Higher Education: Financial Pressures

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

To move that this House takes note of the financial pressures on Higher Education and the impact on (1) local communities, (2) the United Kingdom’s science and innovation exports, and (3) the impact on delivering the Turing Scheme.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate. The Minister is taking her seat, and she knows that I am a bit of a schools policy obsessive, so I come to this area of education somewhat afresh—and I am pretty alarmed by what I have found.

I must start by underscoring that higher education is critical to Britain. For individual learners hoping to prosper in the future labour market, we know that, as technology and the greening of the economy deskills and demands new skills, future prospects will require higher levels of learning for more people. Employers are desperate for talent with strong cognitive and collaborative ability, and are relying on a thriving higher education sector to deliver that. For university towns and cities, the sector creates and sustains-high quality jobs. Many are anchor institutions for the local economy. They bring large numbers of students to pay rent and spend money in that economy. Universities are major property owners and developers, and their research translates into spin-outs, start-ups and consultancies. Nationally, we have a persistent problem in the economy of low productivity that needs more of these highly educated individuals who can work well with both technology and each other. Britain also needs to continue to be at the forefront of applying academic research to maintain any competitive advantage we have left post Brexit. In export terms, international students alone generated £19.5 billion in export earnings in 2020.

According to Universities UK, the sector contributes £95 billion to the economy and supports 815,000 jobs. We are the third most popular destination for international students globally and we have the highest degree completion rates in the OECD. Then last week, I woke up to the news that Cambridge University, my alma mater, alone contributes £30 billion a year to the UK economy. I have also just been reading about the impact of the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre in Manchester and the potential of the venture science doctorate being developed by Deep Science Ventures.

A healthy, vibrant higher education sector is essential as this country seeks to grow and thrive. That is why I was so alarmed to see news from places such as Norwich and Wolverhampton, and then to read last year’s National Audit Office report and the response from the Public Accounts Committee. This paints a picture of serious financial stress in the sector. The report found that the number of higher education providers with in-year deficits has risen from 1% to 15% in the last five years and that 20 have been in deficit for at least three years. In 2020-21, 43 out of 254 higher education institutions were reporting deficits and the net operating cashflow of the sector had halved. These problems cover the full range of types of higher education institution, suggesting a set of systemic issues that cannot be written off as a hangover from Covid. So what is going on?

Put simply, it appears that the university business model is teetering. Universities rely on four sources of income: government funding, tuition fees, research grants and other income such as property investments, IP exploitation, conferences and endowments. These are just the kinds of things that allow the rich, such as Oxford and Cambridge, to get richer while the rest struggle. The balance between tuition fee income from UK students and UK government funding has shifted significantly in the last decade, and this is the core of the problem. In 2010, funding from government was close to three times the level of tuition fee income. Ten years later, following the raising of tuition fees to over £9,000 and cuts in government funding, fee income was almost 2.7 times the level of government funding—an almost straight swap. This reliance on fees for half of income is so important in understanding the problems.

For good reason, the Government have capped fees since 2017 and they are now fixed until at least 2024. But galloping inflation means that, in real terms, the fee of £9,250 is now worth just £6,585 and government funding has not then filled the gap. Ours is the lowest level of government funding for universities in the OECD, hence the financial pressures. Teaching domestic students is now done at a loss, so recruiting more UK students to fill the gap does not necessarily help. That has led some to rely on international students; income from this source has been growing rapidly, by around 12% per year—but I do not believe that this can continue for ever. Students pay the highest fees in the OECD and are starting to get less in return. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that spending on students fell by 18% in real terms in the last 10 years, as universities try to make savings.

I take over as chair of the Council of British International Schools in May. Four hundred schools around the world are members, educating over 165,000 students, and their recent survey was revealing. It found that 96% of their pupils go on to university: 44% of them in the UK, 19% in their host country and the remainder shopping around globally. What is striking is that the UK is becoming less attractive, with 29% of schools reporting it as a decreasing choice of destination for their students. Why is that?

When asked, the students give a variety of reasons. For 65%, it is the cost; 35% mention Brexit; and 26% mention the cost of the visas and the post-study work entitlement. What a massive lost opportunity. Public First recently did some work for Universities UK and found that 64% of the public believed that the UK should host the same number of—or more—international students. Given that the continued growth of overseas students is crucial to relieving the financial pressures on universities that I have set out, can the Minister update us, in her response, on whether the Government plan further restrictions on international students? Can she confirm the Government’s commitment to the graduate visa route and whether they remain committed to their international education strategy? The Turing scheme is a relative success and nurtures an important global mindset by facilitating international student exchange. Therefore, it makes no sense for us not to do our utmost to reciprocate by hosting more students in this country.

Alongside the increasing income from students, it is reasonable to ask whether there is more that universities should and could do in terms of savings. There are problems here with the impact on staff leading to further industrial action, but there are also questions of what that means for students themselves. Students are already struggling with the cost of living crisis and a student maintenance package that is the lowest in seven years. They are borrowing money, half of which will never be repaid. Teaching has been cut and accommodation is hard to find for too many. Post Covid, many students are struggling with mental health problems and have lost out on teaching contact time due to strikes, so dropout rates have increased, further hitting university finances. This is especially important for our public services. Of the MillionPlus members, 66% of university graduates work in the public sector, and they tell us that applications for nursing are down by over 18%, when we need an increase of 20% to meet our targets. As the Minister knows, there is a similar story for teachers, where applications from those wanting to enter teacher training are down by over 15% and are much worse in priority secondary school subjects. I do not believe that further savings that impact on the student experience are sustainable.

The other pressure on our university system comes in the critical area of research. The research function of British universities punches well above its weight. We have one of the lowest levels of investment in the OECD, yet the academic impact of our work is ranked the highest in the G7. Funding is based both on overall university performance and on grant funding for specific projects. However, it is not designed to recover the full cost of undertaking the research. In 2020, only 71% of research costs were recovered, which means using income from teaching funding and elsewhere to fill the gap. I have already discussed the problems in that area. Clearly, the lack of access to the €84 billion Horizon scheme has added to these problems as one of the self-inflicted harms of the Brexit deal with the EU. I am delighted that the Windsor agreement allows that to be reopened. Can the Minister update the House on the progress of those negotiations?

All of that said, the state of university finances looks a bit of a mess. Government policy deliberately shifted universities to a reliance on fee income. The reality of that creating unsustainable levels of debt has meant capping that source, so this vital sector is now in some trouble. We need innovation and change; there is no easy solution. Having seen the economic reality of gambling with our money, thanks to Liz Truss, we also know that there is no magic money tree. While we are waiting for change across our education ecosystem to create something fit for purpose for people and the economy, we also need an answer to give confidence to the sector. We have seen, through councils such as Croydon and Thurrock, that, when push comes to shove, the Treasury will intervene to stop our local authorities from going belly-up. I hope that I have made the case that our universities are too important for us to allow them to be vulnerable.

The Government did the right thing in protecting customers in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month. Can the Minister assure us that, somewhere between the Office for Students, the Department for Education and the Treasury, someone is working on a plan B so that students and staff at our universities will be assured that they will not be left high and dry, as the business model for our universities looks like it might be running out of road? I beg to move.

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[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate; I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I have learned a lot—it is not my natural home as a policy area—particularly about the ups and downs of the Turing scheme. I make special mention of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Austin, and his comments about the importance of universities for community generation. Also, this was the first time I have heard my noble friend Lady Twycross speak from the Front Bench. Clearly, it is her natural home, so I look forward to more of the same from her.

It is good to hear that across the House we are proud of our higher education sector. We want to allow it to continue to pursue excellence, as well as community renewal, and that requires a solid financial foundation. I noticed that in her fine speech, the Minister talked about the seven-year freeze in tuition fees allowing the sector to remain financially stable. I gently put it to her that, having shifted to half the income for the sector being reliant on tuition fees, to then have a seven-year freeze at a time of double-digit inflation is not the best recipe for financial stability.

However, with that note of caution—I do not want to depress anyone—it is still a vibrant sector and is still hugely important, and we are all committed to helping it.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

With the permission of the House, I quoted one figure incorrectly and would just like to set the record straight. I said that, according to the HESA data, the increase in the number of low or unknown tariff higher education institutions that were in deficit in 2016-17 was 11 and in 2020-21 it was 21. I quoted earlier the number of institutions, which rose from 47 in 2016-17 to 70 in 2021. I would just like to get that right and not have to put it in yet another letter.

