Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Johnston and Julian Lewis

Monday 29th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston]

As it happens, I am meeting the director of the Youth Endowment Fund in the morning. We have a quarterly meeting to review progress and make sure it is on track.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

In regard to the worrying topic raised earlier of antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools, will Ministers please bear in mind sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996? The former bans political indoctrination in schools, and the latter says that when political subjects are brought to the attention of pupils, they must be presented in a fair and balanced way.

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Debate between David Johnston and Julian Lewis

2nd reading
Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston]

My hon. Friend makes another important point, and it leads me incredibly nicely to the point that I was just about to make.

I understand the motive behind the Labour party’s desire for 50% of young people to go to university. It was not a malign motive. Labour believed that that was aspirational and that it would help us compete, but it has clearly had a number of negative consequences. One of the most important—this goes to my hon. Friend’s point—is that we have told people, “The most important thing you can do is go to university at 18. It doesn’t particularly matter where you go to university or what you study. The most important thing is that you go to university, because we want all young people to go to university.” Thanks to a whole range of organisations, including the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which has done great work on this issue, we now know that people who graduate from a number of institutions will earn less than they would have done had they just got a job. In 2020, the IFS found that about 20% of people who go to university—one in five—earn less than people with similar grades who just get a job.

We might dislike that that is the case—we might wish that every university or subject gave people the same earnings outcome—but when I worked in this field, people could choose from 60,000 university courses, which of course do not all give the same outcomes. Certain universities—particularly Russell Group ones—give people higher earnings, as do particular courses, such as medicine, engineering and maths. The charities I worked with overwhelmingly supported disadvantaged young people, and the truth is that it is usually those people who do not get the advice they need and who pay large amounts for courses that do not add to their employability outcomes. They do not get good information, advice and guidance at a young age from school or from parents, in the way that a middle-class child might. That is one big way in which the 50% target has prioritised quantity over quality.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I thoroughly endorse the direction of my hon. Friend’s thoughtful argument. Does he agree that, even at the Russell Group university end of the spectrum, there has been a serious issue with grade inflation? So many people—a large majority, I think—are now awarded first and upper second-class honours in institutions where, 20 years ago, one in 10 might, if they were lucky, have got a first-class degree, that it becomes difficult for employers to pick out people for the right reasons and for the right jobs.

[David Johnston]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. Part of the reason why that has happened is that young people feel, “I’m making an investment here. I’m paying £9,000 a year. I’m not doing that for you to give me a 2:2 or a third at the end of it.” There has therefore been this pressure on universities—often, unfortunately, with the threat of legal action from parents who can afford it—to inflate the grades people are given. This is another unintended consequence.

People will say, “Look, it’s not just about the money you can earn after your degree,” and that is the case, but because we as individuals are making that investment at that age, we understandably want to see an impact on our earnings. However, another problem is that lots of people will never pay back the money they have borrowed, and that is a huge liability for the taxpayer. Some taxpayers have been to university themselves, and some have not, but they will all incur this cost. We lend money to people to go to university, but if they do not earn enough to be able to pay it back, the taxpayer will not get a return on that investment. At the moment, we are on course for only a quarter of people to fully pay back their student loans. That is a huge amount that the taxpayer is investing unnecessarily in something that I hope we will change through this Bill.

As has been touched on, it is also the case that the three-year, full-time model for people aged 18 does not suit every young person. Lots of the young people I used to work with at the charities I ran had caring responsibilities, either for younger siblings or ill relatives. Perhaps a member of their family had unfortunately died, and those young people therefore had greater responsibilities, or they needed to work alongside study in order to supplement the family income. As such, again, we need greater flexibility, and that is before we come on to the technological change that we are expecting. We will see some of the most radical technological change that the country has ever known, and lots of the jobs that we train people for today will become obsolete. A person might make a decision at 18 about the particular course they want to study for a particular job, and in 20 years find that that job is obsolete and that they need to retrain for something else. That is why the Bill will be so important.

As an aside, lots of jobs should not need a degree anyway—we have slipped with the 50% target, I am afraid. In order to make the lives of employers easier, we have applied a higher and higher degree threshold to weed out people when we make selection decisions. If everybody has a degree, we end up starting to ask for master’s degrees, so we have entry inflation, not just grade inflation. Above all, that target has contributed to the disparity of esteem between academic and vocational courses. As has been touched on, this is a limited, smallish Bill, so giving people the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money to enable them to train themselves across their lifetime, at some point in the future when they decide that they need to study for qualifications that they do not yet have, is so important for what we are trying to do: create that parity of esteem.

The Bill will promote lifelong and modular learning, and set limits on course and module fees based on credits. It will also achieve subtle things. Going back to the point about the whole system being geared towards one particular model, changing from an academic year to a course year is hugely important, because when everything is geared towards academics, we are continually reinforcing the message that the academic model is the only one for people.

We know that lifelong learning has a huge number of benefits. We know it will help with earnings; for some considerable time only about one in eight of the people who are in low pay have escaped that low pay a decade later. That has been true for decades, and part of that is about progression. By the way, that is partly the job of employers —they need to have good strategies for progression —but it is also about allowing adults to train in things they are not able to do, so that they can get more skills and therefore get more money.