Universities

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to add my words to my noble friend for giving us this opportunity to look over a sector of national life that is so vital.

I begin by mentioning just two words: “Robbins report”. It in a sense shaped the architecture of much of what happened subsequently in the development of higher education in this country. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, whose speech on the 50th anniversary of the report reminded us that perhaps Robbins brought to a proper conclusion what was begun in the Butler Education Act 1944. Since I am the beneficiary of the latter for my secondary schooling and the former for my higher education—or part of it, as I will explain—it is a good place to start for me.

I ask your Lordships to exercise their imagination and see a very raw graduate aged 22, exactly 60 years ago, taking a train—when there was still a train—from Carmarthen to Aberystwyth and stopping at Lampeter on the way. I had just been appointed as an assistant lecturer at St David’s College in Lampeter. I did not want to go. I was doing a PhD and my professor told me I had to, because at that time, Lampeter was being merged with the University of Wales as a fifth college—Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor, Aberystwyth and Lampeter—but could do so only under the aegis of one of the existing colleges. Aberystwyth, fiercely Presbyterian, did not want anything quite so Anglican, so it was cosmopolitan Cardiff that wanted to do the deal.

I was sent to be the assistant lecturer. My subject area was medieval English from “Beowulf” to Chaucer, the history of the English language, pre-Shakespearean drama, and all that kind of thing—gifts that noble Lords would never imagine from hearing other outbursts on my part in your Lordships’ House.

I pause there for a while for two reasons. First, I am absolutely certain that I would not be standing in your Lordships’ House—with all the caveats and mitigations that have been mentioned in the debate—if I had been of university age now. I could not have gone; it could not have been entertained. The poverty from which I came would not have been helped with a bursary, or anything like that. The pressure of home was to have a 15 or 16 year-old boy out working, instead of going off on these fancy educational things about which parents knew absolutely nothing. Little coteries of people would come to persuade my mother, a single parent—we lived in destitution—that it mattered that I went on to do O-levels. They said, “Give him a chance”, and when I did well, that the A-levels were now the next thing I should aim at. Each time, she had to be persuaded, and each time, she did not know how to put food on the table or how to clothe us for school.

From my pastoral work ever since, I can detect large numbers of young people who are trapped in precisely the same way and who will never even entertain the idea, even if we hold out carrots before them. I was just fortunate to have been born when I was. That is the first thing.

I look at this issue through the eyes of students, because most of my life I have not run things, as most Members of this House have done; I have simply gone into people’s homes and dealt with them in their time of crisis and helped with all the pastoral matters. Out of that, I have formed my opinions from the ground up, instead of from the top down.

My second point is that I doubt whether I would easily find a place that wanted a teacher of medieval English now—it is one of the subjects that is been sacrificed. Much more recently, I played a significant part, although not a leading part, in the formation of the University of Roehampton, which brought together four former teacher training colleges: the Roman Catholic Digby Stuart College, the Methodist Southlands College, an Anglican college and a humanist college. We got our degree-granting powers from the Privy Council and all the rest of it. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, mentioned the phrase “liberal arts”, and I am astonished that teacher training colleges—which were, in essence, liberal arts colleges—are now sacrificing jobs in the humanities and liberal arts for the sake of the disciplines and studies that quantifiably can be shown to get you a job in the kind of world we now live in. I promise noble Lords that real attributes that earn real money are to be found in people who can put two proper sentences together, can hold their own in an argument, can read a book, can form a study group and can see, in those aspects of life, things of importance.

I must finish because I have reached my time, but the House must have the impression that I could go on for a very long time. I will say one last thing, if noble Lords will be patient with me. This morning, I heard from the university in Lampeter that it will finish teaching and that it will have no courses after this year. It is for that reason that, although I am usually well co-ordinated, I have put on my Lampeter colours tie to protest the very idea of losing a brilliant piece of educational work, all on the altar of what is called “progress”.