Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems clear, from listening to the noble Lords, Lord Johnson and Lord Stevens, and my noble friends Lady Blackstone and Lord Blunkett, that there is a great deal of agreement across the House about the things that we need to address in this Bill. I for one am really rather looking forward to our sessions in Grand Committee because we might make some progress.

I congratulate my noble friend on her opening remarks and say how much I enjoyed the maiden speeches today. I say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield that I forgive him for being from South Yorkshire, not West Yorkshire. In terms of football teams, if he put a flash of yellow in, he could of course support Leeds United, which would be a wise thing to do at the moment—they need all the support they can get. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Sewell, will make his own distinctive contribution to your Lordships’ House.

I wish to speak about why lifelong learning is so important and to pay tribute to the person who I believe helped to set us on this path many years ago. He has already been referred to by my noble friend Lady Blackstone. I had the privilege of working with Michael Young—later my noble friend, as he became, Lord Young—at the start of my working life at the Institute for Community Studies in Bethnal Green. Your Lordships will all know of Michael Young: sociologist, social innovator and reformer, and a politician. During his seminal research in the East End, Family and Kinship in East London being the most famous, and over years of research in those communities, he learned, as he put it to me over 40 years ago, that working people could not access higher education or university because they had to go out to work, usually when they were 15 or 16 years old. My noble friend Lady Blackstone, who modestly did not say that she is a former leader of Birkbeck College, mentioned the institutions which tried to address that over many years.

I know that is an obvious thing that working people had to go out to work in those days at 15 or 16. Speaking as somebody who was the first in their family to go to university, and is married to someone who was the first in his to do so, we come from the kinds of families where such a thing was not usually possible, however smart the person might be—my mum certainly was. Even if they managed to pass the exams which should have qualified them for higher education, family circumstances and the imperative of earning a living and supporting themselves and their family meant that it was out of the question.

It was not that some of them did not make it through the system—of course, they did. My father did an apprenticeship and was a master plumber. My uncle Jim became a draughtsman and helped to design fighter aircraft, but he was the exception in a large family stuffed with smart and ambitious people. We were of course very proud of him. To get a degree after you had started your working life was rare, so the Open University and the institutions that we are discussing today are to address the waste of talent and thwarted ambition.

Higher education became accessible to the likes of me and my generation thanks to successive Labour Governments’ support for and expansion of it. But that came from the recognition of Michael Young, because he looked, as he did in so many other areas of disadvantage, for practical solutions. We have Which? magazine at the moment, for example, because he set up the Consumers’ Association. Over the 1960s he saw the establishment of several institutions, with—it has to be said—a mutually useful political relationship with the man who became the Labour leader, Harold Wilson. There was a commitment for the Open University to be set up and included in the 1964 Labour manifesto, then to be in the Queen’s Speech and open for business in 1969. It was part of that Labour Government recognising the need for a leap forward in the country—Harold Wilson called it the white heat of technology—in science and modern education. Just like that, today, the Labour Party is launching its vision and mission for rebuilding our economy and greening our world. Who knows what innovations might be necessary or lie ahead with the radical shift that we may well need in our skills and education system?

Michael Young had to tackle the academic community and convince it that a robust degree could be achieved through distance learning and over a longer period. I expect the Minister and her colleagues have had to do much the same in recent times. He had to address the issue of preparing students to apply and be ready to study. In 1960 he created the Advisory Centre for Education and the National Extension College to do these things and achieve distance learning, using the tools then at their disposal.

The idea that new technologies such as radio and television could be used to bring education to a wider audience began to surface as long ago as the 1920s. “Dawn University” on Anglia Television became the prototype of the Open University, which was part of Harold Wilson’s vision. The partnership between two great institutions, the newly formed Open University and the BBC, used the technology that existed at the time to move forward.

Given the amazing availability of technology to assist learning, for the Government to have excluded distance learners from maintenance support seems a backward move if we are serious about lifelong learning and its accessibility. I ask the Minister to address that question. Currently, part-time students studying face to face are entitled to maintenance support, but the vast majority of part-time distance learning students are not. The introduction of the LLE could be a real opportunity to make this important change, which would bring greater access and flexibility to lifelong learning.

The promotion of flexible learning is why we support this Bill. It needs to be improved, but we absolutely support its core aims to widen participation and support student outcomes by allowing distance learners to take unpaid study leave or reduce their hours of work to focus on their studies. Recognising the ambition to study, learn skills and be more ambitious about lifelong horizons should lay at the heart of this Bill. It is good for industry and business, and for individuals and their families.

