Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the pro-chancellor of Lancaster University. From this side of the House, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, on her maiden speech. We look forward to hearing many more speeches from her.

As many Members have said, higher education is one of the jewels in the British crown. It is a tremendous success story. Of the world’s top 200 universities, I think that something like 30 are British. There are not many other areas of life today where we can make such a proud boast. I know from Lancaster how big a contribution a university makes to the local community. When Lancaster University was founded 50 years ago, there were 10,000 manufacturing jobs in the city. There are hardly any now but there is a thriving university. That pattern has been repeated in many of our northern cities and is key to their future success.

The university sector as a whole makes a huge economic contribution to our balance of payments and to the UK’s soft power—as long as, that is, all this is not ruined by current developments. Questions arise with the Bill, given that we face great challenges with the impact of Brexit on university funding. Brexit has had an impact on my own university, where two professors from the continent who were offered jobs have turned them down because they think that Britain is no longer a country where they want to live. The prospect of immigration controls being tightened as a result of Brexit could have a devastating effect on our universities.

How will the Bill help in this situation? I think there is a case for the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, referred to the changing nature of the higher education system and the shift from a funding council to a regulatory body. I believe that is necessary. I also support the increased emphasis on, and the objective of, raising teaching quality. I am not sure that the methods which have been chosen are the right ones, but it is a good objective. This afternoon, a lot of noble Lords who know far more about universities than I do have expressed very serious reservations about the Bill. I hope that, in Committee and on Report, we will have the opportunity to build a cross-party consensus behind the Bill, because the last thing we want at this stage is to have political mucking about with our universities. That makes the situation worse.

I wish to make three points in the time left. First, it is essential that the Bill does more to safeguard autonomy. I would like to see the Office for Students have much greater autonomy with regard to the Secretary of State, rather like the new BBC board which the Government have agreed should be appointed not only by Ministers. I would like to see the body have clearer duties in regard to respecting the autonomy of higher education. Much more could be done to reassure universities that it will not be a centralising, controlling body.

Secondly, we must be much clearer about protecting the balanced funding principle for research. Quality-related funding is a way of letting a thousand flowers bloom in the sector, and again avoids the top-down centralisation of which the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, warned. We must be sure that this will be properly guaranteed in the new system.

Finally, I am not an ideological opponent of more competition. I think there is a role for new providers in driving innovation, but it has to be done very carefully. There has to be a very high bar for the awarding of probationary degrees, and the best interests of students have to come first in the legislation. We have to recognise that there are problems with this. In most universities there are complex funding flows. If you have a competitive market, one of the things that tends to happen is that the subjects which are more expensive to teach are neglected. Nothing could be more important to this nation’s future than science and engineering. Are we setting up a system that effectively competes away the margins in universities and prevents subjects which are expensive to teach being taught? That is a real issue which the Government will have to address in Committee.

Brexit: Impact on Universities and Scientific Research

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as pro-chancellor of Lancaster University. I am very proud of Lancaster, which is in the top 10 of the league tables. I am proud of its success in having a very high proportion of students from state schools, despite being a very strong, research-intensive institution, and of the contribution it makes to the north of England economically. We all accept we have a real regional problem in Britain. We have to have rebalancing. The universities in the north are one of the really positive things about the economy of the north at present.

The first consequence of Brexit for my institution is that we were expecting to get a grant of £12 million this summer to contribute to a health innovation campus we are building next to the university. The first phase is worth £40 million. We were told that this application would be delayed because of Brexit. We now have to put in the application at the end of the year. There is a possibility of a decision some time next year. The fact is that there is already delay and uncertainty. The Treasury sounds, in the way it is asking questions about these projects, as though it really sees the structural funds as a source of economy in the future, which would hit universities in the north very hard. Will the Minister tell us something about that? What is the Government’s commitment on structural funds and universities?

On student recruitment, we have expanded as a result of rapid internationalisation. Our proportion of EU students has gone up from 7% to 10% in the past five years, and of non-EU undergraduates from 11% to 20% of the total student body. The early indications are that the number of international applications is falling this year as a result of Brexit. This is in part an income question. EU students represent an income of some £10 million a year. What is the Government’s position on continued access for EU students to the student loan scheme? For how long will it continue? More than that, it is about immigration and the Government’s attitude to it, about which the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, spoke.

When the question of overseas students was debated in the last Parliament, there were voices in the Government, not least those of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Vince Cable, which were strong in backing overseas student immigration. Of course, we had Theresa May, now the Prime Minister, on the other side. What now is the Government’s position on this? When the Home Secretary suggested that the “tens of thousands” goal might no longer be applicable, she was slapped down. When someone else suggested that figures for overseas students might be taken out of the total, No. 10 said, “No, that is not going to happen”. So what is the Government’s immigration goal in the light of Brexit? Is it to cut immigration to the tens of thousands? If so, how will universities cope with it? All I see on the part of the Government is a pretence that everything can be the best of all possible worlds and a lot of dithering, when they have to face up to hard decisions about the post-Brexit world. If they are not clear on this, they will ruin one of the greatest success stories in modern Britain.

