Higher Education Funding — House of Commons, 2015-01-08
Topic: Education
Barry John Sheerman (Labour, Centre-left): What a privilege it is to take part in this debate. The quality of the contributions has been excellent. The House will recall that I have been involved in higher education for a very long time. Over the 10 years that I was the Chair of the Education Committee it partly covered higher education, so I was very absorbed in the subject. I was also a university teacher for 12 years, back when I used to work for a living, as I sometimes say—like the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), I am one of the few Members who had a career before entering this place. The fact of the matter is that this has been a very high-quality debate I care deeply about higher education and love what it has done for my generation. I am the youngest of five children and the only one to go to university. I got into the local grammar school and was saved by going to Kingston technical college and then getting a scholarship to the London School of Economics, where I am now a governor. Higher education made my life. It gave me opportunities that my brothers and sister never had. I think that we underestimate just how powerful it can be and just what it has done in a short number of years for the people of this country I was at the LSE when the Robbins report was being written. Indeed, we had to walk quietly past the great man’s study in case he was behind the door, working on the royal commission. What he came up with still guides us, and I still think that it is right. He said that higher education should be paid for through a fair balance between the individual who benefits, the employer that benefits and society. That thread has run through all the contributions we have heard today. We are still concerned about how to deliver that fairness and that balance I do not want to repeat the excellent contributions we have heard on funding or to get into the black hole, so I will instead focus my remarks on delivery. However, I will say that the reason I gave, as co-chair of the Higher Education Commission, for doing a report on the long-term sustainability of higher education in our country was that everyone is talking about it. As my old friend the right hon. Member for Havant (Mr Willetts) knows, the higher education sector is very gossipy, and people in every corner—including vice-chancellors and business people—have been asking whether this is a long-term, viable model. They are asking that because higher education is so vital to our future. To get it wrong would be disastrous for our country’s future Fifty years ago Harold Wilson, who was born in my constituency, delivered a speech to the Labour party conference in Scarborough. It is now known as the "white heat of technology" speech. He said that for years this country had been ruled by a few people who went to posh schools and then to Oxford or Cambridge and who were essentially amateurs, but that the new world had no future for people without skills, or even for semi-skilled people. He saw that the future was in high skills, quality management and high science. He told us to look at what was happening in Russia: they had put a man into space before the Americans. He had been to the United States and seen production lines in the automobile industry where nothing was touched by a human hand. He could see that as a country we had to become highly skilled Harold Wilson also said some ridiculous things in that speech. He said, "Why do only 5% of people go to university? It should be 10%." What a silly statement—I say that in jest. Why should we not have a university in every former industrial town? When Labour won the election a few months later, the polytechnics were introduced. There is a lovely story that Harold, when given the list of colleges of technology that were to be brought up to polytechnics, said, "Eee, where’s Huddersfield?", before writing it in. I mention that because it is an amusing story, but there is a serious point: any town or city in this country that does not have a university cannot get into the super league. Up and down the country, large towns and cities that do not have a university—Huddersfield is lucky to have one—are in a lower league. I do not mean to decry those places, but universities are so important to the life of our communities, to their wealth and success. If we took them out of our towns and cities, we would be left with very little.