Office for Students: Appointment Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Robert Halfon
Main Page: Robert Halfon (Conservative - Harlow)Department Debates - View all Robert Halfon's debates with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Joseph Johnson
On the point of process, Mr Young’s appointment to the board of the Office for Students was made in line with the Commissioner for Public Appointments’ code of practice, and Mr Young was appointed following a fair and open competition. He was selected for interview based on the advertised criteria and interviewed by the same panel that interviewed all other board candidates. Sir Michael Barber, who is the chair of the Office for Students, was one of the panel members, along with a senior civil servant and an independent panel member from the higher education sector, and that panel found Mr Young to be appointable.
As for whether the Department for Education exaggerated Mr Young’s qualifications, it absolutely and categorically did not. Mr Young was a teaching fellow at Harvard and a teaching assistant at Cambridge, positions for which he received payment. The Department for Education never claimed that they were academic posts. As I have said, Mr Young is a Fulbright commissioner and co-founded the West London Free School, and that experience will be vital in encouraging new providers and ensuring that more universities are working effectively with schools.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
The Minister will know that I am a supporter of his work and of universities, but things have gone badly wrong here. I accept that Mr Young has done great work on free schools, but so have many other people. I am not talking about the things he has done on Twitter; I am more concerned about some quite dark articles in which he talks about the disabled and the working classes. Much more significantly—I have the article here—in 2015 he talked about what he calls “progressive eugenics”, which is incredibly dark and dangerous stuff. I suggest that my hon. Friend look again at the appointment, because I do not think that it will give students confidence.