Post-18 Education and Funding Review

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my declaration of interest in the register and reiterate what the noble Lord, Lord Patten, said about the nature, accessibility and depth of the report. After listening to him this afternoon and with our joint venture on Radio 4’s “Any Questions” last week, I can genuinely call him my noble friend.

It seems to me that the report was extremely thorough and that the understanding of Philip Augar, and those working with him, of the system’s complexities is displayed very well. My only criticism of the members of the review, if the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, will forgive me, is their naiveté. It is naiveté that the Treasury was, in any foreseeable future, likely to provide the funding necessary; they were also naive about the ingenious creative accounting, which led to the belief that it would be possible, on an annualised basis, to present the changes at £700 million. I am familiar with creative accounting from my days as leader of Sheffield City Council, when Margaret Thatcher’s Government were massively reducing spending in local government. The trouble with creative accounting is that it does not pay anybody’s wages. It may look good but does not actually deliver the goods.

This afternoon, however, I would like to be positive, first in ensuring that there is no doubt about my commitment to the review’s welcome recommendations on further education. When I asked an Oral Question in the Chamber last Thursday, I received a few emails saying, “Why didn’t you mention further education?” The Question was not about that—it was about the reduction in fee level and the likely impact on teaching and contact time, which I will come to a minute.

I want to make it clear that I am not unique in this House, but I am unusual in the sense that I got my qualifications before going to university, in evening classes and day release through further education. I then taught in further education. My older sons went through further education themselves to get to university. I helped to substantially reverse the cuts in further education between 1997 and 2001, when I was Secretary of State for Education and Employment, in one year actually increasing funding by 10% in real terms.

I am deeply committed to further education and to the concept of lifelong learning, including lifelong accounts and entitlement. The late and, in my case, very much mourned Malcolm Wicks, when he was a Member of Parliament, produced a very substantial policy paper on lifelong learning. I am only sorry that the efforts that the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and I made in the early 2000s to put this in place were completely undermined by the Treasury, which simply would not go along with individual learning accounts. Had the child trust fund not been abolished in 2010 in an act of spite by the then Chief Secretary David Laws, we might have been able to build on that initial fund which would have had the advantage of balancing the asset divide in our country and providing a platform on which lifelong learning could have been based and lifelong accounts could have been provided.

In this report, however, the most welcome recommendations were of course funding for part-time learners, the reversal of the increase in interest rates, the maintenance grants that have already been spoken about, as well as funding for further education and lifelong learning. All those suggestions would of course be reversing what has taken place with the austerity measures of the past nine years. While it is important to reverse them, as has been said by my noble friend Lord Layard, it is important that we have a sustainable system for the future.

I want in the brief time available to me to pick up on what the right reverend Prelate said about the way small institutions can have a major impact on individuals and the locality. I speak as someone who still lives in the north of England. What worries me most about the debate on higher education is not the comparator between spending on HE compared with FE, which is well known, but the belief that there is something inherently wrong in encouraging young people from the kind of background that I came from to go into HE. Of course, people should receive the right kind of career advice.

In my teenage years in Sheffield, apprenticeships were not only a given but they had high status as well as high quality. They were often funded by the employer. In fact, the engineering employers and the construction industry of course had their own levy and their own sustainable system long before the welcome introduction although not necessarily the implementation of the current levy. We need to get back to high-quality apprenticeships, as has been said, but they are not an alternative to encouraging young people to go in for HE.

I say to my noble friend Lord Adonis that there may be comparators across the world in terms of the number now going into higher education, but it will be necessary, with the move to artificial intelligence, to robotics, to the way in which we need to understand and handle the use of algorithms to have people who are not only skilled in a practical sense but able to adapt, as the introductory speech of the noble Viscount indicated, in an ever-changing world where people will change jobs many times in their ever-increasing longevity.

I want to draw attention to the absurdity of the longitudinal educational outcome measures which are potentially distorting this debate about the value of higher education and the emphasis that is placed on what people earn in the first few years after leaving university. The interesting thing about the longitudinal studies is that they do not take account of self-employment, which is an important aspect of encouraging young people to show enterprise and innovation, particularly in the most deprived parts of our country, where we have high levels of employment but very low levels of productivity. Of course, the comparator between London and the south-east and GBA and GDP with the rest of England and of course in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is, frankly, extremely worrying. Such studies do not take account of part-time earnings, which are pretty important in relation to women, who often are taking time out in those first few years for childbirth or for caring responsibilities. Crucially, they do not take account of regional labour markets. They take no account of the fact that you might be paid £19,000 on leaving Trinity St. David in Wales or the University of Teesside in the north-east of England, but you might be paid up to £70,000 if you work for PwC, KPMG or financial and asset institutions in the City of London. That does not mean that the education received by people in the north of England is worth less. These are people who stay in their area, who contribute to the enterprise in that area, who often work in small or medium-size enterprises. They make up 90% of the employment in our country but often earn far less than those who come down to London to earn in the first five years after graduating. In other words, the debate about the value of education is wrong in principle in terms of the lack of understanding that education is more than what you earn and the job you have. It also has class implications and regional and socioeconomic implications.

I hope that we might address how universities as the core centre, the anchor institution in areas of our country that previously did not benefit from them, make a contribution to those communities and to regeneration. For some of the young people who stay in those areas, social mobility goes only one way. If we damage the university sector in our country by cutting funding to teachers and reducing numbers or discriminating against particular courses because the national press do not like them, we will regret it down the line. This is why the remarks made recently by the higher education Minister about participation and about foundation courses, if Augar is implemented, are so welcome.

We have got to get this right, not just for the moment but for the world of tomorrow. Thinking ahead involves apprenticeships and well-funded further education. It also involves a higher education system that offers to those who did not have it the opportunity of those who so often take it for granted.