Oak National Academy

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as a director of CENTURY Tech and of Suklaa. I also thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for securing this debate and opening it in the way he did. I must also pay tribute to the founders of Oak for quickly establishing a useful set of resources during the early stages of the pandemic. Their success in attracting large amounts of public money has also been impressive; their continued success in doing so with limited process and scrutiny is of course extraordinary.

Five years ago, I was part of the executive team at Tes Global selling our large education business from one owner to another. I fielded countless questions about the impact on our recruitment business of the DfE setting up a rival recruitment platform. I did my best to reassure them that the teacher vacancy service would be a waste of public money because, however good the product, the Government do not understand the behaviours in the market. I am happy to have subsequently been proven right but, meanwhile, the DfE actions spooked investors and cost us millions in lost value. I now hear from similar investors who are assessing a British digital publisher of educational resources that is up for sale. What will be the impact of the DfE pouring £43 million into Oak? Why have the Government acquired a publisher? Are they going to start buying other publishers? I can reassure them on most points, but it is an added uncertainty that will cost another British business.

This is at the heart of my concern about the establishment of Oak as an arm’s-length body. It will damage the ability to grow of British businesses which need significant overseas investment, but which will be put off by this inexplicable intervention. I know this is not the intention of government or the people at the top of Oak; it is an unintended consequence of blundering into a successful, functioning market.

The reality is that there are plenty of high-quality educational resources being published all the time for teachers in England. Plenty are free and some are charged for. When I managed Tes resources, we regularly had over 1 million downloads every day by teachers of content created by other teachers. We made very little money from it but teachers loved us for it because we saved them huge amounts of time. There are many more—from Twinkl to more video-based offerings from the likes of Oak, to more personalised AI-powered resources that also include assessment, like CENTURY. These digital publishers then also compete with more traditional textbook publishers. There is lots of quality and lots of provision—why intervene? There are three possible reasons: to make it easier for teachers to find what they want; to further improve quality or value; or to increase central control over what resources are used.

I am not against an arm’s-length body for curriculum resources—one that specifies standards, agrees with the sector an API to improve the interoperability of resources from different publishers, and ensures that copyright and data protection are fully respected. These would all be valuable and appropriate functions for a government intervention to improve the functioning of the market. It could even call itself Oak for old time’s sake; it might even hold the old Oak content on its platform. But the takeover of Oak by government is about control. Why else would the DfE acquire an educational publisher? It has its own narrow view of what a good lesson should look like in pursuit of its narrow vision of a knowledge-rich curriculum. It wants to dictate to teaching professionals, not to respect their judgment in their contexts. And it wants to impose this through its new teacher training reforms, its prescription of the curriculum and this influence on pedagogy. This arm’s-length body is bad value for money, bad for education and bad for growth in education business.

Young People: Skills (Youth Unemployment Committee Report)

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, because in many ways he always allows me to act as good cop. I remind your Lordships of my educational interests in the register, and I very much endorse the thanks given to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, his committee and to all the staff who worked on this excellent report.

Back in 2009—which these days is prehistory—I was appointed the Minister of State attending Cabinet for Education and Welfare Reform. That was the title, but it was clear that Gordon Brown as Prime Minister basically wanted me to be the Minister for youth unemployment. It was post crash and he, like many of us, was concerned about the scarring effect of long-term unemployment on young people. When I arrived, the Permanent Secretary said to me, “It is inevitable that youth unemployment will continue to rise. You’ve got to face up to the fact that those scarring effects and social problems are just going to happen.” I am happy to say that we managed to get youth unemployment down during the time I was there, from 664,000 to 625,000; it did not do us any good in the election, but there you go. That was thanks to the Future Jobs Fund, which was then imitated in a much paler form by Kickstart when the Covid crisis then hit. However, I will not get bogged down in the detail comparing them and why I think the Future Jobs Fund was a much better scheme.

The reason why I wanted to recall all that is because it was quite a culture shock going into that job, having been Schools Minister for three years. I had been trotting out the rhetoric about how brilliant all our schools were and what a great job we were doing, and then I saw and met the young people who were at the wrong end of the school system and had not been well served by it. As Schools Minister, I was the Minister who made being NEET technically illegal because I conceived of and took through the legislation to raise the participation age to 18. Indeed, that was a success statistically, in that we moved from 15% NEET down to 10% NEET in that time, but the reality for the minority who continue to be failed by our school system is pretty bleak. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, underscored that.

This report goes to the right things: the skills gap and the school curriculum. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about the curriculum, the need for a much better, all-age careers service, fully staffed by proper professionals who can help people of every age, the need for FE funding and apprenticeships for young people in particular and the problem of Whitehall silos. When I was at DWP I was trying to work with the Skills Minister, who I got on really well with. We both wanted to join up the skills system and the unemployment support system, yet the silos of Whitehall frustrated us.

It is really important that the recommendations in this report are listened to by government, but I will use the remaining time I have to say that I also want to see a mindset change. The reason why we wanted to raise the participation age was to create a mindset change which said that it is intolerable that there are people not in education, employment or training at the ages of 16 to 19. My 11 year-old at home, who has just started year 7 this term, will leave statutory education in 2030. She will then probably have a working life of 50 to 60 years, so she will be in the labour market until something like 2080 or 2090. We have to think about whether, in the remainder of her secondary school experience that she has already started, we are preparing her for the way the world—her world—will change between now and 2090.

We have to think about the need for a greener economy and the sorts of green growth and investment that has just been talked about in the previous debate in this Room. We have to think about STEM skills, but also the craft skills for a retrofit economy, which in many ways is what we need in order to make existing resources go further.

AI machines will be doing much more of the work during the rest of this century, which means we need an education system that helps my daughter compete as a better human, not as a better machine. The danger of our current curriculum is that it is training our children to be machines that will be outcompeted by better machines. We need to be more human, more caring and more curious. We will have an ageing population during our lifetime which simply cannot afford to carry a large number of young people who become long-term unemployed and a drain on the welfare state.

We need to start from there—from a vision of what sort of world this century will create for the people who are currently in school—and work backwards. What will the adult skill system be like? Will it allow people to constantly retrain, change careers and have a proper love of learning and ability to self-direct their learning? What changes do we need in our higher and further education systems so that they work better together in all parts of the country, not just in those where the universities are currently located?

What are the qualification and curriculum needs? I recently went into an E-ACT school in Daventry with a motor vehicle workshop. I asked about the qualifications that are being studied, and none of them include a specification for hybrid cars. Yet, as we just heard in the previous debate, we will not be selling internal combustion engine cars by the time the kids working on those cars enter the labour market. It is shocking that we do not have a skill system that anticipates the future. It looks at what we might need now and the skills gaps now, and tries to fill those with qualifications, but that is inadequate. We need now to be looking to a much more dynamic, future-looking, whole-system change, so that we can urgently achieve the green growth and the much more human-centred society that this country, including my 11 year-old at home, is growing up into.

Education Technology: Oak National Academy

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer your Lordships to my interests in the register, particularly as a member of the board at Century Tech. The Government are splurging £43 million on Oak, which is used by only just over 5% of England’s teachers but which allows Ministers, in the words of Jon Coles, the chief executive of one of the largest MATs, to promote their own preferred curriculum model. I now regularly hear from private equity investors that they are put off investing in education resources in this country because of the distortion caused by the Government clumsily entering the market at scale. Please can the noble Baroness tell the House what competitor analysis the department has undergone and why it thinks this significant investment will aid growth and choice for teachers?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I have to say it sticks in my throat to have private equity investors who are responsible for considerable distortions in the children’s home market lecturing the Government on distortions in the edtech market. More importantly, the Government are not distorting the curriculum. The Government are striving—I know that the noble Lord knows that this is true—to have the best curriculum for children. We know that teachers will make the best judgment on what curriculum their students need. That is why, apart from the curriculum from Oak’s own partners, which will be on the platform, it will also showcase more than 80 other curriculum models for providers so that teachers can make those comparisons.

Times Education Commission Report

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. I applaud him for securing the debate and for his introduction. I declare my education interests in the register, particularly my interest as a co-owner of Suklaa, which has a number of education clients. I am also a board member of Century Tech and an adviser to Nord Anglia Education, and I chair the E-ACT multi-academy trust, among other things.

In my view, there can never be a more important time for us to thoroughly re-examine education and what we are doing with our school system in particular. This is a time when the brittleness of our resilience is being tested—the resilience of the planet, the economy and our political system. A lot of change is going on, and it would be easy to find ourselves with an absence of hope. There is one public service that is about the future: education. When we talk about a national education service in our policy conversations, in many ways our vision is for a national hope service.

