Higher Education Reform

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Paul Blomfield

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

That is exactly what the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill is doing. I do not think he is in his place any longer, but the Chair of the Education Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), is pushing us even further on those interactions between students and businesses and the opportunity of apprenticeships, and on doing more to ensure that teachers have the tools to enable them to share with their students the opportunity of an apprenticeship or a T-level as well as an A-level.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State and I sat together on the Business Committee scrutinising the Conservative funding system, which he now describes as unsustainable. He will recall that some of us argued that at the time. A review was clearly needed, but he has been very selective in adopting its recommendations. The Augar review stated strongly that these sorts of changes to loans must be accompanied by the introduction of maintenance grants of at least £3,000 for disadvantaged students, which he has ignored, and that any reduction in tuition fees—which is what a freeze is, particularly at this time—should be matched by an increase in teaching grants across all subjects, not the selective additional resource that he has talked about. As the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) and others have pointed out, this plan cuts university resources and transfers massive debt from the Treasury to graduates. Is the Secretary of State not effectively making students pay more for less?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I remember our time on the Business Committee when Lord Browne made the initial proposals and we scrutinised them. It is only right that one is able to go back and refine the system and get it to work sustainably, and that is exactly what we are doing in this case. On disadvantaged students, the investment of £75 million in scholarships will make a huge difference. But also, when the hon. Gentleman and I sat on that Select Committee, there was no lifelong loan entitlement where students had a different path to gaining those skills and that career path to university. It is only right that we get the balance right between students and the taxpayer.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Paul Blomfield

2nd reading
Monday 15th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I will address that level 2 issue later in my speech.

The LLE will give us the flexibility to be—I hope—responsive and agile, and will enable people to succeed at any stage in their lives. It will also give them the option of building up their qualifications over time, with both further and higher education providers. They will have a real choice in how and when they study to acquire new, life-changing skills. The LLE will help to create the parity of esteem between further and higher education that we so desperately want to see and so desperately need.

I am pleased to inform the House that since the Bill’s introduction, the Government have introduced further measures to help eradicate that scourge of honest and faithful academia, essay mills. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) for his work on this topic, and I know that he will appreciate these measures. It is high time that we stamped out a dishonest practice that both undermines our further and higher education systems and puts students at risk of exploitation.

Any reform of our system must also reform our set of technical educational qualifications, to close the gap between the skills gained through a qualification and the skills employers tell us they need.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State to his place. We have worked together on education issues in the past, and I hope to do so in the future. May I press him further on the point my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) made about BTECs? He may not intend to abolish them, but will not effectively defunding them have the same effect? Is that not why so many former Conservative Education Ministers made that point in the Lords?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, whose opinion I value highly. He and I have worked on education for a number of years on a cross-party basis. The important thing to remember is that the Sainsbury review was clear that for T-levels to succeed, where there is duplication and lower quality, we need to remove lower quality; that does not mean getting rid of high-quality BTECs. I will say a little more tonight that I hope will reassure the House on how we are doing that without kicking the ladder of opportunity away from anyone who deserves that opportunity. I hope I will be able to allay some of his fears.

Going back to the reform of our system, we are extending the powers of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to approve a broader range of technical educational qualifications. The institute will ensure that the independent voice of employers is embedded throughout the process, while working in harmony with Ofqual to ensure quality.

I want to be perfectly clear: the Bill focuses on the approval and regulation of technical qualifications, rather than the funding of technical or academic qualifications. However, when it comes to both academic and technical qualifications, what we are looking for the most is quality. There is no point in a student taking a low-quality level 3 qualification that does not equip them with skills for a job or help them to progress into higher education. That is even more important when it comes to disadvantaged students.

We have more than 12,000 qualifications at level 3 and below. By comparison, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, all widely regarded as having high-performing technical education systems, have around 500 or fewer. Our qualifications review is vital to ensuring that what is on the market is the best it can be. I am clear that T-levels and A-levels should be front and centre of the level 3 landscape, but I am convinced that we need other qualifications alongside them, many of which exist now and play a valuable role in supporting good outcomes for students. It is quite likely that many BTECs and similar applied general-style qualifications will continue to play an important role in 16-to-19 education for the foreseeable future.

Our reforms to the qualifications landscape are rightly ambitious, but we know that we would be wrong to push too hard and risk compromising quality. That is why I am announcing today that we have decided to allow an extra year before our reform timetable is implemented. The extra year will allow us to continue to work hard to support the growth of T-levels and give more notice to providers, awarding organisations, employers, students and parents, so that they can prepare for the changes.

I am a firm believer in T-levels. As I have said before, I want them to become as famous as A-levels, and I want to ensure that we get them right. As many young people as possible should have the advantage of studying for and successfully completing a T-level. We hear consistently that some students are put off taking a T-level because they are worried that they will fail if they do not reach level 2 in English and maths. We want to change that and bring T-levels in line with other qualifications, including A-levels. We are absolutely clear that English and maths should remain central to T-level programmes, but we do not want to unnecessarily inhibit talented students from accessing T-levels simply because of the additional hurdle that reaching level 2 in English and maths represents. That is why I can also announce today that we will remove the English and maths exit requirements from T-levels. That will bring them in line with other qualifications, including A-levels, and ensure that talented young people with more diverse strengths are not arbitrarily shut out from rewarding careers in sectors such as construction, catering and healthcare. The institute is taking immediate steps towards that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Paul Blomfield

Monday 11th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

8. What recent assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of support in schools for children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)]

We conducted a national survey of mental health provision in schools that showed that most take action to support their pupils’ mental health. Schools need specialist support, so under the NHS long-term plan we are introducing mental health support teams as part of a major investment in children’s mental health.

