Education: Conservatoires

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lipsey both on securing this debate and on his recent appointment, which I had not known about and am delighted by.

I remind the House of my own interests. I have spent all my professional life working with people who have come through conservatoire training; I have observed them, employed them and advised them and for a short while I was in charge of them as, briefly, principal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Furthermore, both my children are conservatoire-trained, so I think I may say that I have seen this kind of education close up, and these are some of the things I know. First, conservatoire training is intense and rigorous, and requires tremendous dedication. For musicians in particular, the road is not only hard but long. Secondly, it is therefore expensive to deliver. Thirdly, students who secure the few available places do so in the face of fierce competition and are often highly skilled before they even start. Fourthly, conservatoire graduates are central to the continuing worldwide success of UK arts and culture, which is critical to our economy.

There is currently, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Lipsey and others, a damaging degree of confusion and uncertainty about whether the necessary special funding for conservatoires will be properly secured. I should like to quote from a letter I received recently from the principal of one of our leading conservatoires in this country. He puts it thus:

“What we have at present is a cocktail of inadequate formula funding with various stop-gap supplements plus an institution-specific supplement that is subject to review every four or five years. It’s a mess. HEFCE do a really good job of making do and mending but ... this has never been translated into the price group structure that has underpinned HEFCE funding for many years. They allocate conservatoire training to a low price group and then wonder why the fee plus teaching grant doesn’t meet the costs and needs a supplementary discretionary top-up”.

He goes on to say:

“What we need is a structure that recognises ... the legitimate high cost and length of training required”.

Of course that is what we need. Why can we not do this when we can do it for other disciplines such as medicine, which also requires long training and high-cost teaching?

The noble Viscount, Lord Younger, is, I know, something of a performer himself. I am sure he perfectly understands these issues, and I hope that when he winds up, he can give the conservatoire sector some hope that they may be resolved.