I hugely applaud the Times for making the decision to resource and commission this really thorough and excellent piece of work. I pay tribute to the four Members of your Lordships’ House who served on that commission. I look forward to the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Rees, and it is good to see the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, in his place listening to the debate. I was also pleased to see that the chair of the Select Committee, Robert Halfon from the other place, was part of this commission.

We should take this really seriously, in part because the commission makes the case for change in education compelling. This country’s school system is high-stakes, with a high level testing and accountability. According to the commission’s report, we have the highest amount of testing of children anywhere in the developed world. We have great professionals working in our schools and, by and large, we have really good schools. We have a system that, in many cases and in many ways, is working really well for the purpose for which it was designed.

Unfortunately, I disagree with that purpose in the current context, because it appears that the system was designed to filter children. It was built during an age of an industrial economy, where swathes of people could leave education without much in the way of qualifications or skills but could still get reasonably rewarding work in factories or by marrying people working in factories. Because we largely now have norm-referenced examinations in our public examination system—we are talking about Ofqual tightening up the grade boundaries again next summer—large numbers of children will fail; that is how the system is designed. Of course, those children most likely to fail in such a system are those born to disadvantage. That is not fair.

I believe in education as something that lifts people up and releases the talents of all children. Having a school system in this country that is obsessed with the academic while neglecting the social, emotional and physical literacy of our children does not serve our nation well. Those who get left behind by the system become a burden on us as taxpayers, because we do not have an economy that is designed to pick up the slack in a modern labour market where people without higher levels of education will struggle to prosper and to get work.

We have some peculiarities in our system: it is remarkably broad within the academic context up to the age of 16, and then it narrows massively between the ages of 16 and 19 with A-levels, for those who pursue that route. This is because, in the end, it is a filtering system for universities. It serves that system pretty well, but it does not serve the rest. We retain a snobbery about the vocational route. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is in his place and, as ever, look forward with great enthusiasm to his contribution. The work he has done on university technical colleges as institutions for 14 to 19 year-olds and trying to break down that snobbishness about the vocational route is to be applauded. Not everyone has been successful in this regard but plenty have, and he has been hampered in his efforts by a system that is not really designed to work with enrolment at 14. This means that he has a disproportionate number of young people coming to UTCs who have not enjoyed success in education, and his institutions then have to deal with them.

I hear complaints every week from employers that our education system is not producing an output that they need. They have to train too many people as they join the workforce in quite basic things, because we are bringing up children with an ingrained fear of failure. If you are in the current work situation, where we need creative, collaborative and problem-solving workers, you have to learn to fail successfully by learning from those failures in order to progress—yet we do not nurture that culture. I hear the same from young people and from parents: that they are impatient to see our education system significantly change.

At its harshest we have those with special educational needs and disabilities on education, health and care plans. We have 4% of our pupil population on EHCPs and, statistically, only 4% of those on an EHCP will get a job. What a waste of talent in our school system that we indulge. I can also talk about the mental health crisis. Within E-ACT, we are responsible for educating 18,000 children. Statistically, 3,000 of those are likely to self-harm during their school career. We have profound problems that we should be talking about, and this commission report and this debate from the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, is our opportunity.

What of the prescription from the commission? We have been waiting for the British baccalaureate for a long time. One of the biggest regrets of those of us who were involved in education during the Blair/Brown years was our failure to adopt the Tomlinson proposals around a post-16 baccalaureate. That was a profound mistake. It is notable that, among the people who have endorsed the commission’s findings are former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major. I also noted that, during the recent Conservative leadership contest, the losing candidate, Rishi Sunak, also advocated something similar to a British baccalaureate. I would hope that, as parties think about this proposal for a much broader post-16 offer that mirrors those of successful economies around the world, they will also want to see things like maths continuing all the way through until 18; again, that is something that we see around the world.

I hugely applaud the commission advocating a significant rebalancing of funding towards the early years. I also applaud what it says around a strategic embedded use of technology, particularly at a time of teacher shortage. It is really important to magnify the impact of great teachers using technology. I applaud very much the sense that our higher education institutions should partner more with further education institutions, so that they can extend their reach into parts that, geographically, they struggle to get to. The notion of electives around access to the creative subjects and to citizenship activity is to be commended. A national well-being survey on an annual basis is of course also to be welcomed.

In many ways, the prescriptions, or the 12-point plan, that the commission report produces—most of which is hard to argue with—should be the stimulant for the debate. The final point in that 12-point plan is a 15-year strategy for education. In a political setting, it is quite unpopular to talk about taking education out of politics; there will be certain things that will just always need to be there, such as funding. The biggest issue facing us at the moment as a multi-academy trust is how on earth we are going to keep the doors open and stay financially solvent if the inflationary pressures coming through the system are not met by some kind of funding for education. Funding will always be a political issue; whether we are successfully recruiting enough teachers of a high enough quality will always be a political issue. But I applaud the notion that, across parties—perhaps this Chamber is a great place to start—we could develop some longer-term consensus on what sort of education we want. Ultimately, I want a system in which every child can thrive, with a diverse curriculum offer and diversity of provision that maximises the opportunity of technology to be able to link institutions and to link learners across the country and the world. It should be a system where every child feels safe and loved and where every child learns to care for themselves, for others and for their natural environment—both for the present and for their future.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 77 is in my name, and I am delighted to have the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is a very modest amendment so I hope the Minister can agree it without too much difficulty—one always lives in hope in this place.

Home educators save the country thousands of pounds because they are not using state-funded education systems, but they often have difficulty finding a test centre for their children when they want to take public examinations, and when they do find one they have to pay exam fees, which can amount to hundreds of pounds, for the privilege of doing so. Of course, many home educators are not wealthy and struggle to find the money for the fees, but surely home-educated children are as entitled as other children to have public recognition of their learning in the form of examinations. This amendment would guarantee that home-educated pupils had a place at which to sit their national exams and financial assistance to ensure that no child is denied recognition of achievement because their parents cannot afford the fees.

As I say, it is a very modest amendment and I hope the Minister will look on it favourably.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Hunt, who is in the Moses Room grappling with procurement, I will speak to his Amendment 79, to which I also put my name. It would require a local authority to have regard to the case of a SEND child and to listen to the wishes of the child and the parent around provision decisions; the information and support necessary to enable participation in those decisions should be present.

It is an important amendment, given that in so many of the cases that we have heard about where parents are anxious about the Bill’s measures in respect of home education, they are parents of children with some form of special educational need or disability. They have felt that their child’s needs are not being properly addressed in the maintained sector and have therefore chosen to home educate their children. It is important that there is some safeguard for that group in particular, so that the parents’ and child’s wishes are properly considered in the context of what we are trying to do in the Bill.

I also support Amendment 74, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, which I supported in Committee, makes an important case for support for sitting national examinations and the cost of doing so. By consequence, I support Amendment 78.

Finally, having listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Wei, on the previous grouping, and given the problem that the Local Government Ombudsman does not apply in the cases of parents of home-educated children, I think it is important that there is some kind of independent complaints service or ombudsman service. I shall be interested in the Minister’s response on how that independent voice to handle complaints about local authorities, with the diverse range of services that they might provide to support home-educating parents, might be provided.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it might be appropriate if I speak first to Amendment 76, which stands in my name and that of my noble friend. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just mentioned—and I thank him for his support—and as I think we have heard from around the Chamber, if you are dealing with a very rare condition, a teacher or the school cannot be expected to know everything about it.

What we expect teachers to deal with now has expanded. Special educational needs have been spoken about already, and we have a better understanding of them: it is not some fad or anything that is made up about various conditions. I refer the House to my declared interest in dyslexia; that is just one. All these conditions will be present in the classroom, and we now expect schools to deal with them. Expecting them to deal with every medical condition that might affect the way children should be taught is beyond the pale. Commonly occurring ones? Yes. The rest of them? No. There should be a duty on the school and the education authority to communicate and to take it on board when something else arises. That is quite straightforward.

Indeed, many of the amendments in this group are about establishing that supportive relationship between such bodies and home educators. I hope that we hear some supportive words from the Government on that, and on Amendment 84, in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey, which makes provision for some sort of co-ordination of support for those who are home educating, and a relationship. I am hopeful that the Minister will have something positive to say in this area. We need to support those who are, let us face it, at the most basic level, saving the public purse some money. If they are doing it properly, let us help them.

