Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I work at Imperial College where I am a champion of the outreach group, which has grown considerably over the years. It started 50 years ago; we called it the Pimlico project. That school has benefited massively from the sort of work that we do with it, and across London we have done this continuously since.

The big problem is outside London, where what I am seeing, as the person who represents the college mostly outside London, is truly frightening: the lack of aspiration and ambition, and the number of kids who do not consider that it is worth being at school after the age of 15, let alone 16, or who are not able to do A-levels because there is not enough money to do that. There is a crisis in our schools, and it is a crisis in the state sector. It is not diminishing. I go into schools in the north-east and north-west of England. I spend much time in East Anglia, 10 or 15 miles from Cambridge, one or the great seats of learning, and it is extraordinary how great that deprivation is. I also work in the West Country and more recently in Wales, particularly in the parts that are difficult to reach in the middle of Wales on the coast. It is a five-hour journey for me, meaning I have to stay overnight. I wondered what the hell I was doing there, but when I saw the sort of things that I could stimulate, I was completely converted to realising that we are doing a useful job.

We are not going to do anything to deal with the massive problem that we have in some of our state sector—not all of it, but where it is poor and diminished there is some urgency. As for the idea that somehow levelling down by taking money from the private schools is going to make a difference, it cannot possibly. The sort of money that is involved is trivial compared with what is needed. Unfortunately, my Government, which I absolutely support, have to recognise that we need to think of much more sensitive ways of dealing with what is in fact needed.

What we are doing with the outreach at Imperial is using the private schools. To take one example, Peterborough is a pretty poor area. Lots of state schools there are not doing very well. We focused on Oundle, which is in the centre up there. Oundle has been amazing. I have visited Oundle maybe seven times in the last 10 years, maybe more. Other members of the college have gone there too. They have connected with the state sector and made a huge difference to the state schools in that collaboration. Those sorts of collaborations are what we should have done in the health service under Tony Blair’s Government, bringing the private sector into the health service, but he felt that the party would never stand for it. We now have another opportunity with education; we have to consider how we can manage that. The attitude of damning the private sector, with all the objections that we have heard—and I agree with them completely; they are really serious—needs to change.

It is all very well to talk about a manifesto commitment. Everybody can believe in their party, but nobody on either side of this Chamber can believe in everything that the party believes; that is madness. Here, we have to think again and recognise that we have to do something about it.