Higher Education

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Blunkett]

That this House takes note of the contribution of higher education to national growth, productivity and levelling-up.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my registered interests. I am very pleased indeed to be able to lead this debate, and thank all those who are about to contribute. Across different political complexions and none, we should be able to find the kind of agreement that I hope will carry us forward for the future.

We have a choice: we can either wallow in nostalgia, meddle, or really look to a future that will be very different—a future of rapid change, where artificial intelligence and robotics will replace so many of the current employment opportunities, but will open up new opportunities for people who have the skills and adaptability to be able to take advantage of the future.

We used to talk about the knowledge economy; I do not hear it mentioned very often these days. There seems to be a view that we have too many students at universities, and too many universities putting on courses that are irrelevant. I am afraid that this view is completely outdated, and totally, utterly wrong.

This morning, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was parading his commitment, quite rightly, to the idea of productivity and growth, but the scientists, the high-level technicians, the research for the future are possible only if we have investment in our higher education system and we value and hold it dear. Innovation, knowledge transfer and the entrepreneurial skills of the future will come from people having their minds opened and their aspirations met. I am a living example of it. I went to evening class and day release to experience the value of further education, which I continue to value dearly. Being able to go to university immediately post the 1963 report of Lord Lionel Robbins transformed the life chances of literally millions of people. That understanding came on the back of what Harold Wilson used to call the “white heat of technology”—whatever happened to that?—and has been crucial to the well-being of the United Kingdom.

There are problems and challenges for our higher education system. It is going to have to adapt to changes in artificial intelligence and in the way we teach and learn, and to a very difficult financial climate. University income has dropped by around a fifth over the past five or six years. Fee levels have not increased, Brexit has affected income from European partnership arrangements, which thankfully are now being restored under Horizon—I will come to the way in which people see the contribution of overseas students in a moment—and it is a much more arid prospect for the future.

However, in Careers Week and on World Book Day, it is important to take a look at what is happening to the young people of today and to reflect on the young people of my era. According to the Labour Force Survey published two weeks ago, 850,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 are not in education, training or employment. In other words, they are either working in the sub-economy or doing absolutely nothing. Some 200,000 of them are alleged to be unable to work because of ill health, including mental ill health. Finding a holistic approach to giving opportunity to the young people of the future becomes even more imperative if they are not simply to languish and deteriorate in every possible way.

I remind the House and perhaps the world outside which might be listening that there are not vast numbers of young people going to university who should be doing something else. It is Careers Week, and people should get the right information, advice and guidance on what is best for them. For some, it will be to go straight from college or school into the world of work. For some, it will be taking a BTEC national diploma or a T-level and moving into work. For others, it will be an apprenticeship, if they can get through the hoops that are put in their way, particularly for those with low-level qualifications at the age of 16. However, for many, it will be exploring their future by going into higher education. Many of those 850,000 young people should be encouraged to raise their aspirations and expectations to be able to take on that challenge. Nothing is more galling than people who benefited from higher education and expect their children to go to university telling other people that it is not for them. We have to renew our commitment to the aspiration that drove me on. I have no idea now how because the careers advice I received was zilch. The report I got from the school for the blind I left was appalling, and the expectation of the world around me was that I was going to be a lathe operator or a piano tuner, both of which are very highly rated and important tasks, although lathe operation has suffered over the years from numerical control. The world moves on, and we should move with it.

Some 750,000 jobs are created through higher education in this country. Many of them are crucial to the levelling-up process, as it is now called, in terms of giving youngsters in the most deprived areas of the country the belief that they can do something different from their parents and grandparents. It is about breaking intergenerational disadvantage, which is why I commend my noble friend Lady Armstrong on drawing attention in her debate later today to the fact that areas of the country that previously benefited from traditional industries now suffer from the worst-quality education in the country and the worst expectation of what people there will do. It is not surprising that more people go to Oxford and Cambridge from London and the south-east because the education system in London and the south-east is, sadly, still much better than it is in the Midlands and the north. It is not surprising that when we tell people that university education might be too much for them or inappropriate for them, they might believe us.