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On the issue of cost, as my noble friend the Minister has said before, parents electing to home educate accept full responsibility for their child’s education and its cost. Under the duty, local authorities will consider requests for different types of support, again taking into account individual and wider circumstances. Support with exam fees would already be a valid way of discharging the duty, and we could outline it as an example in the new statutory guidance depending on the outcome of the collaboration and the public consultation.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. If she has any kind of assessment of the cost of requiring local authorities to cover that cost for parents, it would be really useful to share that with noble Lords taking part in the debate.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I am not sure whether that assessment has been made. If it has, I will be happy to share it. As we have said several times, there are at least two more stages to go on the guidance. One is a collaborative process to produce the draft guidance, and then a consultation process. There are plenty of opportunities as we go along to look at it—for example, whether exam costs would be included in the statutory guidance. I will find out whether we have that assessment and, if we do, I will share it.

I turn to Amendment 118 from my noble friend Lord Wei. As we have already discussed, several routes for complaint already exist for home-educating parents. But, as my noble friend said in response to the previous group, we have heard concerns raised by noble Lords about whether the different current routes of complaint are sufficient. We are also continuing to consider what more we can do to support home-educating parents and strengthen independent oversight of local authorities, such as exploring alternative routes of complaint.

Finally, I turn to Amendments 97ZZA to 100F from the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, which would remove Clauses 53 to 66 from the Bill. The overarching purpose of Clauses 53 to 56 is to improve the consistency of attendance support pupils and families receive to help pupils attend their school regularly. These clauses are an important part of the Government’s overall approach to providing more consistent support for pupils and families in order to help children attend school before legal intervention is considered. Clauses 57 to 66 concern the regulation of independent educational institutions and help us to ensure that all children receive a safe and suitably broad education. Extending the registration requirement and improving investigatory powers will ensure that full-time settings serving children of compulsory school age are regulated. Other measures improve the regulatory regime for independent schools, including by creating a power to suspend the registration of a school because pupils are at risk of harm.

I heard the noble Lord’s request for a meeting and my noble friend is very happy to do that because, as I think she has been at been at pains to stress throughout the passage of the Bill, we want to make sure that we engage with a broad range of voices from the home-education community to be clear about what we are aiming to do with the Bill. It is not at all about reducing or interfering with the right to home education, but just ensuring that we have the proper processes in place to make sure that the best interests of all children are protected while doing so.

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[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I offer very strong support for Amendment 101, so eloquently moved by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and spoken to by my noble friend Lord Blunkett. It offers a coherent system we can unite around. Other countries have their written constitutions; we do not. The Americans also have the Gettysburg Address—easy to teach, easy to understand. In this amendment, we have a coherent system of basic principles of democracy, human rights and equality and the modern imperative of care for the environment. This whole subject, taught as a unity, is particularly important for non-faith schools also, which have a less coherent framework than the faith schools. We are a diverse society. We have several faiths and beliefs and we need a framework that we can cohere around, such as the values of British citizenship in this amendment. The Minister would be doing the children of this country a great service if she were to accept it.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I will briefly add to the chorus of approval for this amendment moved by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. He talked about the problems attached to British values and how they have appeared to exclude some people. What he is trying to achieve is truly inclusive.

I add my voice in particular on sustainability. All of us in this and the other House have been circulated Sir Patrick Vallance’s briefing to MPs on the challenge of climate change. Looking at that, and at the scale and urgency of the challenge from those presenting, it was clear to me that what is missing is public behaviour change. I am absolutely convinced that the key to unlocking that lies in our schools and with our young people, as the demographic which is most enthusiastic about this and can reach into everyone’s home and start to shift our behaviours.

The education company Pearson recently published its School Report, which showed that 50% of school leaders want to teach this—a glass-half-full/glass-half-empty figure. We have had a strategy from the Government which said they wanted schools to do this. Only half of school leaders are planning to do so. We need to do more, including this.

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 105, the purpose of which is to ensure that parents can discover what their children are being taught in school. They must have access, we say, to the materials deployed in class.

It arises because some commercial providers of materials in the sensitive field of RSE and health have tried to stop parents getting access to materials which they have provided for use in class. Requests to see material have been met with the assertion that it is protected and exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act by reason of commercial confidentiality. In other cases, copyright has been raised. In some instances, schools have simply refused point blank. That is what the amendment is aimed at.

The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, who put his name to this amendment, regrets that he cannot speak because he is elsewhere on a prior engagement. On our side, we are grateful for the two meetings we have had with my noble friend the Minister and officials. They have been constructive; we have made progress and received an encouraging letter on Friday.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I support both propositions of delay, particularly not giving the Bill a Third Reading. Not only are there legislative problems with the Bill now not being a Bill in any substance, as originally intended; many measures in it give a future Education Minister the power to provide guidance and put in place statutory instruments—but we do not even know who that Education Minister is going to be.

To be implemented, the Bill will be passed from this House to the other side over next year and the year after, but we have no idea who will be leading on this, how long they will have been in the job or how good their guidance will be. Will it simply be left to the civil servants—for whom I have great respect, but obviously government must lead? We need people in post who know what they are doing and who, ideally, know about education. Over the passage of this Bill, that, sadly, has not always been the case, even with the present team, as much as I respect them. How can we have any confidence that it will be the case with the very fresh team coming in in the autumn?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in particular. The Minister listened carefully and that is why she agreed to remove the first 18 clauses of the Bill. That puts the House in a difficult position in allowing the Bill to go to the other place in its gutted, skeletal form. The suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, not to give the Bill a Third Reading gives us some time before next week, when we will be asked that question, to consider whether he is right.

I suggest that we proceed to Report now and have the debates for which noble Lords have been preparing. But we should take some time, within the usual channels and among ourselves, to decide whether the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is right and whether the Bill should have a Third Reading.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to this. I agree with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. The Government have moved on this Bill; they have listened. They have given more than I have ever seen a Government give. It is possibly true that they had to. It is the worst Bill I have ever seen, but the Minister was described by one of my colleagues as the rock around which a raging department breaks. My noble friend Lord Shipley came up with that one, not me, so he gets the credit. I hope when the Minister replies that she gives some indication or guarantees of what we are going to get if we carry on with the planning. Things have moved on.

There is a nasty little internal fight going on behind the Minister. As much fun as it would be to wade in, it ain’t my fight. I hope the Minister can tell us what is going on. I have never seen another Bill that has got itself into this big a mess. I am not the longest-serving person here, but I am the longest-serving on my Benches. If nothing happens and the Bill is unacceptable at Third Reading, we can do something then, but let us hear what the Government have to say now. There has been a great deal of work done and a great many meetings. A lot of work is going on here. Grand gestures are great, but let us not get in the way of the work of the House.

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[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, would the Minister also consider coming to this House to make a Statement when the proposals are published in the other place, so that we have the opportunity at that point to feed into the proposals that she is making as they go to the other place?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am more than happy to take that suggestion back to the department and consider it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

When I looked through the list of committee members, I could not see anyone representing local authorities. The Minister might well discuss this with them, but it would be helpful if she could send us all the terms of what they are expected to cover. If it is just about multi-academy trusts and the controls that the Government have held to regulate them, I would go along with her. If it goes further than that, I have reservations. The involvement of local communities and local views has inspired English education since the great Act of 1870. Quite frankly, however, there is none of that in this Bill; nowhere are the views of local people to be found. A school is not just an education institution; it is part of a local and social community. This has always been the tradition, and these views must somehow be reflected in any proposal that the Minister brings to us.

I am very grateful for the support of various Peers, particularly the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, on the question of the Government’s power. This Bill increases the powers of both the Secretary of State and the department in a way that has never been known since 1870. I do not believe that the Minister had any hand in drafting the Bill. When I was Secretary of State, I always found that there was an element in the department which wanted these controls from the word go. Although these people have never run a school, some of them always want to run all the schools—thank heavens we managed to stop that. I do not think this will come back in any of the amendments we get after the new Government take over.

This is really strange procedure but it is utterly unsatisfactory to be offered only one day for debate. The clauses will be important and a way must be found—and a guarantee given by the Government before we pass Third Reading—for us to have plenty more time to discuss it in this House, should we pass Third Reading. This Bill started in this House and can be improved again in this House.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly, focusing on this group of amendments and to help the House move on from discussing procedure and process. There are some really strong amendments in this group. It is right that the Minister has listened to us and agreed to take out the clauses that she has—extraordinary as that feels. It gives us the procedural problem that we have been debating. I welcome the contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, on that subject.

