Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I start by declaring my interest as a third-generation former international student in this country: both my grandfathers, my mother and I were, and now my son is, at Cambridge University.

The benefits that international students bring to this country and to our universities are enormous and priceless. It is our biggest element of soft power. There are 30 world leaders at any one time who have been educated at British universities. Generation-long links are built and, most importantly, the international students enrich the experience of our domestic students and universities. Then of course there is the money: directly and indirectly, £14 billion is brought in by international students to our universities and they create employment for 130,000 people. Yet every single time the issue has been debated in this Chamber, we have had unanimous consensus except from the Minister responding. A straight bat is played back to us, with a no.

The country does not think that international students are immigrants. The public do not mind international students staying on and working for a while after they finish their studies. This wretched referendum has brought immigration together into one bad thing and the Government insist on categorising international students as immigrants. There may be a UN definition, but when you come to calculate your net migration figures, you do not have to include international students as migrants. Our competitor countries—the United States, Australia and Canada—do not include them.

Statistics are available to show that international students, on the whole, return to their countries; those statistics are not being released. Can the Minister tell us why? I believe these figures show that only 1.5% of international students, if that—it may be 1,500—overstay and do not go back. We have removed the exit checks from our borders, so we do not know who has left our country. We should be scanning every passport, EU and non-EU, into and out of this country. We should introduce visible exit checks at our ports and borders immediately; we would then have that information at our fingertips and we should release it.

I declare an interest as president of UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs, which represents the 450,000 international students at all our educational institutions in this country. We despair that these students who bring this benefit to this country are not acknowledged. In fact, the perception that this creates is terrible. I know for a fact that Jo Johnson, the Minister for Universities, is very supportive of international students. I have seen that personally. He is here and I thank him for his support, which I know is genuine. However, I am sorry to be very personal but we have a Prime Minister who, when she was Home Secretary, said that every international student should leave the day that they graduated. The headlines in India were, “Take our money and get out”. That is the perception created.

I have had the Australian high commissioner to India say to me, “What are you doing with your attitude to international students? We have a Minister for International Students in Australia and we welcome them. In fact, if they want to stay on and pass through all the filters, they are welcome because they have paid for their education and will benefit our economy. On the other hand, you are turning them away and turning them to us, for which we are very grateful”. We are being made a laughing stock. There is an increase in international students around the world of 8% a year from countries such as India. As our former Prime Minister David Cameron said, we are in a global race. Well, we are not in that race if this is the attitude and perception that we give out.

If the Prime Minister is not willing to listen and if, sadly, the perception of immigration is so bad that the good people who visit this country—the tourists, business visitors and international students, and in fact the migrants who benefit this country over the generations, and without whom we would not be the successful country we are and the fifth-largest economy in the world—are not appreciated, then the only way to address this is through legislation. An amendment would say, “We must declare and detail the actual benefits and contributions of international students at our universities”. It is the only way that the Government will listen, and if they continue to include international students in the net migration figures then the amendment coming up in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is the only way that we will be able to address this. We will do that down the line and say, “Let’s legislate that they should be excluded when counting net migration figures”. This is very important because it goes to our soft power, to the impression we create around the world as a country and to our economy and universities. It is part of what has made our universities the best in the world and this country so wonderful.

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, in supporting the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, perhaps I could give the Committee the benefit of the experience that I have had in the past four years. I have just completed a four-year term as the Prime Minister’s trade and cultural envoy to south-east Asia. In that role, I got to know very well the Education Ministers of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos—all really excellent people who had a tremendous respect for the education system in this country. Over that period of four years, I failed ever to explain our visa policy. I would go further: they were really offended by it. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are not known for the export of terrorism. They are rapidly developing countries and in the case of Vietnam, an important rapidly developing country that sees itself as a world player and which we are prioritising in our post-Brexit determination for a bilateral trade agreement. Try to imagine what it is like to sit in the Cabinet of those countries and be told, “Your students are being grouped as potential terrorists”. It is offensive and it damages us. It is foolish and damages our universities and international reputation. I was deeply ashamed of the arguments that I was forced to put up, all of which were spurious and none of which were defensible.

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments of my noble friend Lord Lucas. This is probably the first shot in a considerable battle in which I hope this House will engage. There is a certain irony which I cannot pass over in complete silence. I was the junior Minister who, in 1981, had to take the full force of opposition from the Liberal Party, the Labour Party, members of my own party and every right-thinking person in what the President-elect of the United States would call the liberal intelligentsia for allowing universities to charge economic fees for their overseas students. Not a single overseas student would come, we were told. This was the end of the civilisation as we knew it. As a matter of fact, of course, not only did the students come in ever-greater numbers but we had provided a wonderful independent source of income for our universities, and thereby saved them at a time when the Treasury and other people were always trying to cut the money. Without those flows of money, our universities would be in very serious trouble. There would not be graduate departments of engineering in many of our great London-based colleges without overseas students, and it is an absolute absurdity not to separate students.