Internationalisation is not just about economics; it is about our vision of higher education. Do we want to be part of a global community of ideas and scholarship, which I believe is the best way of encouraging scientific advance and cultural understanding? Already at Lancaster, two senior jobs have not been taken up because of Brexit. There is a lot of concern among our international staff about their future status and about visas for their families; there is a fear of xenophobia and about whether they will be welcome in Britain any longer. We have to ask ourselves whether this is the kind of country we want to be; or will the Government say clearly that they want to support British universities in continuing to be at the front rank in the world?

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

That is true. I am unable to give an answer; I can be candid about that. However, I reassure the noble Baroness that this is a very important point and that these matters are being discussed and will continue to be discussed as we move forward in this particularly challenging process.

We are also grateful to the European Commission for the swift reassurances it has provided. Commissioner Moedas said in July this year:

“As long as the UK is a member of the European Union, EU law continues to apply and the UK retains all rights and obligations of a member state”.

This means that we still have the same terms of access to European research funding, such as Horizon 2020, for as long as we are still a member of the EU.

[Lord Liddle]

Following on from my noble friend’s question, I point out that we will not have left the EU by the start of term in September 2018. Does the fact that EU obligations continue to apply mean that EU students will be eligible for British loans to come to our universities in autumn 2018? Will the Minister give us that assurance?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I have laid out exactly what our guarantees can be, but I can only say again that I am unable to comment beyond those guarantees. I hope I have reassured the House that this is a very important matter.

[Lord Liddle]

Would the Minister write to me about this point?

Grammar Schools

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the second Cumberland grammar schoolboy to speak in this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, on her maiden speech. As a fellow strong pro-European, I welcome her to this House. However, the subject of this debate may well be typical of what I fear most about Brexit: that we will go in for backward-looking insularity in our approach to the world. I can think of no other European nation that would today be having a debate about the reintroduction of selection at the age of 11.

I shall make three points: one about the past and two about future policy. I became an opponent of the 11-plus on a summer day in 1958 at my junior school, Morley Street, in Carlisle. We had all got the results, and I remember the chap I shared a desk with, one of those old Victorian desks. I passed and got to the grammar school, but my best friend beside me had not and was going to the secondary modern. For me, that changed a day of what should have been success into one of intense pain, and I have felt that for people who have failed for all my life.

The grammar school did an excellent job for me. I was lucky to have special tuition from excellent masters to get me into Oxford—the same college as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, as it happens.

The school system not only ignored the consequences for the kids who did not get there, but did not look after the less academic children in the grammar schools very well. It caused social division. I well remember being in my grammar school uniform and having to dodge the stones thrown by some of the lads on the council estate who resented the fact that I was going to the grammar school.

Now to the future. We should not reintroduce this. As my noble friend Lord Bragg has said, there are excellent comprehensive schools that achieve great success. I now represent his home town on Cumbria County Council, and the Nelson Thomlinson School is an excellent comprehensive school which sends a significant number of pupils to top universities every year. What I fear about the reintroduction of selection is the disruption it could bring to the ecology of education in our county. Let me give a local example. We have one grammar school in Cumbria, in Penrith, and already quite a lot of pupils go from Carlisle to Penrith—a journey of 17 miles. Of course, none of those pupils will have parents who are low paid, because they could not conceivably afford to pay the costs of the journey.

If existing schools are allowed to convert to grammar schools, we will find, I think, that some of our schools will want to convert, seeing it as a way of expanding their student numbers. What then happens to other schools that fear losing pupils in competition with these new grammar schools? It could be extremely disruptive to the success of our comprehensive system. I can see no proposals for making sure that this will proceed in an orderly way with some kind of guiding hand.

My second point regarding the future is that this whole debate is a distraction, as several of my colleagues have said, from what should be the central issue in education policy: how we extend opportunity to everyone and how we raise standards in our schools. We need better standards. The initiative of my noble friend Lord Blunkett was very important but we need a renewed emphasis on standards, and the debate about structures will simply be a total distraction from a necessary reform agenda.

Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I should like to declare an interest as the pro-chancellor of Lancaster University and a former director of the University of Cumbria, and as a member of Cumbria County Council, in which capacity I will probably be knocking on the door of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, quite soon.

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate introduced by my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton, with whom I worked in No. 10, which now, I fear, seems a bygone era. It has also been a very good debate. It is a great privilege to hear the noble Lord, Lord Baker, speak. In Cumbria, we are very excited by the creation of one of his university technical colleges. It was also a great privilege to listen to the maiden speeches by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, and particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury. Although we have been on opposite sides of the political fence, he has made a distinguished contribution to public service in his lifetime. I share his view that London is not the centre of the universe.

