Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 — House of Lords, 2016-01-25
Topic: Education
Helena Kennedy (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Stevenson for bringing the Motion of Regret to the House. I feel more than regret; I feel alarm and despondency. I share the word used by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden: I feel a sense of shame that we have embarked on this step without proper legislation. I have to say to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, that monitoring itself will be too late. The consequences will be very obvious for the groups about whom I am going to speak The removal of the maintenance grant from the poorest and most disadvantaged is something with which I am very familiar. The reason is that back in the mid-1990s, the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, appointed me to lead a small commission to look at some of the problems that had arisen over the funding of further education at the time. One thing that became very apparent was that for the poorest in society, the route to higher education is often via further education. It became clear in the report that eventually came from the work I was deputed to do by the noble Baroness, who was a most remarkable and fine Secretary of State in those years, that many people who had been failed by the system—young women who had got pregnant in their teens, boys who had become disaffected and sometimes got into trouble and people whose families went through problems when they were at a crucial point in their schooling—missed out on the golden ladder, so familiar to people in this House either for themselves or for their children, of going through school and proceeding into university. For many, the route back into education was through further education, and further education is the ladder into higher education I still see such people regularly because, at the end of the reporting I was commissioned to do, the further education world put together a little foundation which bears my name, for which I continue to raise funds and to which I contribute, to create bursaries for students of the category I described: those who try to use further education to better themselves, the very people I so often hear described as those who should be given opportunities. This Government claim to be totally committed to aspiration. I know, because of that little foundation, the Kennedy Foundation, that those people are often hardest hit by the current funding system. It is a hard business, taking out loans when you are the mother of young children, when you are from a really disadvantaged family and have no safety net or back-up from other members of your family. We contribute a bursary to them. It is not a significant sum of money, but if they did not also get the maintenance grant, they would not go to higher education at all This will be a deprivation; I have no doubt about that. We do not have to use more than our imagination to know that there will be a great cohort of young people—people in their 20s and early 30s—who will not go back into education because the idea that they will not get such support will be too much of a disincentive. That should be a source of shame to all of us, but certainly to the Government I have listened to what others have said. I was very moved by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. It is true: those who are poorest do not want to do the business of going off to university. Even in my youth—I was brought up in Glasgow in a family where no one had gone on to higher education—almost everyone who went to the schools that I went to went to the local university because they just could not afford to go somewhere else. I flew the coop and it changed my life, and I want that for other people from my background. I urge the Government to think about this again, because I think that not enough thought went into it. The cost to the lives of people is too great. The numbers are not huge, the money is not that huge, and I think we will pay a terrible price. I would ask the Government to think again.