Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Julian Lewis Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir David Evennett]

My hon. Friend makes a brilliant point. I think we would all agree that what we need is upgrading and progress, rather than pie-in-the-sky ideas. We must get practical.

The other thing I want to highlight is that colleges in local areas should provide for local needs, boosting the skills that are necessary in that area. The skills needed in my area of south-east London are probably different from those needed in Worcester or in other parts of the country. The Bill creates a new duty for further education colleges, sixth-form colleges and designated institutions to ensure that the provision of further education is fully aligned with local needs and requirements. This is another way to ensure we have the employment and opportunities for young people and not so young people to make a real contribution to their community, and to strengthen the accountability and performance of local colleges and the businesses involved in helping the programme forward.

There is a lot to be pleased about in this small Bill, and I look forward to debating it in Committee if I am privileged enough to be put on it by the Whips, though I do not usually blot my copybook. We will discuss certain bits of the Bill and we will all have ideas for how to tweak it, but we must be grateful to the Government for putting forward an excellent, necessary and most welcome Bill that will support the introduction of a lifelong loan entitlement from 2025 and promote a culture of upskilling and retraining.

The Bill will help to open up higher and further education by introducing new methods and limiting the fees that can be charged based on credits. That is really positive, good news. Students will therefore be charged a proportionate amount depending on the number of credits studied, encouraging more people to study by taking advantage of the flexibility that the scheme will offer. We have seen flexibility in work because of covid and changing work patterns. Many people have found that to their liking, and many businesses have as well. Flexibility must be the word for our era, because it gives opportunity to so many more people.

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

I obviously welcome that the fees charged will be limited, but I presume that the colleges will be able to choose the packages that they offer, so is there a danger that they will be less inclined to offer modules if they cannot charge extremely exorbitant rates for them?

[Sir David Evennett]

I know that my right hon. Friend has a touch of cynicism. I am an optimist, and I believe that the colleges will want to take up the opportunity, because that will show the success of what they are doing. They are part of the local community, so they need to get real. We will have to discuss that point further. I encourage my right hon. Friend to beat the drum in the colleges in his constituency and to tell them that it is their civic or local duty—whatever we want to call it—to do these kinds of things. But we should be wary of what he says.

The Bill is the key to the Government’s skills revolution and it will support our businesses, long-term productivity and job creation. That is particularly important as we deal with the difficult times of the cost of living crisis and other things we will face in the future. We need to make the most of our opportunities. I welcome the Bill; I look forward to it passing into law and to the opportunities it will give so many people across our country for more studying, more career development, more skills and, hopefully, a more successful career.

--- Later in debate ---

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and to speak in what has been a very good debate. I thank the Secretary of State for her opening remarks. It is a shame that there are not more Opposition Members here, but it would be churlish of me not to acknowledge the speeches from the Opposition spokespeople, the hon. Members for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) and for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), who are no longer in their places. They both raised thoughtful points, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney, and I am sure the Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education and the Secretary of State will have heard them and will consider what more we can do in Committee.

I also pay tribute to the speeches of the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett). I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friends the Members for Wantage (David Johnston) and for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) in due course.

As I said in my maiden speech, if I can remember back that far, education is

“the greatest tool of social mobility that we have.”—[Official Report, 20 January 2020; Vol. 670, c. 78.]

To echo the Secretary of State, I am a Conservative because I believe in equality of opportunity and in the famous ladder of opportunity that I am sure the Minister will mention in his closing remarks.

In my maiden speech, for which I believe you were in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, I went on to talk about young people making the very best of themselves. In truth, I should have widened it out because it is not just about young people; everyone should have the opportunity to educate themselves. I understand that we cannot offer the LLE to, say, 70 or 75-year-olds because there would be no return on the investment, but I hope that 55-year-olds, or even 60-year-olds, might benefit from lifelong learning, because they still have so much to offer.

I spoke on Friday about an 82-year-old in Chesterton in my constituency who wanted to know whether there are opportunities for flexible working in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and I am sure plenty of older people are looking for opportunities not only for flexible working but to go back to college to get themselves more skills, perhaps while they are working. This Bill will go some way towards that.

I also said in my maiden speech that levelling up is about education, and not simply funding for local areas, although the funding I have secured for Newcastle-under-Lyme—more than £50 million for the borough from the future high streets funds and through the town deal—is incredibly welcome. I am glad the vice-chancellor of Keele University chairs our town deal board.

As I always say to schools, colleges, universities and businesses alike, levelling up is not simply about throwing in money, knocking down buildings, building new buildings and applying a lick of paint; true levelling up comes from the investment our businesses make, the investment we make in our public services and, most of all, the investment we make in our people.

That starts before school in the first 1,001 days that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) talks about and continues through nursery, primary school and secondary school and into further and higher education, which is the point at which it often seems to stop. If people do not have the opportunity of a forward-thinking employer that pays for training, they often do not continue to grow their skills. They obviously gain experience, but they do not have the opportunity to go out and learn new skills that might allow them to take their career in a new direction. I particularly welcome the fact that the Bill offers the opportunity of lifelong learning to people who may have studied to some degree or who may have dropped out of university, so that they are able to go back and put right what they perhaps once got wrong, or once did not value as much. They will then be able to redirect their career and perhaps their and their family’s entire future.

