Higher Education: Arts and Humanities
Lord Morgan Excerpts(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I absolutely do not accept what the noble Earl has just asserted. If we look at full- time undergraduates undertaking arts and humanities courses, at a time of significant growth in our undergraduate population, the figure is almost unchanged between 2019 and 2022—from 20% moving to 19%. The percentage of disadvantaged young people undertaking these qualifications has also been stable. Looking across similar providers which have a significant percentage of arts and humanities provision, a number of them are in a comparably much stronger financial position.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
My Lords, this is a sad and very tragic event for the University of East Anglia, where I had the great pleasure of lecturing at one time—the time of our beloved friend Patricia Hollis. It is bad news for a distinguished department at a good university. It is also showing a very limited appreciation, both by the Government and by the funding councils, of the balance and way of assessing the merits of different university subjects. This seems to be a sad and deplorable cheapening of our universities, at a time when many other universities in other countries wish to partner our own fine institutions.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I do not question for a second—and regularly stand at this Dispatch Box to celebrate—the success of our great universities. Those universities, rightly, would also stress their independence and autonomy. I simply made, in my reply to the noble Earl, a comparison between some of the sad, recent events at the University of East Anglia and other comparable institutions.
International Higher Education Students
Lord Morgan Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that we should have a diverse international student population in our universities, and is she not concerned that, of the 590,000 non-EU students, those from China, India and Nigeria dominate? Is she concerned about the 120,000 Chinese students and maybe their effect on security?
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, it is not just international students who are important to our universities but international research funding. In this context, does the Minister agree with the analysis that shows that, in the two oldest universities in this country, Oxford and Cambridge—I declare an interest as a retired Oxford professor—funding from the European Union has fallen from £130 million a year to £1 million a year? What is the Government’s assessment of the impact of this loss of £129 million a year, and what are the Government going to do about it?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, would my noble friend care to reflect on the fact that in Scotland, which has St Andrews as the oldest university, the failure of the Scottish Government to have tuition fees for Scottish students has meant that there are no places for Scottish students, and the universities are having to raise the money by having more international students, at the expense of youngsters in Scotland?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I cannot really comment on the experience of youngsters in Scotland. I can say that, from our perspective in England, we believe that the presence of international students is a great source of soft power for the nation—both those in our universities here and the more than 500,000 students who study in British universities overseas.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
I am deeply grateful to the House for its delayed courtesy.
It is surely lamentable that the number of university students from, particularly, European universities, has declined in department after department. I know from my experience how enormously enriching the Erasmus scheme, for example, was. It was invented by a fellow Welshman, Hywel Ceri Jones, and we are deeply grateful for it. Furthermore, as has been said, university students from elsewhere contribute enormously to the local economy in a variety of ways. Can we not try to reverse this trend by a very much more European-focused policy in our universities, in the hope of restoring what has been lost, perhaps never to return?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am not sure that I agree entirely with the noble Lord. We are interested in a diversity of students from different parts of the world. I am not clear from the noble Lord’s question what is particular about European students. All our international students bring cultural diversity. We welcome students from Europe as we welcome students from all parts of the world, and all contribute enormously to our economic well-being.
Universities: Impact of Industrial Action on Students
Lord Morgan Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
Universities have obligations under their conditions of registration and under consumer law. Students can make complaints to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. There were 2,763 new complaints in 2021, and we will shortly get the figures for 2022—that figure covers all issues but may well cover this one also. It is our expectation and hope that universities will respond and support students to receive the education to which they are entitled.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
My Lords, I became a university teacher in 1958 and I have never been on strike for a single day in that period, nor would I. However, throughout that long period, university teachers have been underpaid. There are difficulties now about their contracts, which was not the case earlier, in particular the use of younger, untrained teachers in a way that imperils jobs. Could one not give more professional power to university teachers so that they are properly treated?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am sympathetic to the points that the noble Lord makes, but, as the House is aware, universities are autonomous. As autonomous institutions, they are responsible for pay and pension provision for their staff.
Education: Philosophy
Lord Morgan Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I am not familiar with the work of the Philosophy Foundation, but I absolutely welcome all those charities working in our prisons and our schools to support our children.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
My Lords, is it not significant that philosophy is a compulsory subject in French lycée and the basic structures of French education? Is that not reflected in the different levels of public service in both countries? I declare an interest: my wife is French.
Baroness Barran (Con)
It is difficult to make direct comparisons. I would certainly say that the level of public service in this country, both formally and informally through all our charities and volunteers, is of the highest standard. Many of the basic elements included in the teaching of philosophy are in not only our citizenship curriculum but our religious education curriculum.
Foreign Languages: Economic Value
Lord Morgan Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
We were very pleased to announce in the schools White Paper the network of modern foreign language hubs. We are also increasing the languages bursary to £15,000 for 2023 to incentivise candidates. In 2020-21, the number of postgraduate modern foreign language trainees increased by 300 to 16,087.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
My noble friend’s reference to native languages stirs me to point out that, while I of course totally agree with the Question and with the Minister’s replies, there is far more to modern languages than simply improving the terms of trade. There is the question of deep cultural enrichment and, in these islands, understanding the culture of these islands more deeply. As someone who was brought up bilingually in Britain, I think that is important.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I absolute agree with the noble Lord and that is why I referred to the Turing scheme, which we hope will be part of creating that richer picture of the world we live in.
