Higher Education

James Cartlidge Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

In the remarks of the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), whose passion I admire, my colleagues will have been struck by her use of the phrase “ideologically driven, free market privatisation”. Those with particularly good memories will have heard those words some years ago. I refer, as I am sure you will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, to the Second Reading debate on the Education (Schools) Bill on 19 November 1991. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), now the Father of the House, introduced that Bill, which established performance tables and Ofsted. The shadow Labour spokesman, Derek Fatchett, the former Member for Leeds, Central, said in winding up:

“We shall vote against it this evening. We shall campaign against it and ensure that parents throughout Britain see the Bill as deeply damaging, because it is an ideologically driven privatising measure.”—[Official Report, 19 November 1991; Vol. 199, c. 232.]

The exact same wording was used to describe the creation of Ofsted, which is now a part of the warp and weft of the education system and on which my constituents rely. Parents in our constituencies rely on it to look at standards in those schools, which in itself drives up our standards. So the hon. Lady has got the wrong end of the stick, because the OfS is there to do the same thing.

We have to ask ourselves a simple question: what is the purpose of higher education? It is to deliver the best possible quality of education for our young people, so that they can stand on their own two feet and make the most of their talents. Some have an obsession with whether it is free—I agree there are concerns about the interest rate and the level of debt—but the purpose of education is what people get at the end of it and what it does to help them make the most of their lives. I want us to establish an OfS that drives up standards by bringing the same transparency that has applied from Ofsted, empowering students just as Ofsted empowers parents. It is a simple principle: driving up standards through competition. Labour Members do not understand it, which is why they are making the same mistake as they did in 1991, ranting about privatisation and ideology. They are the ones with the ideology: they are anti-quality and anti-aspiration.