I support Amendment 2 in respect of “parents councils”; it is important that the voices of parents are heard in our academies. I especially support Amendment 5 from my noble friends on the Front Bench. Thinking forward to how this Bill will proceed, when we have a substantive new Secretary of State, it will be really helpful for that person to look at this amendment and make some kind of policy statement to both Houses on how they see an all-academy school system working, so that we have clarity around several issues: how we attract and retain sufficient high-quality teachers in the system; the view on qualified teachers working in academies; the view on them abiding by national pay and conditions; and how we hold accountable academies and the regional directors in the system who will be carrying out the Secretary of State’s bidding. What is the role of local governing bodies alongside parents councils? That question is the substance of the next group of amendments, so I will not speak to that. What is the place of a national curriculum when academies do not need to abide by it, and what elements of the curriculum do we want to make compulsory in such a school system?

Finally, of course, there is clarifying which academy freedoms are left once all those other things have been made clear. That is the kind of thing that Amendment 5 is trying to set out; it is trying to put some kind of guide rail around the standards that will come forward in the fullness of time. On that basis, I very strongly support the amendments.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

I shall speak to Amendments 130 and 139 in my name. I can be pretty brief, given the comprehensive outline that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has given, and indeed the words from my noble friend Lady Brinton.

Amendment 130 addresses the difficulty and expense of home-educated children sitting public examinations. They need to find a school or examination centre that will accept them, since not all will if they do not know the children and do not wish to see their results reduced by young people who may not have been taught for their exams and whose results may bring down their overall ratings. That is quite a hurdle for many home-educating parents.

Having found somewhere for their children to sit the exams, home schoolers then have to pay for them. That can easily run to hundreds of pounds. Home schoolers are not necessarily wealthy people and may find the cost of exam fees prohibitive. However, home-educated children are entitled to get credit for their knowledge and skills, just like school-educated children. This amendment probes the possibility of financial assistance for children who could otherwise not afford to be awarded GCSEs or A-levels. Could there, for example, be a system for those on universal credit or of limited means to be helped with exam fees?

Amendment 139 suggests that the opinion of the authorities should be supplemented by a suitably qualified independent assessor to ensure that home educators are given a fair hearing if their child is subject to a school attendance order and the parent or guardian feels that it is inappropriate. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has already touched on the reasons for that. It is an extra check and balance for those who do not want their child to attend school and feel that the order is not in the best interests of the child, and fear too an overbearing authority. This is surely a measure that the Minister could acknowledge and accept.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, this is an important group of amendments, very well introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas; like the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, I do not propose to spend much time going over the points that he has made. I read the somewhat testy exchanges—when everyone was a bit tired, I think—at the end of the day on Monday, so it is nice to be having a debate about how we can better support parents rather than causing them any anxiety, if that is the concern.

In that context, having some means of appeal is really important. That might be through the ombudsman that the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is proposing in Amendment 171X or by some other means. I have been sat here wondering whether the Office of the Schools Adjudicator might be another possibility of a pre-existing office that could perform the function of refereeing and providing some kind of safeguard against the possibility that some rogue local authorities might overuse some of the powers being talked about; that is a worry, given the variety among local authorities that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talked about.

Amendment 130 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, about exams, which I put my name to, is important. It is really important that parents have a positive reason to register and are not just doing it because the law tells them to and that if they do not then they will be subject to penalty. This would be one of those positive reasons that we could offer. I am not sure whether the local authority having to find the funds itself is the answer because, as we know, local authorities struggle to find the funds to do much these days. If the Minister were to agree with this, perhaps she could reflect on the national funding formula or some other means whereby the money could find its way to elective home educators so that their children can have a link with a school and an examination centre. That all seems very positive in the wider scheme of things.

I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about the scale of change regarding the penalties being proposed for parents who fail to abide by this. There is a further amendment on school attendance orders and there having to be some kind of judgment about what is suitable education from someone who at least knows something about education; that is also an important safeguard that we could put in to protect parents.

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 171X on the proposal for an ombudsman to provide protection for home educators. I support many other amendments in the group. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Lucas for putting this focus on the need to provide protection from overzealous local authorities.

I also need to apologise for not speaking at Second Reading due to a variety of home and personal health matters. I also need to declare an interest, in that I am part of a family that home educates. I cannot disclose all the details, which are private, but I have two sons whom primarily my wife home educates. She is incredibly well qualified for that work. They are teenagers and their education is going incredibly well. I fear I might be the only Peer in that situation, but if there are any others we might be able to form a little club.

I want primarily to speak from this perspective, as somebody from a home education family, on the Bill and the relevant clauses. First, as many others have done, I honour the many parents and caregivers, including my wife, who work tirelessly to raise their children, often at no cost to the state, for their outstanding outcomes and work in a variety of different contexts and for a variety of different reasons. If noble Lords want to find out more about how amazing home education can be, an exhibition has just been announced in Parliament in the Upper Waiting Hall, commencing the week of 4 July, which I highly recommend noble Lords pop in and see.

I need to start by saying that I cannot support the Bill. I believe much of it was designed after consultation merely to make the lives of officials in the department and at large in local authorities easier. Not enough is in it to help parents and families, or indeed society. It feels like it was a bit of a one-sided consultation.

We shall see how colleagues in the other place view the Bill. Arguably, the way it is currently drafted in many parts is an affront to freedom and makes a mockery of our claims to be about rolling back the state and enabling ordinary citizens to take back control. If it transpires, as has been reported in the press, that the Bill was launched without proper political vetting and that it will be radically altered by the other place when the politicians have time to look at it, then we all have to ask why our time is being wasted with what appears to be an incredibly lazy piece of legislation, designed to make officials’ lives easier, not those of citizens.

Frankly, I would rather that this part of the Bill, on registration of children who are not at school, which includes many in home education, did not exist, especially in its current form. It has not been thought through; more consultation is needed. Registration is a hammer to crack a nut, the nut being bad actors—I commend the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on raising this very real issue; it is not one that we want to sweep under the carpet—such as those in informal schools who, frankly, would raise children to oppose the existence of this country, or commit future generations to violence against citizens of this country, or inflict neglect and abuse. Many of these situations have been talked about.

Largely, I feel that this has been designed to fix an IT problem. As much was confirmed to me by a government representative, who I will not mention, who I discussed this with. I said that the Government could get this data anyway: we have birth certificates, local authorities ask who is in households and we have pupil registration in formal schools. We could triangulate that data—I come from an IT background; that is the kind of thing we can do with IT—to find out who was not in school. But of course, that is too difficult for the Government to do right now; IT is a very difficult area. So, to make us do all the work for local authorities and government, a registration programme is to be brought in when we could have fixed it with good IT and good use of the powers that already exist to safeguard children who are suspected of being abused or neglected. This is on top of a risk that the data, once collected, could be used intentionally or unintentionally to harm, or get hacked, which has happened.

I will not say much more on this point because I want to get to my amendment, but I suggest that registration could be voluntary to begin with but highly incentivised, perhaps using the Oak National Academy, the online school set up by the Government, as a resource and a referrer, which could provide amazing data if parents consented to it being provided and analysed.

What incentives might there be for signing up voluntarily to such a scheme? We talked about the cost of exams and paying for them. It costs £150 to £200 per GCSE; I am feeling the pain of that right now. Many families have to fork out a huge amount of money for those exams.

Another incentive might be the provision of forecast grades in the event of situations such as Covid. This was brought home for many home-educating families, whose children basically had to resit because no resource was available; children in school could get forecast grades from their teachers. The Oak National Academy might be a place that could provide such forecasts, based on its data.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 168, on which noble Lords have spoken very well. It is very important, particularly for people who come to live in this country, to understand our values and to feel happy living here.

I also support Amendment 171F, which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, explained clearly and eloquently. As a parent, I find that it is so important to be involved in your children’s education, and children also want their parents to be involved. If there is a loophole—which is so easily amended by this amendment—it is important for it to be included, and it should not be difficult to do so. If it is not corrected, we run the risk of being on a slippery slope. There are consequences if parents are not involved in what is taught to their children—this is what happened under Nazi rule and in communist China and communist Russia, and is possibly happening even now with what President Putin is doing with children in Russia. It is important for parents to be involved and, if there is a loophole, I hope that this Government will amend it.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in favour of all the amendments in this group, and in particular Amendment 168. However, before I get to that, I will speak in respect of Amendment 91, on careers education, and the amendments from my noble friends around work experience.

