Bishop John's contribution to the Queen's speech debate:
My Lords, there are two aspects of the gracious Speech that I would like to
comment on with regard to education. One is the
proposal to improve provision for children with special educational needs. I am very
pleased to have heard the announcement today on that subject. There is great need
for reform in that area. As the Green Paper so eloquently demonstrated, it is a
cumbersome system and does not deliver the individualised support that young
people need and that schools and colleges want to give.
Wonderful work goes on, of course. I was in a church school in my diocese the
other week where they teach and look after a child with, I am told, the most
extreme special needs of any child in the county. He has two full-time carers. What
impressed me was not only the quality of that care but the way that the teachers
spoke about receiving a lot more than they give in looking after that special eight
year-old. As we know, a society is judged by the way it values its most
vulnerable members.
Today’s announcement will have widespread support. There is a real opportunity to
make a difference to the lives and opportunities of many children and young
people with additional needs. Many noble Lords will have experience of children with
special needs in schools.
I ask the Government also to remember the 300,000 learners in FE, sixth forms and
apprenticeships who have learning difficulties. More than half of them have support
costs of no more than £2,500, so a modest investment can make a real difference.
I also support the intention to simplify the assessment process. It is at present too
bureaucratic and too disjointed. We need integrated budgets between health,
education and skills, social care and the Department for Work and Pensions. The
new children and families Bill is eagerly awaited.
My other point is about higher education, which is of course vital to our national life,
educating about 45% of our 17 to 30 year-olds. Massive changes are going on. We
have had the trebling of tuition fees, a new and untested core and margin method of
recruitment, a changed funding system with money following the student and no
central funding for the arts and humanities—and lots more happening. Those are far
reaching changes, but there is no mention of higher education in the gracious
Speech. The once anticipated higher education Bill is nowhere in sight.
Last June, theWhite Paper, Students at the Heart of the System, was published. I was
very pleased to see the commitment to widening participation, constant
improvement in the quality of teaching and the importance of the student
experience—all very good things. I remain uneasy about one fundamental point
which I detect in the changes. That is a view of higher education in many ways alien
to the tradition of, for example, Humboldt, Newman, Robbins or Dearing.
Put simply, it is an instrumentalist view. Universities are there to serve the economy.
Students are to go to university to help them get jobs. Those are important matters,
but that is a disappointingly narrow approach to what education is about at its most
transformational.
There is nothing about the excitement of learning, nothing about feeding the human
spirit, nothing about a community of learning at the heart of society, nothing about
the university as a place where society can reflect on its values and goals.
The Diocese of Oxford has seven universities within it, somewhat surprisingly. I can
name six of them but I always forget the seventh. I look to them not only to serve
the economy—they must do that—but to help the country to think, to reflect and
to be self-critical in the right sense. In the Times Higher on 1 March, David Willetts
said that the higher education White Paper initially had a chapter on the value of the
university and its wider purpose, but it got cut out. A sight of this lost gospel would
be most helpful.
There are massive changes going on in higher education, yet no mention of it in the
gracious Speech and no suggestion that Parliament might review the impact of the
current changes in, say, a year’s time. Nor has the Government’s response to the
consultation on last year’s White Paper been made public. Is the House to be denied
the opportunity to debate what is happening in our universities?