9,000. Many believed at the time that those measures would have a particularly adverse effect on the higher education participation rates of young people from poorer families, thereby affecting not only their life chances but, longer term, the national economic effort.

In fact, according to UCAS, the proportion of young people in higher education eligible for free school meals has increased by a percentage point a year since 2012, and the number of young people from places in England with the lowest HE participation—I come from one of those areas—has increased year-on-year from about 19,000 in 2012 to about 22,500 in 2015. As Universities UK pointed out in its report of June last year:

“There is no evidence that the funding reforms of 2012 have deterred young, full-time students from applying to university. Numbers of applications from all socioeconomic groups have been increasing steadily”.

My second point is that in the past—this may be an explanation for that steady increase in participation rates of children from poorer families—increases and changes in student fees have been accompanied by grants, loans and bursaries and, in 2012, a 10% rise in the maintenance grant for poorer students. It is therefore welcome that, as part of this proposed switch from grants to loans, the maximum available finance for poorer students will rise by about £500 a year to more than £8,000. This has been welcomed by, among others, Sir Les Ebdon of OFFA.

However—my noble friend will be aware that a “however” usually comes in at this stage when I am making points about education, and I pay tribute to the extremely valuable and passionate points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech—the Department for Business itself acknowledges that the prospect of increased debt may deter some low-income households from undertaking higher education. It is for this reason that I strongly urge my noble friend to ensure that the effect of these changes is closely monitored. I ask this in the name of social mobility. The Government’s 2015 higher education Green Paper commits them to doubling the proportion of students from areas where participation is low by 2020. This is an admirable objective in line with many other policy areas where the Government’s pursuit of greater social mobility is succeeding. It would be regrettable if that progress in social mobility were to be checked at this stage for the sake of an omission of careful monitoring of the effects of these measures on precisely the groups already referred to by the noble Baroness—and those that I suspect will be mentioned by other noble Lords who will contribute to the debate. I know that my noble friend will undertake to keep a more than close eye on the way that this develops.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Stevenson for bringing the Motion of Regret to the House. I feel more than regret; I feel alarm and despondency. I share the word used by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden: I feel a sense of shame that we have embarked on this step without proper legislation. I have to say to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, that monitoring itself will be too late. The consequences will be very obvious for the groups about whom I am going to speak.

The removal of the maintenance grant from the poorest and most disadvantaged is something with which I am very familiar. The reason is that back in the mid-1990s, the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, appointed me to lead a small commission to look at some of the problems that had arisen over the funding of further education at the time. One thing that became very apparent was that for the poorest in society, the route to higher education is often via further education. It became clear in the report that eventually came from the work I was deputed to do by the noble Baroness, who was a most remarkable and fine Secretary of State in those years, that many people who had been failed by the system—young women who had got pregnant in their teens, boys who had become disaffected and sometimes got into trouble and people whose families went through problems when they were at a crucial point in their schooling—missed out on the golden ladder, so familiar to people in this House either for themselves or for their children, of going through school and proceeding into university. For many, the route back into education was through further education, and further education is the ladder into higher education.

I still see such people regularly because, at the end of the reporting I was commissioned to do, the further education world put together a little foundation which bears my name, for which I continue to raise funds and to which I contribute, to create bursaries for students of the category I described: those who try to use further education to better themselves, the very people I so often hear described as those who should be given opportunities. This Government claim to be totally committed to aspiration. I know, because of that little foundation, the Kennedy Foundation, that those people are often hardest hit by the current funding system. It is a hard business, taking out loans when you are the mother of young children, when you are from a really disadvantaged family and have no safety net or back-up from other members of your family. We contribute a bursary to them. It is not a significant sum of money, but if they did not also get the maintenance grant, they would not go to higher education at all.

This will be a deprivation; I have no doubt about that. We do not have to use more than our imagination to know that there will be a great cohort of young people—people in their 20s and early 30s—who will not go back into education because the idea that they will not get such support will be too much of a disincentive. That should be a source of shame to all of us, but certainly to the Government.

I have listened to what others have said. I was very moved by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. It is true: those who are poorest do not want to do the business of going off to university. Even in my youth—I was brought up in Glasgow in a family where no one had gone on to higher education—almost everyone who went to the schools that I went to went to the local university because they just could not afford to go somewhere else. I flew the coop and it changed my life, and I want that for other people from my background. I urge the Government to think about this again, because I think that not enough thought went into it. The cost to the lives of people is too great. The numbers are not huge, the money is not that huge, and I think we will pay a terrible price. I would ask the Government to think again.