It is really important, in its own right, that we nurture in young people an interest in their future in work and the future careers they might have. I am particularly passionate that they should think about more than one career; it is about not just what you want to be when you grow up but the variety of things in a long working life that young people might want to do when they are older. I also believe in its importance for more than just that purpose, as part of a broader and more balanced curriculum than we have at the moment in our schools, at every one of the key stages, where things are particularly narrow. I would hope that, in the context of Amendment 158, which talks about digital skills, this might include media literacy—something we were talking about earlier at Oral Questions.

I would also say in passing that if any noble Lords are interested in how the career aspirations of children change as they grow up, they should talk to the people at KidZania. It is a rather unusual experience in this country, at Westfield shopping centre, where you drop your children off and they are immersed in a two-thirds size world where they can choose from different work options for them to enjoy as work experience while you go shopping. KidZania exists in various cities around the world, and it collects data about the different backgrounds and genders—all the aspects of diversity—of children and what their choices are, and it is fascinating to see how those change as they get older and become more gendered. The different aspirations according to background are indeed fascinating.

On work experience, I know that, as ever with anything where you are looking at a broader and more balanced curriculum, people in schools have to make some difficult choices about resources and what aspect of the curriculum they are going to let go to make space for something different and new. I think we need to be honest about that. My sense is that we have an overemphasis on academic and cognitive skills and not enough on some other skills. That is a point I make regularly, and it is where I would want schools to focus. I would also want them to use the good work of organisations such as the Careers & Enterprise Company, which has been mentioned; Founders4Schools, which has a great platform to help connect schools with local employers and people who run local businesses to ask them for work experience opportunities or to come in and speak in schools; Speakers for Schools; and the few remaining education business partnerships. In a world where every school is an academy, one thing I would really like to see is for all those academies to be in local partnerships with local employers so that they can help drive this important work at a localised level. I think the partnership in Hounslow still exists, but such partnerships are very few and far between, and I wish that they could be revived.

On Amendment 171F, transparency for parents is really important. They should not be treated as a third party in a school, as my noble friend talked about some being treated. They are an integral part of the community, and for community cohesion purposes among other things, it is important that such transparency exists.

That leaves Amendment 168 in the name of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, which is excellent. I am somewhat partial, in that I tried to introduce through a Private Member’s Bill “sustainable citizenship” as a way of amending the citizenship subject in order to introduce sustainability. I will not rehearse all the compelling arguments that I made during the passage of that Bill, but interested Members of your Lordships’ House can look it up in Hansard. But the rest of the amendment, in respect of codification of British values, is really valuable and important. Indeed, if we could introduce this really quickly, perhaps members of the Cabinet could take some instruction in citizenship and learn about equal respect for every person, an independent judiciary, government that is accountable to Parliament and freedom of assembly—all things that appear to be threatened at the moment.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I have not contributed so far to this debate, either at Second Reading or in any of the subsequent stages. I am no expert in the field of education, but I wanted to contribute today, just once, in support of Amendment 168 in the name of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for reasons I shall come to in a minute. As he pointed out, the amendment has had pretty strong cross-party support.

But before doing so, I want to take just a moment to reflect on earlier days in Committee, which I sat through, covering the opening clauses of the Bill. As I have just made clear, while I am not an expert and know very little about education policy, wearing my hat as chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, listening to those earlier debates—particularly the contribution from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who is in his place—left me quite disturbed. Of course, we come to the point made by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, that part of democracy includes,

“in a Parliamentary system, a Government that is accountable to Parliament”.

Many noble Lords will be aware of the recent reports by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and its sister committee, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, drawing attention to the Government’s increasing use of what we have come to call framework Bills. These are Bills in which only the broadest direction of policy travel is revealed in the primary legislation and is, therefore, subject to a proper level of scrutiny, or the detail—and it is the detail that really matters—is left to secondary legislation. The hard-hitting report by the DPRRC about this Bill in particular set out the case in detail.

We on the SLSC have a wonderful staff, but we are concerned that we are going to be asked to report to the House on regulations which are of sufficient importance to justify a much higher level of scrutiny and consultation. The SLSC’s report, Government by Diktat, has been commented on—less so our more recent report published about six weeks ago, What Next? The Growing Imbalance between Parliament and the Executive. To be honest, it is simply not good enough for the Government to say that all these regulations are approved by both Houses. While that may be true technically, it is none the less a sophistry; as the House knows, statutory instruments are not amendable—they are either passed or rejected. Therefore, it is not surprising that when faced with this nuclear option the House has, understandably, been reluctant to press the button marked “reject”.

I have some sympathy with the Government’s view that public policy is evolving too fast for the rather stately pace of primary legislation to keep up. But if this argument is to be accepted, then the Government, in turn, must accept there is a need to examine and redesign our secondary legislation scrutiny procedures to cover these framework clauses—not necessarily very many of them—that come in the Bills before your Lordships’ House. Yes, it will make the Government’s job more difficult—that is why they do not like it—but better consultation and wider debate will lead to better law; most importantly and most significantly, it preserves and strengthens the principle of informed consent which is a critical part of any properly functioning democratic system. So, I urge my noble friend the Minister to encourage some fresh thinking by the Government, who have had, after all, “taking back control” as a primary policy objective.

I turn now to the amendment from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. I had the pleasure—it was a privilege—to chair the House of Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement on which he, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley—from whom we have just heard a very interesting and informed expert speech—all served. One key issue on which the committee focused was what held us all together—the glue that binds us. It must be true that if we are to adhere to that glue, to accept that glue, we need to establish some values that form an essential part of it. This is the essence of the argument of the noble and right reverend Lord.

I have to argue that there is an urgent need to debate, to agree, to teach and to then stand up for those values. Why is this important? I think there are three reasons. First, the impact on our society and on our social cohesion of social media. Social media is a shouty place, it is not a reflective one. It emphasises rights and can often forget responsibilities, and responsibilities inevitably run—and must run—parallel to our rights. If our society is to be successful, every one of us has to be prepared to put back in as well as just take out. Indeed, if I have a concern about the amendment from the noble and right reverend Lord, it is that the words “rights” and “responsibilities” do not appear in it.

The second reason for the glue weakening is the rapid changing of our society and the way it is made up. I touch here on the point made by my noble friend Lady Meyer. ONS statistics tell us that 28% of the children born in this country last year were born to mothers who themselves were not born in this country. That is not an anti-immigrant remark; it merely points out that if you were not born in the country, you will inevitably have a slightly more tangential knowledge of the values that are essential to the country in which you have arrived and are now living, as my noble friend pointed out.

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[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Just to note, a lot of the charitable organisations and so on are making money. I am not suggesting that because they are making money, they are evil, but I do not think that it quite works in this instance because the phrase “commercial sensitivity” is used by organisations which are not big businesses going in; they are small and socially worthy, but they are also commercial. Let me tell you, a lot of them are making quite a lot of money, even if they are doing it with the best intentions. That is not really the point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

While we are at it, I declare my interest that I work with a company called EVERFI, which does some of this work, but it liaises with money-making commercial organisations to provide resources at no charge for teachers. Some of those, for example, relate to careers, which is part of this group of amendments. There are excellent science employers or computer gaming companies, for example, which are trying to help create the learning that will mean that people from all sorts of backgrounds are more inclined, readier and more confident to think that they could work in those industries. I would not want anything that the noble Baroness is saying to curtail that sort of important learning resource.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I take the noble Baroness’s point that NGOs and social enterprises may indeed have commercial interests. I still think that there is a difference between them using that to fund their work and a company that exists purely for making profit, but I take the point about commercial confidentiality. I will circle back to the question on computer gaming companies when I comment on some of the other amendments.

I entirely support Amendment 91 and the related Amendment 171I on careers programmes and work experience. We have already had an interesting debate, but a bit more needs to be drawn out. Some of the discussion was about raising aspiration and social mobility; the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said that in introducing his amendment. We need to acknowledge that there is a huge amount of aspiration in our societies that people cannot fulfil because they lack opportunities. We need to acknowledge all those strangled aspirations.

I pick up the point from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that we need to think about this not just as a way of helping people to think about different careers—although I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, that addressing gender stereotypes is really important—but as people going out into and spending some time in operations in society as a way to see how they might contribute in all sorts of ways, not just through whatever paid employment they might eventually take up. It is important that we see that.

On this whole language of aspiration and social mobility, I contend that we have to ensure we value everyone contributing to our society in all sorts of ways. I will pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, about Eton. Would we not have got somewhere when pupils at Eton aspired to be a school dinner person or a bus driver? Maybe there are pupils at Eton who do, but I doubt it somehow and I doubt they are encouraged to. Yet those are both vital jobs in our society that people can make a large contribution through.