For too long, young people have been encouraged towards unsustainable degrees. We have a fixed model, pushed under the Blair Government, of three-year courses that all charge the same fees. When that Government introduced tuition fees, the original idea was that different institutions would charge different amounts, but that is not how the free market resolved the problem. It was apparent that if a provider charged less than the maximum —originally £1,000, and later £3,000 or £9,000—it would be advertising itself as inferior, and no provider wants to do that because they all want to have the badge.

In practice, of course, there are inferior courses and universities that are not as good as others, yet people are paying the same for every course at every university. There is no proper market signal to young people as to what is valued in the marketplace and the world of work. The Bill introduces a new method to make sure that students access courses at a fair price, and pricing modules and short courses proportionately will go a long way towards getting the market signal out to our young people, and to older people who take advantage of lifelong learning, as to what is valued.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I recall some of these debates and it was predicted at the time that the universities, in particular, would behave in precisely the way my hon. Friend has described. I am a little bit concerned about the people who did a course that was not really viable in terms of qualifying them for a practical career. How, if at all, will they benefit from this legislation, given that, presumably, they may have used up their three years’ worth of learning allocation?

[Aaron Bell]

I am not sure whether my right hon. Friend was in the Chamber earlier when I intervened on the Secretary of State on precisely that point. This comes with a four-year entitlement. It is not perfect and people will have used up entitlement; I discussed this last week in the Tea Room with the Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education, who is in his place. The flexible loan is worth £37,000 at today’s prices—four lots of £9,250. Those who did a three-year course and found it did not do much for them may have the opportunity to do a one-year course now. When people are a bit older and wiser, they can often get as much out of a one-year course when they really want to do it as they did in three years when they were at university and perhaps were too busy in the bar, on the football pitch and so on. I take the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) and thank him for sharing his experience of those debates from back in the early days of the Blair Government. However, I do think that the Minister and the team in the Department for Education have considered this point, and I think it is one reason why they have set this at four years rather than three.

I also welcome the investment we are making in skills training more generally, and I will talk a little more about that in a moment, because I want to speak about the further and higher education institutions in my constituency. I am lucky, as it is blessed with both a fine further education establishment, Newcastle and Staffordshire Colleges Group and, specifically, Newcastle College, and a higher education institution, Keele University. It is genuinely positive for the area, if not for my re-election prospects, that we have a university in my constituency. If we could make sure the next election takes place during the holidays, I would be extraordinarily grateful, although I know that is not in your gift, Mr Deputy Speaker. I always enjoy going to Keele University and speaking to the students, even if they do not always vote the right way at the ballot box. [Interruption.] I see the Opposition Whip, the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore), heckling me from a sedentary position.

Keele University is very integrated now into Newcastle-under-Lyme, in a way that it has not always been, partly because of the involvement in the town deal that I spoke about earlier, with the vice-chancellor as the chair. As part of that, Keele University is going to be opening a digital society centre in the centre of Newcastle-under-Lyme. The science and innovation park at Keele is also a huge benefit to the constituency. We manufactured the vaccine on that park; the AstraZeneca vaccine was manufactured by Cobra Biologics, which has since been taken over. A number of small businesses are also going on there, through the Denise Coates Foundation, which has funded a school of management there. All of that is essential to levelling up, having more money in our local economy and more wealth generated locally and spent locally, supporting our high street and helping us to get the growth we want in our local economy.

I will speak a little more about Keele in a moment, but first let me speak about the Newcastle and Staffordshire Colleges Group. I am delighted to say that it is becoming an institute of technology—sadly, it is in Stafford, not Newcastle-under-Lyme, but that is by the by because it will be open to people from both areas, which are very much connected. Ours was the first FE college anywhere in the country to be rated outstanding across the board by Ofsted. I wish briefly to raise a point about T-levels with the Minister. I know that the college welcomed them, and it currently has 2,259 learners studying level 3s, mostly in applied general things, mostly on BTECs. That cohort is considerably disadvantaged compared with the one doing A-levels at the college; they are eight times more likely to have education, health and care plans, twice as likely to have a learning difficulty or a disability, and 33% more likely to be economically disadvantaged and in receipt of a bursary. The college has written to me as it has concerns about the transition to T-levels and the speed with which it is occurring, and I think there are a number of practical concerns. The college is very much in favour of what the Government are doing but it has a number of practical concerns. If the Minister would be willing to meet people from the college, either on a visit, which I know he would be keen to do, or virtually in the meantime, that would be welcomed by the excellent principal, Craig Hodgson, who has written to me about those concerns. I am very blessed to have that further education establishment in my constituency, as it is changing the life chances of many of my constituents. It is also well engaged with local businesses, as it offers apprenticeships as well. Having such a good further education provider in my constituency is a fundamental part of what will help to level up Newcastle.

