Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Lord Bishop of Sheffield Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Sheffield (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak for the first time in this Chamber, and in support of this Bill’s aim of widening access to higher education. I look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead. I record my thanks to Members and staff for the consistently warm and generous welcome I have received and the helpful induction I have been given. If my experience of introduction to this House is typical, it speaks very well of the culture of this place.

On Thursday, it will be exactly six years since I was consecrated as a bishop at York Minster and took up my present responsibilities. The wonderful diocese I serve is made up of former steel-making and coal-mining communities across much of south Yorkshire, farming communities in parts of the East Riding and even a port in the town of Goole. I had never lived in south Yorkshire before but have found the city of Sheffield astonishingly green—I believe it to be the only city in England with a national park within its boundary.

Sheffield also boasts two professional football clubs: Wednesday and United. The former play in blue-and-white stripes, the latter in red-and-white stripes. Rather gloriously, both achieved promotion this past season. I am in the happy position of not having to choose between them but of being able to rejoice with them both, because my own football allegiance belongs—for historic reasons—to Newcastle United, who play in black-and-white strips. Noble Lords will understand the pleasure it gives me to don my club’s colours every time I enter this Chamber.

Every follower of Jesus Christ is a disciple. The word “disciple” simply means learner; almost by definition, therefore, every Christian is rather obliged constantly to be seeking to grow in knowledge and wisdom, in insight and skill. The Christian church is, therefore, again almost by definition, bound to be committed to the principle of lifelong learning and, therefore, to support any Bill which seeks to make lifelong learning more effective and more widely possible.

Personally, I recognise how privileged I am. I have benefited—at the expense of the taxpayer—from a world-class higher education studying for degrees in the traditional manner. I studied history as an undergraduate in Durham and then theology as part of my training for the ordained ministry in Cambridge. Subsequently, I undertook doctoral studies at Oxford. So I appreciate the value of scholarly immersion, of intense periods of lectures, seminars and tutorials, of reading and writing.

In ordained ministry, however, over the past 35 years I have served on Tyneside and Teesside, in the West Midlands, on Merseyside and in South Yorkshire. Immersion in these communities has left me in no doubt that a greater flexibility and access to higher education is urgently needed. Apprenticeship schemes have generally and lamentably languished in recent years. New initiatives are urgently needed to revive them or at least to fill the gap in training which those schemes previously met.

In the diocese of Sheffield, we boast two top-ranking universities: Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield. We also have the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. However, across the diocese as whole, we are equally as proud of our less-heralded colleges with HE provisions in Sheffield, Barnsley, the Dearne Valley, Doncaster and Rotherham.

I was at Rotherham College only last week to meet the staff responsible for its HE provisions and to hear from them about this Bill. Few of the HE students at Rotherham College are in a position to access the education I received; their domestic circumstances and accessibility to learning are often very different from my own, and they require more flexible funding arrangements. They may be combining higher education with employment or childcare in a way I never did. The shift envisaged in this Bill, to enable learners, including mature students, to access funding in a modular way, is surely right and good.

As noble Lords may be aware, no fewer than 11 universities in this country have a Church of England foundation and retain a Church of England ethos. Known as the Cathedrals Group, these 11 HE institutions educate 100,000 students a year. These learners, as much as any others, stand to benefit from the provisions of this Bill, to unlock new opportunities for lifelong learning and to support a greater plurality of routes into higher education. These are very laudable aims, and I gladly support them.

However, I came away from that visit to Rotherham College last week with some sense of the scale of implementation challenges which are bound to attend a Bill as ambitious as this one—for example, in the management of learning provision to ensure that supply is as flexible as demand; or on the impact of learners taking advantage of newly flexible grant arrangements to switch providers, perhaps multiple times, in the accumulation in their modules and credits. I realise there is much detail in relation to this Bill which still needs to be worked through, but could the Minister assure the House that the Government are aware of implementation challenges such as these and will address them, perhaps in Committee?

In closing, I note that my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry—the lead Bishop for the Church of England on FE and HE—would also add his support to this Bill, though he regrets he is unable to be in the House today. It is a great privilege to participate in this debate, and I look forward to many more such opportunities in the years ahead.