Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill — House of Lords, 2019-07-15
Topic: Education
Andrew Adonis (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, a few moments ago, the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said that the great and the good had fled the Chamber. I leave him to speak for the great but, as far as the good are concerned, there is no purer good in society than education, including higher education. The issue I bring before the House is the state of higher education in Northern Ireland. It is in a very unsatisfactory condition. This would not normally be a matter that detains this House, because the Northern Ireland Assembly would be sitting and the Executive would be coming forward with proposals, but it is now two and a half years since the Executive met. Two and a half years is a large part of the time that pupils are educated for. Two and a half cohorts of students had the opportunity, or lack of it, to go to university, so I make no apology for raising the issue in this House. Each year that we delay dealing with higher education provision in Northern Ireland is a year that many thousands of young people are denied the opportunities they should have. It is right that, in the absence of an Assembly and Executive in Northern Ireland, Parliament directs its attention to this issue The issue is simple. There is an inadequate number of higher education places in Northern Ireland. This is a long-standing issue, but it has been getting progressively worse as education participation has risen across the United Kingdom. There are 50% more undergraduate places per capita in England than there are in Northern Ireland, and one-third of all students who have a Northern Ireland residence are studying outside Northern Ireland at the moment I have had the pleasure of going to Northern Ireland a great deal recently and talking to young people. Apart from Brexit, which I have mostly been going to discuss, the issue they raise with me all the time is inadequate university provision. There are not enough university places and people are put off going to university because they are unable to go locally. Most people, particularly the most able students, feel they need to leave Northern Ireland to get a higher education This general problem is in crisis in Derry, because there is no university with a dedicated campus there. There is one campus of the University of Ulster, the Magee campus, which has a historic mission and has existed in Derry for a century and a half. But it has a tiny number of places and is not being expanded as it should. I have gone through towns and cities of a comparable size across the United Kingdom, and not detected one anywhere with fewer higher education places than Derry. It is true that some other towns and cities of a comparable size in England, Scotland and Wales do not have a dedicated university, but even where they do not, they have campuses of other universities which provide far more places than in the case of Derry I was initially surprised by this because I am not versed in the history of Northern Ireland, but as I got into it, a very sorry story was revealed. In the 1960s, the Lockwood commission was engaged in deeply controversial issues as to where the second university in Northern Ireland beyond Queen’s University Belfast should be located. I am afraid that it was a straightforwardly sectarian division of opinion. One part of the community wanted—