Lifelong Learning

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, on this important debate today. It is one of those debates that remind us of the pauperisation of what is going on in Britain at the moment. There are many young people, and not so young people, who really want to get on in life. They want to make changes in their own lives and to be learning eternally until the last moment. By doing so, they want to demonstrate to children and indeed to everyone that learning is the key to social justice, democracy and other things.

However, what has been happening since probably 2010, if not earlier, is that we are losing people who should be using education to bring about enormous change in their own lives and, hopefully, in the lives of others. I would say that that is very much to do with what happened around the economic crisis—the way that we came out of it, the enormous austerity that we have gone through and the sense in the country of just about hanging on and of putting perspectives of the future on the back burner rather than saying, “Actually, whatever happens, we need to educate ourselves through this crisis”.

What we need is a Government, and I hope it is this Government, who will say, “We will not allow education to shrivel up”. I am not very good at quoting Shakespeare, but if it is true that those who the gods wish to destroy they first make mad, a variation on that could be that if the gods want to destroy anyone, they first make them ignorant and rip from them all the intricate systems of education that have been growing over the years: Birkbeck, the Open University and the Workers’ Educational Association, which has been running since the beginning of the 20th century. I have to declare an interest: when I was banged up, on many occasions there were people from the WEA and the then National Association of Boys’ Clubs who gave us all the classes that we wanted on art, brickwork, crafts and things like that, so I am a recipient of that lifelong learning. On occasion, I have used it to pick up a bit of calligraphy and so on.

I want to talk about the problems of a particular organisation in which I have to declare an interest because I am a fellow: the WEA. It is in a bit of a cleft stick because of localism. We know that localism is about bringing the process of decision-making down to as local a level as possible, especially around education and so on. The WEA will be stripped of about £7 million, so one-third of its income will disappear if localism is followed through. In the process it will also have to try to bid, as there will be a process of local bidding. That will push up the costs of this organisation, which has 50,000 people going through its doors at any one time in 2,000 different settings. It does not own any buildings. It does not have a shed load of money stacked up somewhere. It cannot save for a rainy day, because everything is done simply and 84% of the money made goes direct to the teaching—and the opportunities that come from it. Of those who come to the WEA without work, 59% find work. If we really want to find a way to help this organisation and others that are calling for support, we could do a lot to heal the problem of the shrinking numbers.

The other thing that we have to do is to look into how we educate our children—the way we use education. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said, schools are driven by the bottom line, their results. We must find a new way of looking at education which is about getting as much as possible out of our children so that they can grow and develop. If we can get it right about education, perhaps Brexit is something that we will be able to weather. The fact that we now learn fewer languages than we did 10 years ago is an abomination and should be addressed by a central Government who will not allow the quality of life that education brings and the offspring that it creates around justice and democracy to shrivel up. The only way that we will lose our democracy is if we stop learning and developing as people.

I would like the Minister to tell us what he will do about organisations such as the WEA so that they do not run out of money.