I entirely support Amendment 168. Its importance has been powerfully covered by lots of people, in particular the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. However, I question one word in it. It refers to British values as “values of British citizenship”. The values in the amendment—

“democracy … the rule of law … freedom … equal respect … freedom of thought, conscience and religion”—

are ones that the international community has collectively agreed should be the values of human rights and the rule of law and should be observed all around the world. I do not think this necessarily has to be referred to as “British” citizenship; they are the values of citizenship that we encourage in our own society and all around the world. Indeed, British jurists, British campaigners and British Governments have played a very powerful role in spreading those values around the world, such as through the European Court of Human Rights. They are not uniquely British values but values we want to encourage everywhere.

On that point, I have to challenge a comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, who suggested that those who were born overseas and have chosen to become British citizens may have less awareness of these values than those who were born here. Of course, people who have chosen to move here—I declare my own interest as someone who chose to become a British citizen—have consciously chosen to sign up to those values. It is very important that we do not suggest that this is an issue for some people and not everyone in our society.

I had a lot more but I am aware of the time and we have not yet heard from the noble Baronesses on the Front Bench about mandatory curriculum subjects. I will just come back to the point about computer gaming. Some of the items that the noble Baronesses suggest as crucial are “financial literacy” and “life skills”. I looked to a report from the Centre for Social Justice, On the Money: A Roadmap for Lifelong Financial Learning, which points out that there is a huge problem with a lack of financial knowledge among young children being exposed in digital online marketplaces, particularly with gaming loot boxes. We need to be very careful about the involvement of companies such as that because there are very large financial interests there.

Finally—I am aware of the time and wanted to say a lot more—the one thing that I do not agree with, which I have to put on the record, is that all academies must follow the national curriculum. The Green Party does not believe that there should be a national curriculum. We think that there should be a set of learning entitlements whereby learners and teachers together develop a curriculum content to suit their needs and interests.

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That is absolutely appalling, and it is why the Bill needs to make sure it is absolutely clear why children are out of school, so that we can start to analyse the data and then to understand how the country and our education system can support these most disadvantaged and vulnerable children.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, this is an important set of amendments about Part 3 of the Bill, and it is our first opportunity to really debate it. It is not a part that I had time to really reflect on in my Second Reading speech. I would like to be able to set out a little bit of thinking about the right approach to home education and school attendance in that context.

I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for having done the grunt work of going through all this and putting down a swathe of amendments—I do not necessarily agree with them all, but I have put my name to some of them, and to those from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has also put in some useful amendments. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and I think she made some really useful points.

First, I fundamentally support the right of parents to home educate; it is an important freedom and right. We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, some of the circumstances where the parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities find that mainstream schooling does not work for their child and that special schooling and alternative provision might not be right—or might not be right for now. It is important that they have an alternative: to take responsibility themselves, as long as they are “providing a suitable education”—which I think is the phrase used in law. I also know of examples where parents have an alternative view on the values and vision set out in the national curriculum or in mainstream schooling. There are examples of really innovative, interesting practice from aggregated home schoolers who are coming together at different times of the week. Indeed, I have friends who elected to home school their daughter so that they could take off—literally—and travel and circumnavigate the globe with their child who was, I think, nine years old at the time. He is a primary school teacher and took responsibility for educating her while she went around the globe. I would hate for us to pass any kind of legislation which would criminalise someone for providing such a rich educational experience for their child. I must say that it would not be my choice to home educate; the experience of Covid meant that many parents had suddenly to educate an eight year-old or nine year-old—depending on at what point in the pandemic they were. I had to home educate only one child, and that was enough—thank you. So it would not be my choice, but I respect the rights of others who want to do it.

It also true that this right can be abused to hide children from the authorities that we ask to keep children safe. Here, I pay tribute to the work of my noble friend Lord Soley, whom I am glad to see in his place, and others in this House and the other House who have been working to bring in a requirement for parents to register their children with the local authority if they are not in school. I absolutely agree with that, alongside the right to home educate. I am pleased that the Government, in this part of the Bill, are bringing that in. Indeed, it is logical that, if we are mandating parents, there are consequences for those who flout that mandation. This is why penalties are being introduced, and fines are probably right. I am concerned by feedback I have received from correspondents that the Government have not consulted with home schoolers on the monetary penalties. I know that there have been various consultations around changes to home education, registration of home education and so on, but this move to criminalise parents through the use of the single justice procedure—given the specific way in which that works—is causing some significant concern which I ask the Minister to look at.

Of course, most local authorities already operate a register, so this ought to be an incremental measure that could be introduced without too much controversy. Sadly, however, that is not the case; huge concern has arisen, and these amendments allow us to debate some of them. Indeed—surprise, surprise—it feels a little bit like the Government have rushed to take overweening powers in this Bill—as with other parts of the Bill—rather than think it through and win the argument on the detail of how they want to implement it. There is a concern that much of this has been written with a mindset that all parents who choose not to send their children to school are colluding in some kind of truancy—and that is informing quite a lot of the concern we need to explore.

I understand some of the concern. When I read new Section 436C(1)(c)—

“details of the means by which the child is being educated”—

I thought that was maybe okay. I could see some over-intrusion in it. I know of examples of people providing services to home schoolers, among others, who have had Ofsted inspectors using powers of entry and filming themselves entering premises in a way that even the police are not allowed to do. There are examples of people using their powers in ways that are over the top. However, when I read new Section 436C(1)(d)—“any other information” as required—the alarm bells then ring about taking on excessive powers, and I understand why parents worry. I remember, for example, the case in 2009 of the local authority in Poole, not far from the South Dorset constituency I used to represent, using powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to implement surveillance on some parents who were living in an area in order to be within the school catchment area of the Lilliput school, which is very popular in Poole. In the end, that was thrown out as an unreasonable use of RIPA powers by that local authority. I also read the Square Peg briefing that was helpfully supplied, and of the anger that some parents feel towards local authorities about the way they are already being dealt with—before these powers are even brought in.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is right to want to define what data is collected in the register, and some of that comes up in the next group. I am slightly concerned by his comments about tracking and how that feels. I do not self-identify as an overly libertarian sort of politician, but it raised some concerns about tracking individual children. If he is talking about aggregation and anonymisation in the context of tracking so that we understand the general trends, I feel somewhat calmer about some of the privacy concerns around children’s data that might flow from where he was going. I was very happy to add my name to Amendment 97A on the main address; it is important to establish the principal address, rather than penalising people when they are on holiday—as the noble Lord said.

In the next group, we have Amendment 97D, where my noble friend Lady Whitaker and I question why we would not add gender and ethnicity to the data collection. It is important, as in Amendment 101B, that we should establish the reason for not being registered in school, and specifically to identify home education, and people electing to home educate, so that it is properly acknowledged and that a proportionate response from the local authority, and a proportionate relationship between it and the parent, follow. It is also right that these regulations—particularly if they remain as wide-ranging as “any other information” as required—should be brought in by the affirmative procedure. My noble friend Lord Hunt was not able to stay to speak to his Amendments 131 and 132, but I have signed my name to Amendment 131 and support Amendment 132, which would give Parliament more oversight over the regulations.

This data collection should then be the basis of some kind of annual check by the local authority; it should be able to see the child to fulfil its child safety duties, but in a reasonable and proportionate way that respects the right of parents to home educate their children. I had a very interesting conversation with Professor Eileen Munro of the London School of Economics, who is opposed to any of these measures. She made a really important point that, if we had properly funded child social care workers who could go around and do the human business of working with the children in their area, things would be a lot easier, and it would take a lot of the heat out of this debate. At the moment, the worry is that this is all going to be done by algorithms, registration and data collection—an inhuman approach. I also put it to your Lordships that this whole regime will become easier as and when local authorities are no longer providers of schools. That is because if they are no longer running schools and we get to a position where all schools are academies—as is the policy direction of travel—they no longer have a vested interest in the funding that goes with getting pupils into school; they can become a more independent advocate for children and families. I think that being their voice first and foremost—unfettered by any of those other interests—could make a difference to this regime.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will just follow up on that. It would be helpful if we could get some clarity on what else is coming through, if not that process. It is not the Minister’s fault, but she was given a car crash to drive, and we have now got to where we are. Can we please have a little more consultation about the new form of this Bill?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Is the Minister intending to conduct some kind of regulatory review and consultation prior to Report?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sure all your Lordships understand that the timing and content of what we discuss at Report is a matter that will be agreed with the Chief Whip and through the usual channels. I really cannot say any more on that today.