Let me speak a little more about Keele University, which, as I have said, is also in my constituency. A total of 31% of home undergraduates are in receipt of financial support due to low household income. That places the university 27th out of 122 English higher education institutions, according to the Office for Students. It does very well on non-continuation—keeping disadvantaged people in university—but it acknowledges that it has more to do on attainment. According to the most recent figures that I have available, in 2017-18, only 14% were mature students, and the university wants to do more about that. I am sure that the Bill will encourage more people to study at what is an excellent university in Keele. It is so excellent, in fact, that it was voted Britain’s best university, as ranked by students. It has 96% graduate employability, which is very encouraging.

I will, if I may, briefly mention Staffordshire University, which, although it is in neighbouring Stoke-on-Trent, is attended by a number of my constituents. It has a different profile: some 24.5% of its students are in quintile 1of the income deprivation affecting children index; and 50.5% of its students are mature, of whom 35.5% are full-time—that compares with 21% nationally. The university is incredibly well set up to deal with lifelong learning. There are a number of disadvantaged people in Stoke-on-Trent who did not even get GCSEs, let alone A-levels or go to university, and I hope that some of them will take advantage of the opportunities that this Bill presents.

Let me cite some figures that were provided by UCAS, for which I am grateful, to give the overall picture in my constituency. In the last cycle, there were 730 applications to higher education institutions, 600 of which were accepted. Of that, 135 were studying locally, which I think is mostly at Keele. Those numbers are lower than average. I would like to see them higher, again, to see us do better, but 28.1% of those were aged 21 plus, which is above the latest national average of 23.8%. That is encouraging, as it shows that mature students in Newcastle-under-Lyme are already taking advantage of the opportunities through UCAS.

The Bill also sits alongside our record in education in general, and how we are using education to improve people’s life chances to help level up their opportunities and outcomes. I welcome T-levels, despite the aside from the college that I mentioned, because they are a technical qualification that will help people. They provide practical learning for those who do not necessarily want to study A-levels. We have also delivered lots of money on different fronts—£490 million to boost skills training and upgrade our colleges and university, £432 million of which will fund state-of-the-art university and college facilities at 100 providers, and a further £57 million will support 20 specialist higher education providers to deliver a wider range of specialist courses of the highest quality. We have invested £350 million in renovations for further education colleges across the UK. We have brought forward £200 million of that to renovate 180 providers. That means that colleges have started immediate work in repairing and refurbishing their buildings.

Importantly, given the context of Putin’s war in Ukraine, we have provided £500 million for energy efficiency upgrades for schools and colleges, which will help them to save on their bills. A primary school will receive, on average, £16,000, a secondary school, £42,000, and further education groups approximately £290,000 each, which is very welcome and will help to make sure that we have energy efficient buildings, saving ourselves and the providers money in the long run.

We have £3 billion in the National Skills Fund that we have established. That helps individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises to access high quality education and training. Although that is not completely in the scope of the Bill, it is important that we engage with businesses at every stage on what they want. I had representatives from businesses down here just last week to attend a roundtable meeting, and they told me that their two challenges are land and planning and then skills in the local population. Therefore, everything that we can do—whether it is through apprenticeships, through training on the job or through the opportunities that the Bill will provide for people to acquire new skills, possibly taking a year out and possibly while working part time—will be welcomed by businesses in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

It is not just money that we need. We are also requiring further education establishments to provide for local needs. The Bill creates a new duty on further education colleges, sixth-form colleges and other designated institutions to ensure that the provision of further education is fully aligned with local needs. That will be considered on an annual basis to strengthen accountability and performance, so if an area is falling behind, there will be scope for it to catch up. Finally, we need to reform initial teacher training in further education, which is part of the cycle that I spoke about earlier. We need the best quality teachers. At the moment the system is a bit too fragmented, so we need to make it easier to navigate and it needs to have high-quality, clear standards throughout. We need to ensure that public funding for teacher training goes only to high-quality providers following the standards that we and employers want to see.

In conclusion—I know that a couple of other Members wish to speak—as I said at the start, I believe in equality of opportunity and in giving people the tools they need to make more of themselves. My people in Newcastle are ambitious; indeed, all of our constituents are ambitious. They want to stretch themselves, learn new skills and make a better life for themselves and, above all, their families. As I have said, education is at the core of that. It gives people and their children the opportunity to make more of themselves, and this Bill is all about expanding that opportunity and making it available to more people—more than I considered in my maiden speech, to be honest. It will ensure that opportunities are available, with Government support and the help of teachers, lecturers and everyone else who works in the sector. I pay tribute to them, because they have been through a very tough time with covid and have had to work very hard to get back on track. This Bill will be a shot in the arm, giving them more keen students who have actively chosen to go back into learning. That is exactly what teachers and lecturers want—those are the people they want to work with. This Bill is about expanding opportunity, regardless of people’s background, previous educational history and age, and I commend it to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.