Higher Education: Part-Time Students

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I am delighted to join in the congratulations of the noble Baroness. This is something that we are very committed to. The Prime Minister wants to ensure that we increase the number of BME students by 20% by 2020, which is why the Green Paper proposes a new social mobility advisory group to help outline the plans for how we will achieve that.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

A simple question: what is the reason part-time student numbers have fallen by half?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The answer to that is very complex and very long, and I am happy to talk to the noble Lord offline. There are a number of reasons: as I said, we have more people going into apprenticeships, so they are taking different routes; we have more people with an initial qualification, who will not necessarily want to take a second qualification; and we have a growing economy in which people are in stable jobs and able to advance by that route. There are a range of issues.