Exiting the EU: Higher Education

Debate between Liz McInnes and Rupa Huq

Wednesday 23rd November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) for securing this important debate. I know this subject is very close to her heart, given her work as a university lecturer before her election to serve her constituents here in the House. This subject is also very close to my heart. As an NHS scientist before I came to this place, I worked in a field that thrived on collaboration and recognised no boundaries.

Our universities are rightly held in high esteem worldwide. We have 18 of the top 100 universities in the world, including four in the top eight. Globally, Britain represents only 0.9% of the world’s population, but we have 3.2% of global research and development expenditure and 4.1% of the world’s leading researchers, producing more than 15% of pioneering research papers.

It is well known that British science punches above its weight in the international university league tables and does so mainly thanks to EU grants. British science is not awash with funding; in fact, Britain has the lowest per capita spending on research of any G7 country. Sadly, Brexit and the Government’s handling of the referendum outcome have shown their inability to lead and to quash uncertainty over what Brexit will actually mean for the higher education sector. Brexit just adds more uncertainty, and uncertainty breeds insecurity.

There are two aspects of the human and intellectual cost of Brexit for universities. The first is the brain drain and the second is the potential restrictions on overseas research students. The brain drain is nothing new. Many senior figures in British universities remember the lack of support from the Thatcher Government in the 1980s and the exodus of scientists abroad. It is ironic that the four recent British Nobel prize-winners—Duncan Haldane, David Thouless, Michael Kosterlitz and Sir Fraser Stoddart—are all based in the US, having been forced out of Britain during the 1980s brain drain. British research scientists are worried that the Prime Minister’s mantra that “Brexit means Brexit” will lead to a lack of funding and grants for British science, and has the potential to create a modern-day brain drain.

[Dr Huq]

I neglected to say something in my own speech. As a scientist, is my hon. Friend aware of the Science and Technology Committee’s report last week that says that the future of EU researchers and scientists in this country should be guaranteed, because otherwise we would imperil our science research base here?

[Liz McInnes]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and yes I am. I was briefly a member of the Science and Technology Committee and I try to keep on top of the work that it produces. I fully support its call for EU funding to be replaced in some way by this Government, and I hope that we might get a response from the Minister today on that subject.

NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans

Debate between Liz McInnes and Rupa Huq

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

Before entering the Commons, I worked for 33 years in the NHS and saw and experienced on a daily basis the service that it provides to millions across the UK, from its GPs to its world-leading research and development. With 80% of hospitals in debt, bed-blocking at record highs, an ageing population, waiting times for cancer treatment lengthening, underfunding of social care, mass staff shortages in hospitals and a future where collaboration with the European Union is unclear, we should show our commitment to our NHS in its time of need and give it the funding it deserves so that it can succeed for all patients.

The NHS STPs do not clearly address those issues. As many hon. Members have said, they have been shrouded in secrecy and drawn up behind closed doors. There has been no public consultation, and there is a staggering lack of evidence that they will deliver the reductions and improvements the Government promise. They will be untried and untested, and will come at an unimaginable cost to patients if they are found not to be the right path to pursue.

I am a Greater Manchester MP. When the metro mayor plan was introduced, bold promises of devolving power to the region were made, including in health.

[Dr Huq]

My hon. Friend mentions local government. Is she aware that, in north-west London, which is one of the few areas not to have had its STP published, the London boroughs of Ealing and of Hammersmith and Fulham have not signed up to the STP? They are refusing to do so because it threatens the closure of both Ealing and Charing Cross hospitals. The mistrust and secrecy is everywhere, including in local government.

[Liz McInnes]

My hon. Friend highlights the secrecy surrounding STPs and the attempts of local authorities and the devolved regions, including Greater Manchester, to deal with devolved health issues, as they are supposed to do.

The promise to devolve health was front and centre of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016. Metro mayors would need to be consulted like any other political leader, and the plans jeopardise the autonomy of the metro mayor’s powers. The British Medical Journal states that STPs may risk the post of metro mayor

“becoming a rallying point for opposition to service reconfigurations.”

Not only metro mayors and clear legislation are needed if the STPs are to be effective. Councillors and committees must be at heart of the planning process, and health and wellbeing boards must be an integral part of it. They are the only place where local political, clinical and professional leaders come together. They can be pivotal in driving change, but they seem to have been put on the waiting list for consultation.

As with the disastrous Health and Social Care Act 2012, overseen by the former Prime Minister, and now former MP for Witney, the proposals take us on a journey to another calamitous reorganisation of the NHS. It is now a necessity that the Government abandon the timetabling and scheduling of such a major restructure package. Perhaps now is the time to step down and take stock, like the former Prime Minister. I call on the Government and Secretary of State for Health to go back and reconsider not only the timeframe but the proposals in general, and to have a full and frank public consultation, allowing for transparency and debate at local and national level.