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[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My understanding is that the powers in the Bill including ones for single-academy trusts to be subject to all the directions and all the compliance that we discussed on Monday. I believe there is a recent government amendment to make this possible. Therefore, my reading of it would be that the powers are there. If a Secretary of State decides that all single-academy trusts are going to go and they are all going to join multi-academy trusts, the powers are there for them to find reasons to do so and use the powers in the Bill to close down the single-academy trusts, which are then left having to find a home.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I take the noble Lord’s point. I absolutely reassure him that that is not the intention. I will also go away and double check that there is not the ability to do that under those powers. Given the discussions we have had on those parts of the Bill and our commitment to reflect on them, our discussion on this issue and the reassurance that is being sought will also form part of the discussions.

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Amendment 75 concerns existing stand-alone academies joining multi-academy trusts. The process by which an academy joins another trust is not set out in legislation; it is a matter for agreement between the two trusts and with the approval of the regional director.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I hope that this is an appropriate moment to ask this question. In listening to, and thinking about, this debate, my mind has gone to free schools and their duties to consult. We have not really talked much about free schools in the context of this Bill. The department’s guidance for starting free schools says on a statutory duty to consult that Section 10 of the Academies Act

“requires the trust to consult with the people they think appropriate”.

Is the department’s thinking about free schools shifting around consultation in particular so that they do not just land among a group of schools in a community, throwing out all the pupil place planning and creating difficulties for existing providers in terms of the viability of the academies and other schools in that area?

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[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Deben, partly because he may be supportive, given his expertise in climate change, of my amendment, which I will speak to. I agree with the thrust of what he said. I am a former Rural Affairs Minister and a former Schools Minister; one of the very few things I managed to do for school funding, apart from announce a lot of it, was to introduce a small element in the formula on pockets of rural deprivation. I would hate to see that recognition lost in a national funding formula, so I support this.

I will mostly speak to my Amendment 97ZA, which is about a pupil fund for sustainability. This is probably the first of a whole set of hobby-horse amendments which we will hear more of through the rest of this evening. I will probably duck out at the end of this group and not hear some of it; in particular, I regret that I will not be around for the debate on Amendment 168 from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, who I am delighted to see in his place. I introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the last Session, the Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill, which very much attempted to do what the noble and right reverend Lord seeks to do with his amendment.

Instead of using the curriculum to persuade the Government that we need to do more on a more mandated basis on the study of climate change and sustainability in our schools, my amendment uses funding—one of the other great levers Ministers have at their disposal to try to encourage behaviour. In the measures I proposed on curriculum, I was inspired by my friend Lorenzo Fioramonti, the former Education Minister in Italy. Given the Mediterranean climate, I have stayed with the warmer climes for my inspiration on this and gone to Portugal, where Minister Rodrigues introduced a very simple mechanism of pupil empowerment. He agreed that every pupil in Portugal would be entitled to €1 for their school, on condition that the pupils would decide how it would be spent. It was a simple mechanism, initially spent simplistically by pupils, but they have gradually matured as they have got used to this very modest sum of money that, as a pupil body, they have been required to decide how to spend on a school-by-school basis. As a result, they have become much more engaged in the running of the school and the empowerment has worked extremely well in that country.

My amendment proposes an extremely modest £1 per pupil in the pupil formula for pupils to be able to spend, on the condition that they spend it on sustainability measures in their school and community. It is a start in trying to empower pupils around this issue.

In thinking about that, I commend to your Lordships the Times Education Commission report which was published today. What I have managed to read so far is an extremely good read. There are some gems in it, such as the commission’s finding that the system is “failing on every measure”, or that the schools White Paper is a

“tidying up exercise that shows a staggering lack of ambition”.

But, more pertinent to my amendment, I was interested to read that:

“Young people are more socially aware, independent and intellectually engaged than perhaps any previous generation. Yet, pupils who are used to organising climate change campaigns, curating their own Spotify playlists, creating their own eBay businesses and researching their own interests on YouTube are treated in school as passive recipients of knowledge rather than active learners.”


That goes right to the heart of what I am trying to encourage with this amendment. There were Members of your Lordships’ House on the commission: the noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria, Lord Johnson of Marylebone and Lord Rees, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and Robert Halfon, the chair of the Education Select Committee in the other place. It is a commendable piece of work.

The commission talks also about employability, and that is part of what I am trying to achieve by encouraging young people in schools to work collaboratively to problem solve and to spend this money in projects round and about the school. That in itself is going to contribute to exactly the kind of employability skills that employers are asking for. Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former chairman of John Lewis and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, who is now the Head of Training and Apprenticeships at QA, is quoted in the Times report. He said:

“We’ve ended up in a situation where the world of education and the world of work are almost more separate than they’ve ever been. It’s crazy and very unfortunate for a lot of people.”


He suggested that

“the failure to address the skills gap could cost the UK £140 billion in lost GDP by 2028”.

He also said:

“Standards in education have always been measured by exams, assessment and grades, so it’s not surprising that this has been the focus. However, this is increasingly at the expense of what employers really value: resilience, communication and problem solving.”


That is what I want to achieve with this fund.

The other thing I wish to address, apart from the employability of young people, is the levels of anxiety, including climate anxiety, they are suffering, and there are other amendments around mental health that will be discussed today. The evidence is pretty clear that one of the ways you can help any of us deal with some of our anxieties is to empower us and trust us. That is what this fund would seek to do. We also know, categorically—and here it is tempting to say yet again how wonderful my time in Orkney is, to the delight of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, but I will resist the temptation—that contact with the natural environment and spending time with nature is fantastic for well-being. I confess I measure my blood pressure every day, and my blood pressure certainly goes down when I am in Orkney; I am happy to say it has remained lowered since my last trip there.

With this amendment, I am not choosing on this occasion to ask the Government to impose this on the curriculum. I am supportive of their sustainability and climate change strategy, in so far as it goes, but I do think there is more to be done to activate our young people and to give them a sense of responsibility and power. If the Treasury is listening, it needs about £9 million—not a lot. If the Government choose to do more, we would be very happy about that. It is flexible, it can work for any and every school, and I hope your Lordships like the sound of it.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. The point is that, if we look at school funding going back to 2010, my goodness me, what a squeeze there has been between then and 2022.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My noble friend may know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is regarded as pretty authoritative on these things, has said that school spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20—the largest cut in over 40 years.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

There we have it. Is it not good to have noble friends to fully apprise me of the facts?

I sympathise with what the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said on transport costs for 16 to 18 year-olds. This is not an issue just in rural areas; at sixth-form schools in metropolitan areas, there is a huge movement of students. I know that, in Birmingham, there is an enormous movement of students, which can be costly.

I noted the noble Baroness’s comments about the EMA. I would gently say that it was a coalition Government decision to get rid of the EMA. I think that the EMA was one of the most brilliant initiatives—we still have it under a Labour Government in Wales—to encourage attendance at school. It is a great pity that it was removed.

I sympathise also with what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said on the impact of Covid.

On Amendments 92 and 93 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, I agree with him about the centralisation of powers. There is an issue around how bureaucracy responds to it but it is also about the span of political control. I do not want to go back over the first 18 clauses of the Bill but it is about putting the two together. There is a desire for the Secretary of State to control everything, including funding. The implication is that, in the end, Ministers are going to have to account for individual school performance here. I do not think that they have really taken that into account. The line of accountability, including for dosh, is clear now; Ministers have taken responsibility. In the end, they will find it very difficult to say, “I’m not going to get involved in that; it’s nothing to do with us”, because I am afraid that it will be to do with them. That is why it really is not good to have such central powers in an education system.

What an uplifting contribution from my noble friend Lord Knight. I have skimmed the Times commission’s report. It has some wonderful ideas. What struck me is how uplifting it is. It gave me a positive feeling about what education could do, which drags us away from the rather dreary, exam-focused situation that we now find ourselves in. I almost thought that year 6 pupils might be able to enjoy their last year, instead of having incessant pressure from those wretched SATs at the end of the year. My noble friend is also right about pupil councils. In many cases, before we moved to the new system, the Lords outreach programme allowed us to engage with student councils. I found it a fantastic experience. Having some money tied in with sustainability is a wonderful idea indeed.

Finally, the Minister was a bit dismissive of my noble friend Lady Chapman’s Amendment 79C, which would introduce a requirement to report on academy funding and performance. I think that that is a very good idea. I would tie that into the remarks from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, about transparency. I know the Minister says that this is all transparent but the process by which the funding formula is put together—it is the weightings that are so crucial—warrants greater transparency.

Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.