Social Mobility
Lord Morgan Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
The right reverend Prelate raises an important point—that families are vital to the process of dealing with disadvantaged communities. When I ran a number of academy schools, the thing that struck me most was dealing with the lack of aspiration among the parents. Looking at one of the first opportunity area plans, which has just been published and which happens to be in my own area of Norwich, I can see that the stakeholders cover a number of the communities that the right reverend Prelate refers to. Therefore, I am confident that families will be included in the process.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
My Lords, would the Minister like to comment on the relationship between a growing economy and the dynamics of social change? In the light of that, would he also like to comment on the effect that a policy of austerity has had on social mobility?
Lord Agnew of Oulton
I am being put on my mettle today, my Lords. I think that austerity has affected different communities in different ways. The real-term incomes of the most disadvantaged sector of our community—the bottom 20% of earners—have increased over the last seven years. We have also been very focused on helping to bring about affordable housing, which of course deals with the most vulnerable people, and have committed £9.4 billion to delivering over 400,000 new affordable homes by 2021. We remain very focused on this.
Schools: Classics
Lord Morgan Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Nash
My Lords, ITT places for classics are up 25% and we have increased the bursaryship for classics and modern foreign languages. I fully agree with my noble friend that the classics are a fruitful subject for partnership. I am sure that he will be pleased to hear that we announced a fortnight ago a number of independent/state school partnerships, including one for Latin involving Thomas’s Kensington in collaboration with three state primary schools, with a further three language partnerships. I wholeheartedly agree that such partnerships should grow from voluntary initiatives, such as these ISSP programmes, and not be forced by government.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
My Lords, in view of the popularity of television programmes on classical civilisation, would it not be good to encourage state schools to put on more courses in the area of classical studies, relating language to history, philosophy, architecture and other aspects of the classical world? Would this not give a more rounded and attractive possibility for students in state school and perhaps give the classics an equality with modern subjects, ceteris paribus?
Education: Black British Students
Lord Morgan Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Citizenship Education
Lord Morgan Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
On the specific details of what is happening in institutions—I recognise the noble Lord’s concern about that, and I agree with him on the importance of this in prisons and young offenders institutions—if I may, I will follow this up with my colleagues to see if I can help him with some more specific information about those programmes.
Lord Morgan
My Lords, is the underlying problem here not the general lack of discussion of citizenship as an idea in this country? Citizenship as a concept is absent from our standard textbooks on the constitution. This is very different from the republics of the United States and France. Is this not a serious matter?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, your Lordships’ House is a good example of an institution where we frequently discuss questions such as the meaning of citizenship and its importance. I know that many Members of this House take part in the Lords outreach programme and explore exactly these issues with children; so far about 30,000 pupils have been seen by Members of your Lordships’ House as part of that programme. We need to explore these issues. The thought at the back of the noble Lord’s mind is probably the distinction between us being subjects and citizens, and I would be happy to explore that with him on another occasion.
Schools: History
Lord Morgan Excerpts(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Morgan
My Lords, history needs defence in Parliament. It has been ill served by parliamentarians in recent years. One of the many reasons why I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for an excellent Motion is that it enables us to make amends.
New Labour served history ill. It was unaware of the historical dimension. The essential quality of New Labour was that it was new—therefore. the past dealt with the old and therefore it was of less significance. That is not true of the two Labour leaders whose biography I had the privilege of writing—Lord Callaghan and Michael Foot. Jim Callaghan was very interested in history, particularly naval history. Michael Foot wrote a famous book on the politics of Queen Anne. They had a sense of history. So, too, did my famous countryman Nye Bevan; he did not have much schooling and did not go to university but had his famous story about how he would walk the hills known to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, above Tredegar. When he was lost he would turn to see where he had come from. The moral, said Nye, was that if you want to know where you are going you want to know where you have come from.
The present coalition is not much better. We have heard about the difficulties in schools where history is marginalised in the curriculum. We heard last week about how university funding for the teaching of history has been severely cut back, with serious effects on historical research. So history needs defending and yet it has, as so many noble Lords have said, huge appeal, growing journals and great appeal on television, particularly, I hope, when presented by professional historians and not by television personalities.
I never taught in a school, so to that degree I am totally unqualified to speak. I speak, perhaps, as a parent. The most successful course that my daughter did at her comprehensive school in Wales was one on social protest in Wales between 1800 and 1914. I believe it was written by one of my former pupils; perhaps I should declare an interest. It was very effective for many reasons, which produce some wider conclusions. First, it was about social history and change within society, particularly change in local society. You could see the toll houses or whatever the artefacts from the conflicts described were.
Secondly, it was covered through primary documents. It was very valuable for schoolchildren to look, for example, at some of the pamphlets of protest from that period.
