Lord Liddle (Lab)

My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, I find that the quality of this debate has left me with very little fresh or new to say. I want to emphasise some of the very important points that have come out in the debate. The first is that our basic school system still has a lot of improvement to make. The report from Teach First showed how children from free school meal backgrounds were pretty much doomed to failure in our system. Something has to be done, and that agenda of reform of schools has still to be pursued. A lot of people have paid compliments to the Milburn review. It is one of the best documents of its kind that I have ever seen in my political experience. For those noble Lords who have the stamina, there is the debate on an ageing society tomorrow, which I am standing in to lead. We on your Lordships’ Economic Affairs Committee have come to the conclusion that we can afford an ageing society only if the employment participation rates of people over 50 are radically increased. That has all sorts of implications for how people develop their lives in education and how they can continue after the age of 50. The other point I would like to emphasise is the one my noble friend Lord Barber made about the lack of consistency written into further education, apprenticeships and skills policies. We desperately need that consistency—the kind the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has shown at a personal level throughout the last 40 years or so of his life—in our politics and structures. My final point is that we should not, as my noble friend Lady Morgan made very clear, see this debate as a choice between further and higher education. The expansion of universities, to which Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Tony Blair both made an enormous contribution, has been one of the drivers of opportunity and social mobility in this country. We should never forget that, and we should never allow opponents on the right to make the argument that more means worse. It does not. We have to develop ladders of opportunity between further and higher education, in which the universities have a key role to play. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we cannot let degree apprenticeships be confined to a socially select few.