Feminism in the School Curriculum

Debate between Liz McInnes and Rupa Huq

Monday 11th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huq]

My hon. Friend puts it well. Jessy McCabe is with us this evening, and her e-petition—a very modern way of petitioning the Government—obtained nearly 4,000 signatures. When I pointed that out to the Prime Minister during Prime Minister’s questions, he congratulated her. However, that should not have been an afterthought. Why do these things go so far that they have to be brought back from the brink?

Last month, the Department for Education said that feminism could still be studied as part of the reforms to the A-level sociology curriculum, and that the proposed move

“tied in with school autonomy and trusting heads”.

It is not good enough to leave it to chance in that way. Teaching and learning strategy should enrich students because, as many Members have pointed out, feminism informs history and globalisation. This is not just one of those theoretical “isms” as many of these things are; feminism affects us all every day. As young people go on to study at university across different disciplines, having the compass of feminism and an understanding of unequal gender relations to navigate their path is critical, and we must make the classroom responsive to, and representative of, society. The syllabus should not be gender-blind, because that is denying reality. We could also include world thinkers on an expanded list, such as Simone de Beauvoir from France, or the American black feminist, bell hooks.

In the December debate in the other place, Lord Nash declared that the proposed new content for politics A-level was an improvement on the last one because for the first time it contained political ideologies. However, feminism was not one of the named ideologies, so that is a little inconsistent. The Department for Education justified the move on the grounds of giving more choice to schools, but to us it looked like freedom to downplay the historical contribution of female thinkers. It took reports on the website “BuzzFeed” over Christmas for us to have some inkling that movement was taking place, and such unofficial, if positive, statements, need substantiation tonight.

Today I tried to get clarity from the Department, and I rang up the parliamentary affairs section, which over Christmas was asking me, “What is going in your speech? ”—this is hot off the press, so I did not entirely know the content. I did, however, ask whether the rumours in The Independent on Sunday were true, and I was given the classic response, “The Minister will be laying out the Government’s position in the course of the debate.”

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

With the article in The Independent on Sunday, I did what one should not do and looked at the comments underneath. Some said, “Feminism equals hate”. I would not like to hazard a guess, but I suspect that those comments came from men. Does my hon. Friend agree that we really need to educate men as well as women about feminism? It is not just a women’s subject, and we need to clarify to men what feminism really means.

[Dr Huq]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. When The Guardian had a women’s page, I often wondered whether that meant the rest of the newspaper was for men. When academic departments teach women’s studies, it makes me think, “Does that mean everything else is for men?” She makes a powerful point very well. It is true what they say: one should never go below the line, where the comments from all the crazy people are. [Laughter.] Not that I am empowered to make a diagnosis. Sorry, where more exuberant people sometimes post before they have engaged their brain. No, before they have thought of the consequences of their exuberance. [Laughter.] Anyway, we are nearing the end.

An opinion piece in November in The Times Educational Supplement, the in-house journal for the teachers of our nation, advised readers to:

“use the topic of feminism in the delivery of subject content. In maths, look at the pay-gap. In science, explore the work of female scientists. In PE, explore the notions of ‘female’ and ‘male’ sports. Make gender an explicit part of teaching…Make them cry and make them angry. Then tell them your generation has failed them and it’s now on them to go out and change it for the better.”

This is all sound advice—from a male head of history at a school in Hertfordshire.

Any curriculum needs to be inclusive, balanced and pluralistic to foster mutual understanding between people of all backgrounds, genders, sexualities, ages, ethnicities, and all faiths and none. Sadly, this sorry shambles where a change is shelved—if that is what is going to happen; we are still waiting to hear—after it should never have got to the advanced state that it did in the first place, is not an isolated incident. A-level music has already been mentioned. A petition with nearly 4,000 signatures pointed out that out of 63 composers, there were zero women. That is even worse than one out of 16, which meant that 94% were men. We do not need a calculator to work out zero out of 63, even if my constituent Jessy McCabe reversed that situation.

On GCSE religious studies, Members may not have noticed—it slipped out at the very end of last year—that in November a landmark High Court judgment ruled in favour of three humanist families who challenged the Government’s removal of non-religious world views in their rewritten syllabus for that subject. In the judgment, a High Court judge stated that that was:

“a breach of the duty to take care that information or knowledge included in the curriculum is conveyed in a pluralistic manner.”

The British Humanist Association called it “a stunning victory” and pointed out that

“continuing to exclude the views of a huge number of Britons, in the face of majority public opinion and all expert advice, would only be to the detriment of education in this country and a shameful path to follow.”

I hope—dare I say pray, as we are talking about religion?—that history repeats itself in this House tonight and we see a U-turn. Women’s voices have in the past all too often been silenced. That was meant to have happened in the bad old days, before the right to vote and before the Equal Pay Act 1970. In 2016, we cannot allow women’s voices to continue to be silenced. As Mary Wollstonecraft, the one surviving woman from the draft syllabus, put it:

“I do not wish”—

women—

“to have power over men, but over themselves.”

How can women have power over themselves if they do not know the voices that have created the foundations on which they stand?