Thirdly, it covered a decent span of time. I very much respond to what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said on this. It covered the whole of the 19th century, indicating that history should not be a pick and mix or based on snippets and soundbites. You should be able to study a problem over a prolonged period.
Fourthly, it was also about conflict. I do not want to be misunderstood on this but history is a record of collision—of colliding ideas, classes and social and political movements. We just lost the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Hurd. I wanted to mention Sir Robert Peel’s career, of which the noble Lord wrote, which was about conflict over Catholic emancipation and the Corn Laws. It is very important that a history course for children should make the point that out of conflict can grow consensus. How was it, after those people were shot down outside the Westgate Hotel in Newport, that the Chartists’ demands were, in the fullness of time, largely accepted? I do not mind history being about conflict. Better that it should be about that than a mindless conformism or a mindless patriotism. People have different views. To quote Nye Bevan again:
“You tell me your truth and I’ll tell you mine”.
That is the way to approach history.
The awareness of history is essential for the maturing and development of young people. It is accessible to everybody. As one who has spent—I am afraid—the past 50-odd years of my life writing and teaching history, it is important that I should always bear in mind that it is for everybody, not just for other historians. Outreach is very important. I always commend the Historical Association and never turn down an opportunity to speak to it, even if it is to 10 men and a dog on a wet night in Manchester. It is important to approach your audience in that open way, and to look at history in the round and at its artefacts. I enormously commend the work of National Heritage, chaired by my noble friend Lady Andrews, and, in particular, the work of the People’s History Museum in Manchester, where you see documents and archives side by side with the physical artefacts of working-class history. It is nearly adjacent to the site of Peterloo, to which my noble friend Lady Bakewell referred.
There are many reasons to study history. It is fun; it stimulates curiosity; it is infinitely varied and colourful. It is a good intellectual training. It is not just a soft option for, as it were, would-be Guardian readers of the future. It is a powerful intellectual test. How do you know things? What is the evidence? How do you compare different kinds of evidence? When you consider such matters you do not need jargon. I am not so sure about some of my medieval colleagues but you do not need jargon; you can say it in plain English that everybody can understand. You do not need physical apparatus; you need only a working mind. History is available to all sentient beings.
As other noble Lords have said, history teaches a sense of perspective and change over time. This is true of even the contemporary history that some of us are said to teach. In even the most recent period, that is the essential sense that you must convey. You should extend it to everything—not just to anniversaries such as the 50th anniversary of some famous event but to all the experiences of daily life. For schoolchildren daily life becomes alive if you stimulate the historical sense and it can be linked to the past. The greatest of all historians, Edward Gibbon, observed that his period in the Hampshire Grenadiers was not irrelevant to the historian of the Roman legions and the decline of the empire.
History gives children a sense of identity—of where they belong and who they are. Other countries are aware of this. In my wife’s country, France, people would be astonished that history is not a compulsory part of our curriculum, as it is so powerfully there. History also gives a sense of a many-sided identity. People in this country have many identities. I have spent much of my career writing the history of Wales and the history of Britain and the north Atlantic side by side. It is interesting to see a different sense of relevance. For example, the Blue Books controversy of 1847, which is probably unknown to most of my audience and never mentioned in books on British history, is perhaps the most important event in 19th and 20th century Welsh history in stimulating a sense of nationality.
One must look at and reassess identity, not only because new research is being done and new facts released, but because you are writing within a society that is itself changing. Therefore, the questions to do with the past that you are interested in are constantly changing. The noble Baroness who preceded me spoke very interestingly on multiculturalism and cultural identity. That is clearly an area where questions that are different from traditional themes have been posed. A few years ago there was an interesting series of commemorations to do with the ending of the slave trade in 1807. How refreshing it was to see that an awareness of the multicultural society led to understanding that it was not simply the work of a few benevolent white middle-class Englishmen. It was in fact a dynamic process in which black men and women also participated, which was as much a part of the great process of liberation as what was done in England.
History is the basis of a civilised society. A famous historian, JR Seeley said that it was “past politics”. It is much more than that. It is capacious and contains multitudes. It is a mosaic of changing ideas, cultures and social formations. This should be reflected—I hope it is—in the way that history is taught in schools. I hope schools are not afraid of being conceptual and looking at the history of ideas. If we look at and celebrate Magna Carta in three years’ time, I hope we do not approach it simply from the bad King John—or even the good King John—point of view, but from the ideas of human rights and the discussion of human rights down the centuries. Yesterday I took part in a debate on the terrorism prevention Bill. A brisk course in human rights would be instructive for the Front Benches on both sides of your Lordships’ House.
Finally, history appeals to the most powerful of instincts: memory. The French are very aware of memory, not just the individual memory but the public memory—what the famous historian Pierre Nora called lieux de mémoire, or the sites of memories that have colonised and infiltrated the present. I hope history in schools can capture memory in its widest sense.
I began with a fellow countryman, Aneurin Bevan. I finish with another, a great friend of mine, who I think taught my noble friend Lady Andrews. If the House will indulge me, Professor Gwyn Alfred Williams observed, “Beth yw hanes ond cof cendl?”. What is history but the memory of a nation? How right he was.