We need a menu that enables young people to make the right choice, but that allows people who may have experienced the world of work and decided that change is an imperative driver for them to come back into higher education through lifelong learning, to re-educate themselves and be able to take on new challenges. Lifelong learning should be at the root of what we are doing, saying and investing in in relation to education.

I want to address a negative before coming to the positives. The negative has been the suggestion that somehow attracting overseas students to universities in this country is squeezing out domestic applications. Applications through UCAS from English students dropped this year by 1%. That is not surprising when people are told, despite the fact that they might face unemployment, that university is not for them. The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, who chairs the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, raised a Question in this House about inequalities arising from overseas students coming to this country in large numbers. The Minister was honest, as she always is, and brave enough to say that there is no evidence whatever of that happening—and, of course, it is not. The number of overseas students, who now include EU students, has actually dropped, marginally. As university income has fallen and the challenges of research funding have grown, it is not surprising that universities have sought to attract overseas students to allow cross-subsidisation into crucial research, which we applaud all the time, such as into better vaccines and engineering for the future things that will transform our country, including on net zero. Yet in the next breath we condemn the idea of going out there and attracting students.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer said yesterday:

“Outside the US, we have the most respected universities”—[Official Report, Commons, 6/3/24; col. 843.]


in the world. They are respected by the rest of the world but not enough by people in this country. It is bizarre to hear the Chancellor applauding our universities and then hear his colleagues going around rubbishing them. It is absurd that you can put out through the Sunday Times, a highly respected historic investigatory newspaper, the notion that students from abroad were squeezing out domestic students and their applications, and for a presenter on GB News, Katherine Forster, to say that it made her blood boil. She is a really good example of why we need more people in higher education—they might actually be able to evaluate facts and make a critical thinking exercise on what they read or, in the case of GB News, what they see in their own programmes. They might, seriously, be able to lift their horizons of what we need to do for the future.

At my own university is the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and its work on small modular reactors and the energy needs of the future. It has not just pure science and engineering but the social science and humanities which we will need for the creative economy of the future, which so many universities are applying themselves to. Universities bring a massive input to local economies, as anchor institutions and the real levelling up, with £272 million going into Sheffield Central alone. Why? It is because we have two universities. The average across each constituency in the UK is £58 million, which is still an enormous contribution to the well-being of local people and our future.

What do we need to do? Universities need to be rigorous in their quality and aspiration. Linking up further education and higher education is a no-brainer. Ensuring that we take overseas students out of the migration statistics is a no-brainer, as it would stop silly arguments. We should ensure that we can reshape our longitudinal studies to get a real understanding of what students from higher education are actually doing in local communities, whether they are part-time or self-employed. Let us have a commission on the funding of higher education for the future—that has lost its way at the moment. Above all, we should ensure that quality research, world-class teaching and the importance of valuing our universities are put front and centre. Stop knocking what is such a valuable asset to our country; let us invest in a world of tomorrow.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a very wise tradition that those who have moved take-note Motions do not make another speech at the end, but I shall just take one minute, if your Lordships do not mind, to thank the noble Baroness for, as ever, a thoughtful and comprehensive response to what has been an excellent debate. I thank everyone who has taken part for their generosity and for their wisdom, including those with whom I disagreed. The great thing about a seminar of this sort is that the spirit of Socrates still shines through. I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire: when the scientist challenged the idea of social sciences having a value, did he not wonder what he might have said to his colleagues who were teaching classics?

I was really pleased that the Minister got an honorary degree from Bath. “Don’t throw the baby out” is the message that we crave this afternoon.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, and I were contemporaries at the University of Sheffield politics department. I spent too much of my time, perhaps, marching against apartheid, while he spent far too much of his time in the library.

To conclude, I want to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that the dog has kept his breakfast in on this occasion. I think that was a measure of the quality of the debate. The quality of education is crucial to all of us. If there are problems, we can fix them, but, above all, we should tell the rest of the world, as the Chancellor endeavoured to do yesterday, that the higher education sector in Britain is open for business, is the best in the world and will give a very warm welcome to any student who wants to come here.

Motion agreed.