Grammar Schools

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, I not only thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, but warmly congratulate her on what was one of the most coherent speeches I have heard in my 20 years in this House. She set out the case magnificently.

I also declare one or two interests as set out in the register, particularly that of chairman of the advisory board of the Times Educational Supplement. I mention this in particular because one great asset of that role is that we probably have more data and more up-to-date information than the department itself. In that sense we are in an extremely privileged position.

One of the great roles of this House is its ability to detect and warn against unintended consequences, so I shall take my few moments to talk precisely about the unintended consequences of what could be a quite dangerous policy shift.

I have not been as regular an attender in the House in the past few months as I would have liked and for a very simple reason: I have been making a documentary. It is a four-part documentary on the impact of digital, on Europe in particular. One part of the series is specifically on education. This took me in April to an inner-city school in Dublin, where I interviewed a headmistress. It was a terrific school with a terrific principal.

In a break in the filming, I wandered around and looked at the noticeboards. My attention was drawn to one particular notice, which I photographed—I have the picture here. It set out the 10 top-performing kids at that inner city Dublin school; they were 13 year-olds and it was the Easter term. I shall not read out all the names, partly because I would probably mispronounce them. Suffice it to say that seven were from eastern Europe and three were from Asia; there was not one single Irish kid.

I think that that Dublin school will be typical of almost any inner city school in this country. The very notion that, by reintroducing selection, the people whom the policy is intended to attract—the traditional white working class—will suddenly find their children surging into new and better grammar schools is a fantasy. What will actually happen, which I admire and salute, is that migrant and first-generation kids from Asia—we know already that the highest-performing children in Britain are Bangladeshi girls—and eastern Europe will sweep into those schools, and God bless them. The small problem will be that the disgruntled and now disconnected white working class, who believed that they were going to get better schools, will not get in. I can think of no more dangerous tinderbox that you could strike under hard-pressed and already divided communities.

This is a potentially lethal policy. It is ill thought through and ill considered, and it could do far more damage than I think anyone fully understands.

Schools: Admissions

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Whips’ Office for allowing me to speak in the gap, and I promise that I will not delay the Minister for very long at all. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for raising this issue. It is interesting to note that over the almost 20 years that I have been a Member of your Lordships’ House, I typically follow the noble Lord in the speakers’ list for debates only to find that everything I wanted to say has already been said by him—sometimes to the consternation of my own Benches. We have been ad idem most of the time for many years.

The wonderful thing about being in this House is that you are able to look back at your own experiences and try to offer them for the future. I should like briefly to give the Minister a short, personal narrative. The day King George VI died, 6 February 1952, was the most important day of my life. It was the day I took the 11-plus exam. I was 10 years old, and indeed most children sat the exam at that age. I have never understood the extraordinary misnomer of 11-plus. I passed, so I got a cap and a blazer and, unlike almost all the other children at my primary school in north London, I went to a grammar school. I never saw my friends from primary school again. An extraordinary wall came down, with them on one side of it and me on the other, and I have never really fully recovered from that.

I am convinced that the only selection component involved in my passing the exam was the fact that my mother took herself off to Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road and bought a batch of old exam papers, which I was then required to go through. I vividly remember sitting in the exam room that day and seeing the absolute horror on the faces of the kids around me as the exam papers were turned over. At least I was familiar with what I was about to do.

I put it to the Minister that never can we go back to a system where life’s chances are determined irrevocably at the age of 10. I am here today because of that one day in 1952. As he was reminded yesterday in Oral Questions, the 1944 Education Act had two routes. It offered the opportunity for children to retake the 11-plus exam at the age of 13 or the opportunity to go to a technical college. There were no technical colleges and I think that only around half a dozen were ever built. I am sure that the statistics are held by the department, but I never knew a child to arrive at my grammar school having retaken and passed the 11-plus at 13 years old; it just did not happen. Effectively, my entire generation’s life chances were determined at the age of 10 or 11.

All I would ask the Minister to do is to remember this story. I have the privilege of sitting in the House of Lords because my mum got on the Tube and bought a batch of old exam papers in Foyles. That opportunity was not afforded to the other 30 children in my class.