The Bishop of Sheffield made his maiden speech during a debate on the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill on 19th June 2023, speaking on his experience in Sheffield Diocese and highlighting potential challenges in the implementation of the bill:
The Lord Bishop of Sheffield: My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak for the first time in this Chamber, and in support of this Bill’s aim of widening access to higher education. I look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead. I record my thanks to Members and staff for the consistently warm and generous welcome I have received and the helpful induction I have been given. If my experience of introduction to this House is typical, it speaks very well of the culture of this place.
On Thursday, it will be exactly six years since I was consecrated as a bishop at York Minster and took up my present responsibilities. The wonderful diocese I serve is made up of former steel-making and coal-mining communities across much of south Yorkshire, farming communities in parts of the East Riding and even a port in the town of Goole. I had never lived in south Yorkshire before but have found the city of Sheffield astonishingly green—I believe it to be the only city in England with a national park within its boundary.
Sheffield also boasts two professional football clubs: Wednesday and United. The former play in blue-and-white stripes, the latter in red-and-white stripes. Rather gloriously, both achieved promotion this past season. I am in the happy position of not having to choose between them but of being able to rejoice with them both, because my own football allegiance belongs—for historic reasons—to Newcastle United, who play in black-and-white strips. Noble Lords will understand the pleasure it gives me to don my club’s colours every time I enter this Chamber.
Every follower of Jesus Christ is a disciple. The word “disciple” simply means learner; almost by definition, therefore, every Christian is rather obliged constantly to be seeking to grow in knowledge and wisdom, in insight and skill. The Christian church is, therefore, again almost by definition, bound to be committed to the principle of lifelong learning and, therefore, to support any Bill which seeks to make lifelong learning more effective and more widely possible.
Personally, I recognise how privileged I am. I have benefited—at the expense of the taxpayer—from a world-class higher education studying for degrees in the traditional manner. I studied history as an undergraduate in Durham and then theology as part of my training for the ordained ministry in Cambridge. Subsequently, I undertook doctoral studies at Oxford. So I appreciate the value of scholarly immersion, of intense periods of lectures, seminars and tutorials, of reading and writing.
In ordained ministry, however, over the past 35 years I have served on Tyneside and Teesside, in the West Midlands, on Merseyside and in South Yorkshire. Immersion in these communities has left me in no doubt that a greater flexibility and access to higher education is urgently needed. Apprenticeship schemes have generally and lamentably languished in recent years. New initiatives are urgently needed to revive them or at least to fill the gap in training which those schemes previously met.
In the diocese of Sheffield, we boast two top-ranking universities: Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield. We also have the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. However, across the diocese as whole, we are equally as proud of our less-heralded colleges with HE provisions in Sheffield, Barnsley, the Dearne Valley, Doncaster and Rotherham.
I was at Rotherham College only last week to meet the staff responsible for its HE provisions and to hear from them about this Bill. Few of the HE students at Rotherham College are in a position to access the education I received; their domestic circumstances and accessibility to learning are often very different from my own, and they require more flexible funding arrangements. They may be combining higher education with employment or childcare in a way I never did. The shift envisaged in this Bill, to enable learners, including mature students, to access funding in a modular way, is surely right and good.
As noble Lords may be aware, no fewer than 11 universities in this country have a Church of England foundation and retain a Church of England ethos. Known as the Cathedrals Group, these 11 HE institutions educate 100,000 students a year. These learners, as much as any others, stand to benefit from the provisions of this Bill, to unlock new opportunities for lifelong learning and to support a greater plurality of routes into higher education. These are very laudable aims, and I gladly support them.
However, I came away from that visit to Rotherham College last week with some sense of the scale of implementation challenges which are bound to attend a Bill as ambitious as this one—for example, in the management of learning provision to ensure that supply is as flexible as demand; or on the impact of learners taking advantage of newly flexible grant arrangements to switch providers, perhaps multiple times, in the accumulation in their modules and credits. I realise there is much detail in relation to this Bill which still needs to be worked through, but could the Minister assure the House that the Government are aware of implementation challenges such as these and will address them, perhaps in Committee?
In closing, I note that my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry—the lead Bishop for the Church of England on FE and HE—would also add his support to this Bill, though he regrets he is unable to be in the House today. It is a great privilege to participate in this debate, and I look forward to many more such opportunities in the years ahead.
Extracts from the speeches that followed:
Lord Blunkett (Lab): It is my great privilege and pleasure to welcome and applaud the excellent speech by my friend—he is my friend—the right reverend Prelate. I find myself the Spam, or maybe even the ham, between two maiden speeches. I wish the noble Lord, Lord Sewell, well and look forward to his speech. I will concentrate for a moment on the excellence of the speech just made by Bishop Pete.
Obviously, all of us who are resident in or have some association with Sheffield and South Yorkshire always like to hear the city and sub-region mentioned in the way that the right reverend Prelate has done. In his case, it comes from the heart because of his humanity and sense of place and emotion—backed up by his wife Cathy, whose books my wife Margaret and I would recommend to your Lordships. They might make your hair stand on end, but they have very interesting takes, including on the Church of England.
I thought that the right reverend Prelate’s maiden speech was an indication of his own understanding of and commitment to education—to the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to use it in the service not just of yourself but of others—and an understanding that the city and region he now serves were built on apprenticeships, crafts and artisan skills which were the measure of success in the past.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con): My Lords, I declare my interest as a visiting professor at Buckingham University, many of whose customers are adult learners. What a pleasure it is to follow those two outstanding maiden speeches. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield spoke about his scholarly immersion and his pastoral immersion, although he did not call it that, and gave us a distilled version of all the things he had learned. I hope it will be the first of many such contributions.
Baroness Barran (Con): My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions today. In particular, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield for his description of lifelong learning within a Christian context—I think he will agree with me that just sitting in this House listening to colleagues extends one’s lifelong learning still further—and my noble friend Lord Sewell. I am not sure about his football metaphor, but if he is secretly a spin bowler, I think he might find himself popular at Edgbaston in the next day or two. In all seriousness, I look forward to working with and listening to him, with his great experience in education, and benefiting from that.
(…)
A number of your Lordships—my noble friend Willetts, the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield—talked about what perhaps I may describe as the implementation challenge from both a supply and demand perspective. The noble Baronesses, Lady Wilcox and Lady Thornton, both asked about maintenance loans for distance learners. Our emphasis, with the exception of those with a disability who, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, pointed out, are eligible for those loans, is on making sure that these courses are as flexible as possible, including, potentially, distance learning. I think there was some confusion in the House about the status of online learning, which is of course part of distance learning, as rightly said by my noble friend Lord Dundee. Our emphasis is on making sure that these courses work for those leaving school or who are already in employment, and who have that flexibility. There is an enormous job to be done by the Government and providers in raising awareness of those opportunities, making sure that people feel confident to take them up and are clear on the improvement they can make to their future employability, earnings power and satisfaction in the workplace.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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