Education: 16 to 18 Year-olds

Lord Fink Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Fink]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for securing a debate in which I can make my maiden speech. While I have spent the majority of my time in the Lords in the Chamber, it gives me particular pleasure to make my maiden speech in the Moses Room. As well as the ancient ancestral connection, I also feel that the warmth and intimacy of this Room offers a comfortable place for making such a speech. To have the chance to speak in a debate on supporting 16 to 18 year-olds in full-time education is a particular pleasure as it touches on two or three strands of my particular interest and family history.

I thank your Lordships for the warm welcome that I have received from so many of you during my three months in the House, and in particular the staff of the House, who have shown great patience and helpfulness to me. I also thank my introducing Lords, my noble friends Lord Harris of Peckham and Lord Howard of Lympne, for the warmth of their introduction and my mentor, my noble friend Lady Fookes, for the time and patience she has shown me.

My life and family journey have been centred around education, which is one reason I was particularly pleased to make my speech on this subject. Growing up in Manchester in a happy family, albeit of modest circumstances, I never visited the Palace of Westminster, let alone dreamt that one day I would be privileged to attend your Lordships’ House. It is for this reason that I feel both very fortunate and humbled to be standing here.

My main education was at the Manchester Grammar School, where I received a free place to study as my parents could not have afforded to pay the fees. While I remember my early years at school with fond memories, I was acutely aware of the privilege I had in studying my chosen A-level subjects in science, together with free options to study one or two other unrelated subjects. Given how much I enjoyed and benefited from those last two years at school, I would not wish to see any other child deprived of that opportunity for financial reasons.

A law degree at Cambridge was a relatively dramatic change of direction for me but I saw it as a good way to study some arts subjects to balance my more natural skills in mathematics and science. However, being a mediocre lawyer, I was rapidly tempted to move back to accountancy and business, which I did after leaving Cambridge in 1979. Since then, my 30-year business career has spanned time in both industry and banking but, for the most part, I have worked in the world of investment management. I was proud to be able to work at Man Group for over 20 years and to help it develop from a medium-sized commodity trading business into a financial services group.

One of the reasons I left Man in 2008 was that I had suffered from a brain tumour three years earlier which had required major neural surgery. I received extraordinary treatment at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, where I was fortunate enough to be treated and diagnosed by a neurologist who, coincidentally, happened to be a friend from university, together with an incredibly dedicated neural surgeon as well as a fabulous team of nurses and speech therapists, who looked after me for nearly four weeks and helped me to speak again.

Along the way, I always tried to practice philanthropy in the way my parents had instilled in me, starting off in youth voluntary work, which was how I met my wife, Barbara. As well as managing to do some good on visits to the elderly people in Manchester, we made good friends with each other, of course, and with others. As well as supporting community causes, today my real philanthropic passions are the improvement of children’s health and education. I believe that with these two attributes the potential of our children is infinite, yet with poor health or education early lives are sadly blighted. I also never take for granted the joy of being blessed with three healthy and well educated children.

Noble Lords can see that these two main themes strike deep chords with my life experience and hence my commitment and passion. For this reason, I became a trustee of Absolute Return for Kids, which is a leading UK children’s charity focused on children’s health and education issues. That charity has the aspiration in education that every student should have the opportunity to go to university and that we should try to achieve five or more good GCSEs for each student under our care. The charity currently operates about 10 schools, and growing, in some of the poorest inner-city boroughs, mainly in London but, increasingly, in the Midlands.

In a personal capacity, I became a very enthusiastic supporter of the academy schools programme, directly supporting two schools: the North Liverpool Academy and Burlington Danes Academy in Hammersmith. The students at both these schools face enormous challenges and in both cases the ratio of children receiving free school meals is around 50 per cent, which is one of the highest marks of deprivation. Both schools also face non-financial challenges. In the case of Liverpool, it is a dependency culture, with many children coming from homes where there is literally no memory of a successful job. In the case of Hammersmith, it is a school with a large proportion of recent immigrants whose natural language is not English, many of whom are from Somalia.

What I have found so inspiring about the academy programme is that with the help of really committed staff many of the students’ lives have been transformed, while the rate of successful passes at GCSE has improved dramatically over the past four or five years, from less than half the national average to approaching 70 per cent in both schools. It is vital that schools have the ability to keep these less well off students in full-time education until the age of 18, at which point the students can choose whether to go to university or into a relatively skilled job or apprenticeship.

While I recognise and appreciate the necessity of saving public funds during a period of such fiscal constraints, I fully commend the coalition Government for focusing financial support on such students between the ages of 16 and 18 who are most needy, when financing those students makes a key difference in enabling them to remain in full-time education. I also believe and hope that the students who may miss out on the tightened criteria will also continue to proceed to A-level. The drop-out rate of the most able students is a statistic that might be monitored over the next three or four years, in order to see whether the targeting has adverse consequences. The first cohort of students from Burlington Danes Academy is finishing its A-levels this summer and I would be tremendously proud to see the first of these students go to a good university.

In conclusion, I thank all noble Lords for the kindness, courtesy and advice that I have received from all the Members of the House and look forward to being able to make a positive contribution over time.