We also heard an excellent veteran speech by my noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton, to offset the maiden speeches. His experience reminded me of the absolute political commitment that we ought to have to education. My mother left school when she was 14 for exactly the same reasons as he had to, and went to work in a confectioners for five bob a week.

I want to make four propositions in this debate. First, education has contributed to economic growth, is contributing and has the potential to contribute much more. Having heard a little of what my noble friend Lord Hanworth said, I hesitate to talk statistics, but I looked to the excellent authority of David Willetts, who has written a very good pamphlet called Robbins Revisited. He argues in that that 20% of UK economic growth in the past quarter-century has resulted from the increase in graduate-level skills, and that a third of the increase in UK labour productivity in the decade before the financial crisis was due to the growing number with university degrees. Economic growth is not the only benefit that better education brings. He cites research that says that people who are well educated are more likely to be members of a voluntary organisation; likely to be more tolerant; less likely to suffer depression; less likely to drink a lot—I am not sure about that; less likely to smoke; less susceptible to criminal activity; and more likely to live longer. Those are all good things.

He also cites evidence that education leads to less cost in public spending. Indeed, the net lifetime benefit to the Exchequer of getting someone through university successfully is, according to David Willetts, £260,000 to the Exchequer for a man and £315,000 for a woman. Perhaps the Minister can explain why, in the light of this compelling logic, today the Chancellor has announced cuts in public spending that affect the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and prevent those economic potential gains being realised.

The second argument I will make is that we have in Britain a huge problem of two nations in education, which we have to overcome. That is what the recent PISA studies show. We have, on the one hand, a combination of great academic standards, wonderful universities and world-leading research, and, on the other, average standards that are too low and regional divides between success in London and failure in northern cities. We have huge deficits in vocational qualifications and skills that Governments have failed to tackle over decades. We have a deplorable position of leadership in Europe on the question of NEETs—young people not in education, work or training of any kind.

I do not think one should play politics about this. This is a huge national problem. I do say, however, that, in response to the PISA studies this week, I thought the Secretary of State for Education—for whom I have respect because he is a man with genuine commitment to equal opportunity—demeaned himself by trying to turn the PISA results into an attack on Labour’s record in office in those years. Labour inherited an education system that was in crisis in 1997. Yes, we got some things wrong. We had perhaps too many targets and perhaps the wrong targets. Perhaps getting rid of languages as a requirement in 2004 was a mistake. All Governments get things wrong. What we got right, however, was a 74% increase in spending per student below university level in those Labour years and an increase in higher education spending per student of 38%. Let us not play politics with education. Let us recognise that we have these underlying problems.

My fear about the present coalition’s policy is that, although there are aspects of it that are very attractive, the problem of the two nations may be made worse. I will give a few examples. One of the good ideas in the coalition policy is the pupil premium. When you look, however, at what is happening in teaching, autonomy in schools should not become an excuse for hiring loads of unqualified teachers. That will not improve the quality of teaching; nor should the proposals to reform the system of teacher education be rushed. The Government are right to want a lot more apprentices. Yes, there is a need for more apprenticeships, and the previous Government, I think, got things wrong on Train to Gain. I am quite willing to admit that. However, I looked at a recent report from the Boston Consulting Group—this is not a Labour think tank, this is the Boston Consulting Group—which said that, of the 240,000 new apprenticeships created in the past two years, 58% were low-level and 75% went to people over the age of 25 who were already in work. It looks to me as though this is not a dramatic breakthrough in skills education but another form of employer wage subsidy. We have progress to make on apprenticeships.

That is also the case in higher education. My noble friend Lady Warwick talked about the decline in part-time students and mature students, which is a great shame. The noble Lord, Lord Paul, mentioned how migration policies threaten the future of our universities. I think the Government may have the wrong priorities. For instance, I am sure that, in the other place today, there will be a lot of applause for the married couple’s allowance and the universal free school meals. Would it not, if you were seriously interested in educational opportunity and that was your principal objective, have been better to spend that money on children’s centres and early years?

Our education policy needs a rethink, on a cross-party basis, to try to establish consensus. We need to make institutional changes to our education system that will withstand changes of Government. We need to make systemic change to raise quality, not just fiddle around at the edges. We need to raise the status, as Labour attempted, of the teaching profession. We need a new system of post-16 funding. I think the Labour Government experimented with an individual learning account and it went wrong, but we need something like that. We also need a new, more settled approach to higher education.

In conclusion, we will succeed as a country only if we improve our educational quality. The greatest national resource that we have for our future is the unfulfilled potential of so many of our young people. We need a national consensus if we are to achieve that.