Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I support the Bill and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, very much for introducing it. The present law is unacceptable and I have an additional reason to suggest to the House why this is so. My mother, already widowed for 50 years by the 1980s, and accustomed to making all her own decisions, joined an organisation called Exit. This organisation had been set up by brave people...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, anybody who has sat in a meeting with heads of education can imagine discussions to work out how not to offer pupils at age 16—I do not have much knowledge of provision below that level—a full and free choice as frequently as possible, because of worries about redecorating classrooms, hiring more teachers or the other income-related things that heads need to think about. While I...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: I too thank my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green for introducing this debate. I declare an interest as a board member of a multi-academy trust in Cambridge and vice-chairman of one of the university technical colleges set up under the auspices of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust. I also have past form: until recently I was chancellor of BPP University, which is a provider to most...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Rooker for introducing this debate at a time when we are coming to understand that the timetable for dealing with carbon emissions is much shorter than our generation had hoped. The science underpinning our understanding of carbon emissions and the consequences for the planet is not in doubt. Like my noble friend, in preparation for the debate I read...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I rise along with many of my colleagues to talk about education. I should declare my interests as the chancellor of BPP University, a member of the Parkside Federation Multi-Academy Trust and a governor of University Technical College in Cambridge. Something that went unmentioned in the recent higher education Bill, now an Act, was student fees, which turned out to be hugely...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I support the amendment. The Bill has cross-party support; it is potentially the greatest engine of social change that can be imagined and rights the injustice of the many years when technical education has been regarded as much less important than formal academic education. The effect of cancelling benefit for 16 to 18 year-olds embarked on apprenticeships will be to deter a small...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I support the amendment. That may come as a faint surprise as I am chancellor of BPP University, the ownership of which is sort of changing—our old owners have become our new owners. We do not expect it to lead to instability. Our vice-chancellor will be replaced by a new vice-chancellor who has been there for a very long time. I am staying as chancellor and the chairman of the...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I support the amendment and the powerful speeches made by the noble Lords, Lord Sharkey and Lord Sheikh. I am staggered to be reminded how long this has been going on for and the difficulty with which Government seem to be approaching this issue. Nothing should stand between the young and their education. I fear that the lack of a sharia-compliant scheme may bear particularly hard...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I support the amendments. In allowing the simple-minded rankings of bronze, silver or gold, we would be substituting for all other measurements or assessments a fairly crude system of three measures. Nobody is going to read beyond “bronze”, which probably does not give enough credit. It is a very unsubtle method of ranking. I would like to see the test used for assessments and...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, batting at number 153 as I am, I do not seek to make a balanced and complete argument as many have done. I am here, however, to speak on two points where I have specific real life, worldly experience. I voted to remain but I am also among the 48% of us who want to find out as quickly as we can how our lives, families and jobs will actually be affected. I am particularly concerned...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I declare various interests as set out in the register. I am chancellor of BPP University, where we have a current enrolment of 2,000 students on degree apprenticeship courses and an expected substantial increase for September 2017. I am also a member of the Parkside Federation Academies Trust and a governor of the University Technical College in Cambridge, which has just voted to...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I remind the Committee that I am chancellor of the biggest private for-profit university in the country. We gain high marks in student surveys and in terms of employability. However, we regard both these things as at best very partial measures—student surveys, for all the reasons adduced by other Members of the House, and employability because we teach subjects, mostly law,...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I support the amendments. I would like to see something more definitive in this package of clauses. One of the most important developments in higher education is the growth of the degree-level apprenticeship. It has not had the fair wind that it deserves, but it is immensely important, because people come out of it without debt and, usually, with a good job, but there is a distinct...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, at the risk of lowering the tone after my noble friend Lord Judd’s speech, I say that I support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Not only are we cutting ourselves off from the intellectual, social and international contribution from the students we are refusing or discouraging, we are behaving with staggering ungraciousness to those students who have already made an...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I have a couple of perhaps slightly random points to make. Access and participation go together. If you do not enable participation either by disabled students—although access for physically disabled students is much easier if you have modern buildings—or by students who do not come in at your normal expected entry level, you have not widened access, because they will struggle...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I support all the amendments and in particular the comments that my noble friend has just made. For the university of which I am chancellor, part-time study is a key part of the business model, and for my noble friend Lady Blackstone it is a key part of her business model at Birkbeck. Why, we ask ourselves, are part-time students reducing in numbers? I have to say that I do not have...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, it is with great relief that I rise this time to support the amendments proposed by own side; I have confidence in all of them. I also emphasise the importance of part-time students. They are a key part of the business of BPP University—and, like other universities, we suffered a great fall in numbers without changing our offering. We have changed our offering in every way we know...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I would not have spoken again but for the fact that I should have known the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, had been so heavily involved with Lucy Cavendish, of which I am an honorary fellow and, I hope, partly responsible for its financial stability. One thing is being missed out of this debate on autonomy—it is my fault because I have not mentioned it: we find ourselves heavily...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: Perhaps I may add to my earlier remarks. This proposed new clause is absolute anathema to those of us who are chancellors of substantial private universities set up under the 2004 legislation and regulated to the hilt. My organisation, BPP, has 20,000 students, we have 5,000 to 6,000 undergraduates and we make a profit. We charge £5,000 a year, which is very much less than £9,000 a year,...
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Lord’s comments, because I have the greatest possible difficulty with this amendment, for a reason that nobody in the Committee has stated this afternoon. The amendment, as drafted, risks disqualifying—and hence turning some into sheep and some into goats—a whole group of bodies that have been given degree-awarding powers and the title of university...
