Higher Education

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, of the three key words in the very thought-provoking Motion before us, and following the provoking and thought-provoking speech we have just heard from the noble Lord, I intend to home in on productivity linked to how degree apprenticeships can fit into getting us a more productive country. It is one of the great mysteries of the age, at least to me, why in productivity we are such laggards. We all know the unsatisfactory trends that we have, but answers there are relatively few, despite an avalanche of words from multiple think tanks. Heaven only knows, we have enough think tanks in this country now, yet we still seek an answer as to why our productivity lags.

The ingredients in all this must include a bit more than just a lack of private and public capital invested and skills developed to explain away the faltering footprint of our national productivity. For sure, many universities do a good bit towards helping productivity; we even have the British Academy weighing in now with its thoughts. But even if some do not seem to be at the peak of productivity, quite a few universities do not seem to be good at managing their own affairs; hence we have at the moment a growing number of universities, unfortunately and sadly, reporting gravity-defying deficits and growing redundancies, sometimes with the closure of valuable units. Something is not quite right in the way that universities are running themselves.

Degree apprenticeships could do very much to help. They are making good progress. They were a great idea when first mooted, but they are not in the numbers necessary to correct the balance between traditional universities and higher education. There is of course that vocational tinge to it all. I do not say that everyone goes to university to follow a particular career or develop a vocation, but it is important that young people are taught to think. None the less, why has there been such slow development of degree apprenticeships?

Some people think that the very term “apprenticeship” is off-putting—that it gives the wrong image or perception. Maybe cultural conservatism is also there in our universities. Certainly, some schools do not think that an apprenticeship is quite what their brightest and best should be doing. I think that is wrong. Families also sometimes think the same for their own: that the brightest and best should not be going to apprenticeships. Maybe there is a poor selling of that concept, yet degree apprenticeships can be deeply satisfying for individuals and can greatly help productivity.

One example to illustrate this is of a young friend who started off in a school which was in measures and got into a sixth form later on. She came from a home that had never sent anyone to university before and where they are very proud of her. She told me that, despite getting the grades predicted and a place thereby in that excellent university, the University of Nottingham, she had decided that she was going to reject it. I asked why, slightly surprised, because the school had wanted her to do this. She said, “I don’t want to do that freshers week and have all that piling up of debt. I want to do something, so I want to go into a degree apprenticeship”. She has done that and gone into a big corporation, where she is very well treated and monitored. She is moving around its departments and, in the meantime, doing an excellent course of study with the partner university to that corporation.

That is certainly a choice which more people should be encouraged to take and are not being encouraged to take at the moment. We need more action on that front. Not only that, but this girl is now earning north of £20,000 per year. She has no debt whatever and is paying no fees. She can have a nice time and, by living at home, can make a contribution to the bank of mum and dad from the money that she is earning, rather than asking mum and dad for money. That might be a particular case, but I was very impressed with what she said and how she said it.

I hope very much that my noble friend—perhaps in her closing remarks, or if not then in a letter later—will explain what more the Government think they can do to promote degree apprenticeships.