[Paul Blomfield]

During my annual community consultation, I met students from secondary schools right across my constituency. In every school, they raised the difficulty in accessing mental health services as a top priority. The Minister said that he is encouraging schools to offer counselling. Schools want to do that, but the funding crisis is preventing them because they do not have the resources. Next Tuesday, I am hosting a delegation of headteachers from every Sheffield constituency. Will he meet them to discuss this issue?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I would happily discuss the issue. I am very proud to share with this House the fact that the funding that we are increasing to £2.3 billion a year by 2023-24 would mean that funding for children’s and young people’s mental health services will grow faster than overall NHS funding, but also, more importantly, faster than total mental health spending overall.

Student Visas

Debate between Nadhim Zahawi and Paul Blomfield

Thursday 6th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak after the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), just as it was to speak alongside him last September at the Conservative party conference, where we made the same points and received a good reception.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman is always welcome.

[Paul Blomfield]

I am not sure that I will make a habit of it. We made the point then and we make it again today that there is much cross-party unity on this issue. The fact that the motion has been sponsored by Members from all three main parties is a sign of that. From my discussions with Government Members, I am sure that, were they not tied by the responsibilities of office, many more of them would be joining us in support of the motion.

The case that we are making today was perhaps most powerfully put in an article in the Financial Times in May 2012 under the headline, “Foreign students are key to UK prosperity”. The author wrote:

“Britain’s universities are a globally competitive export sector and well-placed to make a greater contribution to growth. With economic growth at a premium, the UK should be wary of artificially hobbling it.”

The article continued:

“Now that the government has clamped down on the problem of bogus colleges”—

from my perspective, the last Government did that too—

“there is scope to take legitimate students out of the annual migration targets… Indeed, that is what our main competitors in the global student market already do.”

I do not disagree with a word in the entire article and I do not think that any of my hon. Friends would. Who was the author? It was the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), who is now head of the No. 10 policy unit. I quote from that article not to score a debating point, but to demonstrate the breadth of support for the motion.

At the outset of the debate, it is worth emphasising that international students are important not just because of their financial contribution, but because they add to the intellectual vitality of our campuses; they are vital to the viability of many courses, particularly in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths; they contribute to the cutting-edge research that gives the UK a unique edge in international markets; and they give UK students the chance to learn alongside people from every other major country, which is extraordinarily good preparation for the transnational environment in which our graduates will work. As has been pointed out, international students form relationships and a fondness for this country that will win us contracts and influence as they become leaders back home.

Those are huge advantages for Britain, but let us put them to one side and look at the hard-nosed economic case. International students bring £8 billion into the UK economy each year. Higher education is a major industry and a major export earner. Some people ask, “What about the costs?” Indeed, the Minister made that point on the all-party parliamentary university group at one point. I discussed it with the university of Sheffield, which said, “Fair point. We ought to look at that”, and it commissioned Oxford Economics to undertake the first ever independent cost-benefit analysis of the contribution of international students. As an independent study I expected it to be quite rigorous, although I did not realise how rigorous. Oxford Economics did not just look at health, education and use of public services; it went to the nth degree and looked at traffic congestion and every conceivable indirect cost. It concluded that the annual net benefit to our city’s economy is £120 million. That is worth about 6,000 much-needed jobs in the city, not just in universities but in restaurants, shops, transport, construction and more besides.

The Government have damaged our ability to recruit by including international students in net migration targets. That is not a statistical argument but a fundamental point because in doing so, they have put international students at the heart of the immigration debate. It is no good saying, as the Minister might later and the Home Office did this week in its response to the report by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, that there is no cap on student numbers—[Interruption.] The Minister says from a sedentary position that there is not, but if the Government have a target for reducing immigration and they include international students in that, such a policy leads them to celebrate cutting the number of international students coming to the UK. Indeed, the Minister did just that a couple of weeks ago when the fall in net migration was announced by celebrating the drop in numbers of 56,000 international students year on year.

The Minister will point out that within those figures the number of university visas rose slightly while the real fall was in private college and further education student numbers, but that in itself should be a cause for worry not celebration. Not only are those students valuable in themselves, those courses are pathways into higher education and a fall in numbers is an indication of the problems we are storing up for the future. Conservative estimates suggest that some 40% of students going to universities in the UK go through those routes, and we should worry about that future impact.

On other occasions, the Government have argued that numbers are holding up, but as my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) clearly pointed out, holding up is not good enough. We do not want to stand still in a growing market, which the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recognised will double by 2025. That is another £8 billion in export earnings for the UK and another 6,000 jobs in Sheffield, yet the Home Office is frustrating that ambition.

The hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) mentioned Brazil—one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Under their Science Without Borders programme, the Brazilian Government are spending $2 billion over four years on sending 100,000 of their brightest young people to study abroad at undergraduate and postgraduate level. They want them to go to the best universities in the world, and those are in the UK.

A group of 2,143 Brazilian students who wanted to come to the UK have been prevented by inflexible visa rules. They are high-achieving students who wanted to study undergraduate STEM courses, but they needed to improve their English before starting. Current rules prevent them from staying in the UK after completing an English language course, and they would have had to return to Brazil and reapply for a new visa before starting their courses. As a result of those rules and the Home Office’s refusal to change them, 1,100 of those students are now going to the US and 600 to Australia, where they are welcome to study English and stay on for their degree course. Of the original 2,143 students, only 43 are applying to come to the UK this September. The value to the country of that cohort was £66 million. That has been lost because of Home Office inflexibility, and with it, considerable good will.