Part-time and Continuing Education and the Open University

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, if the Minister entered the Chamber this morning with any doubts as to the significance of the Open University, those doubts should by now have been well and truly extinguished. I declare my interest as a former chancellor of the Open University, a role in which I served from 2007 to 2014. If I regret any one thing during my term as chancellor, it is my failure to persuade any Minister to attend an OU graduation ceremony. Had it been any other university, this would just have been a pity but, for the reasons touched on by the noble Baronesses, Lady Lane-Fox and Lady Garden, in the case of the OU it is tragic. It is tragic because unless you have experienced one of those celebrations—and celebrations they are—you can never truly understand the impact of the OU on the lives of its graduates.

One of the assets that this House brings to the national debate is informed experience, so allow me to quickly set out the actual experience of being a part-time learner. I had failed badly at school and belatedly realised that I needed some sort of education if I was to make anything of my life. In that pre-OU era, I enrolled at the City & Guilds. I studied nine subjects at what was then called night school. I was up before 7 am to get a bus and a train to where I worked as a messenger in an advertising agency. Three evenings a week, I would cross London to study from 6 pm until 9 pm. I then got the Tube and a bus home, reaching there just before 10 pm. I did that for four years, during which time I got married and our first child was born. I am in no way regretful but that allows me to know that unless you have lived with the challenge of doubling up on childcare and doing your homework on a train while juggling with every other facet of adult life, you are very unlikely to have the imagination to understand—let alone appropriately legislate—for non-traditional forms of education. Those forms of education are imposed by circumstance rather than privilege, be that privilege intellectual or financial.

I sincerely hope that the Minister, when he replies, will prove me wrong but I get no sense that the Government have demonstrated a full understanding of the role that the OU could play in a post-Brexit, productivity-challenged Britain. Surely, one of the few issues on which remainers and Brexiteers ought to agree is the overwhelming importance of developing a workforce in which every person, no matter what their age or background, can develop an active and constructive role. In my opinion, this is a task that the Open University is better equipped than any other institution in the country to fulfil.