Master’s Level History Scholarships

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

If the noble Lord is making the case that it is not just at undergraduate level in universities that we need to promote wider access but at postgraduate level, I strongly agree with him. We made that point in the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, and we have already begun work to support, for example, the promulgation of successful best practice in opening up access to postgraduate study. We want to do more on that issue.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, the wider, hugely worrying trend is the loss of humanities and arts courses more generally at the higher education level, one effect of which, as has been said, has been to widen the class divide in the study of those subjects. Do the Government have a strategy to reverse those long-term trends?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

It is important, first, to ensure the financial sustainability of our higher education sector, which this Government have taken action to do by increasing the maximum tuition fee cap. It is also important, as we set out in our White Paper, that universities are able to think carefully about what they want to specialise in and the way in which they collaborate—something that has not happened enough in our higher education sector—to maintain access to important subjects such as history and humanities. In doing that, we will make it more likely that access to these important subjects can be maintained for students at all levels.