Post-18 Review of Education and Funding

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

Again, I am happy to take the message back, but I am not in a position to make any commitments—which, admittedly, my noble friend did not ask me to do. I say again that it is so important both horizontally and vertically to have a system whereby individuals’ careers are managed from a pretty early stage and that the right guidance is given to them on whether to go up through the academic route—through university, for example—or through the vocational, technical route, using T-levels or apprenticeships. My point is that it is all joined-up thinking. It must be, because vertically, through the career path, and horizontally, in what you can actually offer, it is very important that we get it right. That is all part of our thinking. The Augar review is extremely informative to our thinking.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chair of council at Lancaster University. I endorse the welcome from these Benches of the Augar review’s emphasis on the improvement of further education and the integration of our further and higher education efforts. This has always been the Cinderella of our education system, and we have to correct it. However, does the Minister accept that there are dangers in the line of thinking that one can improve the further education sector by making economies and redistributing money from the university sector? I do not believe that this is a feasible course of action. Indeed, the reintroduction of maintenance grants and the cut in the fee to £7,500 proposed in Augar will require increased spending on universities if their standards are not to fall. If there is a cut in the income of universities, my noble friend is correct that the research is not fully funded by the Government, and that, therefore, there will be pressure on research budgets. Also, if the headline fee is cut without any comparable increase in the teaching grant, universities will find that they are under pressure to cut what they spend at present on wider participation and bursaries. That would be a tragedy for equal opportunities in this country.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I take note of what the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has said. I think the assumption he is making out of Augar is that there could be a skewing of funding—robbing Peter to pay Paul. That is noted, and it is perhaps understandable that it has come out of the Augar review. As I say, I cannot comment on that at all. We will need to think about it. As I said to my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy, we need to look at all these important institutions and at what we are trying to do as part of the industrial strategy as a whole, because they are all important. It is very important that we have a world-class technical sector and a world-class university sector. It all has to go together.