That leads me to my final points. As my noble friend Lady Wilcox said, we need to see the Government’s vision of what they are building. It is not entirely clear how this Bill and the previous legislation will promote lifelong learning, and what the Government intend to do to promote that demand. I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said about the need to promote and encourage demand and the need for more flexibility. Indeed, I agree with the noble Lord’s remarks about the supply side and how that might be delivered. I have to say that I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who asked: how will we know if this Bill has succeeded, and when? There is a large measure of agreement across the House on how we might improve it, and I look forward to working with noble Lords to do so.

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 5th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by apologising for my bad timing in not arriving for the previous set of amendments to which I was a signatory. I was caught on the hop, and it takes a few hops to get here from my office in Millbank House, so I apologise to the House.

It is important that some of the issues to which my noble friend Lady Twycross referred are emphasised. The impact of the Bill’s provisions on a number of education sectors is considerable, and I return again to the impact on the access to higher education for students from lower-income backgrounds. I shall not rehearse the arguments about BTECS and AGQs, the Minister will be relieved to hear, but that is one issue that needs to be borne in mind as the legislation proceeds.

I can no longer speak on behalf of the party as I am no longer on the Front Bench, but I very much hope that an incoming Labour Government would retain much of this legislation, because I think it is very positive and it would be a great shame if that was not done. I think it will; I think common sense will mean that that happens. Some of how we shape the Bill now, therefore, will have an impact further down the line, whatever happens at the next general election. I particularly mention the skills gaps in the economy, mentioned at the end of subsection (2) of the new clause proposed in the amendment; it is very important that we bear that in mind going forward.

The Minister, in response to the previous set of amendments, talked about impact assessments: the one done before the Bill was published and one in, I think, March this year. I was surprised that she did not mention—at least, not when I was here, and I think I was here when she was speaking—the report issued just under two weeks ago by the Permanent Secretary of the department on the assessment of the lifelong loan entitlement, which I thought was potentially rather worrying. The Permanent Secretary was questioning the ability to complete the rollout by 2025, as is intended. She said, and I quote from her report, that the biggest risk to feasibility of the lifelong loan entitlement is “significant delivery challenges”.

I will not go through all of those, as I am sure noble Lords will have seen them—this is the report issued on 25 August. It is all very well to talk about an impact assessment, but an assessment has been made of whether the deadline can be met, and I would like the Minister at least to comment on it, because we are getting fairly close to the time when, if certain preparations for the implementation of the lifelong loan entitlement are not completed, that 2025 introduction date will slip. That would be very unfortunate, to say the least, and could have considerable knock-on impacts.

Coming to my final point—perhaps I am being a little unfair to the Minister, but I am going to say it anyway—I referred, in my Oral Question in July, to a thematic report published by Ofsted which raised some questions about T-levels. I know that this is not the same thing, but I think the way that T-levels roll out will have an effect on the number of people who are properly prepared to take up some of the options under the lifelong loan entitlement. Could she say whether—if she thinks it is not appropriate to do so now, I should be very happy if she could write—she and her officials, having had more time to study the Ofsted report, have any other comments to make on it? I thought it unusual for His Majesty’s inspector to be as openly critical on such a fundamental part of the Government’s education and skills policy. If she would prefer not to rise to that today, I would be very happy for her to write, but it would be helpful to have some comment on that thematic report issued in July.

With those remarks, I think that the issues covered in Amendment 3 are important, and I do not really see why the Government should be unhappy about the Secretary of State conducting an annual review considering the various issues listed in the amendment.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment, to which my name is attached, but I also echo my noble friend’s remarks on this matter. As I mentioned to the Minister, the rollout will be very important, and the three to five-year assessment of whether the legislation has worked will not serve, because it will be a moving feast. Indeed, I thank the Open University for writing to us to draw our attention to the accounting officer’s assessment, which my noble friend mentioned, which highlights concerns within the department that the rollout might be a problem.

There are two things here, really. First, I seek some clarity on how this will be promoted. This partly echoes the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in Committee, which we rather liked; they were about trust and how this will be sold to people as something that we would want them to take up in the long term. The second point is about addressing the concerns that have been expressed within the department by the accounting officer.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, we have here a fairly formidable list of things, all of them important. I want to focus on subsection (2)(j) in the new clause proposed by Amendment 3, which concerns:

“the financial sustainability of the tertiary education sector”.

We note that student fees have not gone up in all the years they have been there and that universities now face intense financial pressures. I note that, in Committee, the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Johnson, put forward a suggestion that student fees should rise with inflation; that has not gone further but I wonder whether the Minister could give some succour to university vice-chancellors, who are desperately worried about how on earth they can balance their books as costs go up but income does not.