Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Tuesday 18th May 2021
(2 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Tuesday 15th June 2021
(2 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)
My Lords, first, I thank those who contributed to the debate following Her Majesty’s gracious Speech, when we first discussed this Bill. I also thank noble Lords who attended the recent briefing with departmental Ministers. For the benefit of noble Lords contributing remotely, I note that the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Apprenticeships and Skills is physically present with us in the Chamber today. I also look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, and it is wonderful to see the priority given to the Bill by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, who is speaking today on her birthday. I am glad to see a common desire to look at skills reform and further education. I look forward to the debate that we will share, and I welcome the scrutiny that the Bill will be placed under.
We can all agree that skills and post-16 education needs its moment in the spotlight, both in Parliament and in communities across the country. We talk about the forgotten 50% of people who do not go to university; today, we are giving this policy and the people it affects the attention they deserve. We can see today the vast challenges facing the nation. Covid-19 has significantly impacted the economy and shown us how urgently we need a resilient, highly skilled workforce. We all see the clock ticking towards 2050, when we have committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions, and we are all aware of our need to succeed as an independent trading nation, following our departure from the European Union.
This is also the perfect opportunity to think about what constitutes our nation. Is it one big city, or a couple of big cities? No, it is a diverse set of communities, families and individuals, with different ambitions and potential. This means that we need to match opportunities with the talent that we know can be found across the country. We need to ensure that people can succeed without feeling that they have to move to one of the big cities. This past year’s extraordinary transition to flexible working for many has only proved this further. We have a duty to make sure that the skills provision offered in people’s home towns meets their needs and ambitions and that of employers, so that everyone has the opportunity to realise their full potential and find success, wherever they live and whatever their background.
The evidence is clear: we have a problem in the balance of education. Only 4% of young people achieve a qualification at higher technical level by the age of 25, compared to a third who get a degree or above, yet 34% of working-age graduates are not in high-skilled employment. No wonder more parents would now prefer that their child gain a vocational qualification than a degree. University is a great option for some but not the best option for everyone, and it should not be seen to be the only pathway to success. My honourable friend, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Apprenticeships and Skills often tells me how inspired she is by the learners she meets on visits to colleges and further education institutions—people who have found their vocation and their way of success through technical education.
Philip Augar’s 2018 Post-18 Review of Education and Funding made the call for parity of esteem between further and higher education. I take this moment to offer my congratulations on his recent knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. The review set out the case very clearly for a genuine choice, for everyone, beyond the fantastic opportunities offered through our world-class university system. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who served on the review’s panel. The Government have listened to this call; the Skills for Jobs White Paper, published earlier this year, set out our vision to reform post-16 education and training. We will prioritise flexibility, accountability and quality, and we will put employers at the heart of the system, building on what we have done with apprenticeships and T-levels, so that individuals can know what their qualification leads to, and employers can have confidence in them. Given that 80% of the workforce of 2030 are already in work today, it is essential that we have a flexible system for adult retraining which supports people to progress in their careers.
We want our reforms to work for everyone, which is why we are working with noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Addington, to ensure that we support those with special educational needs to access the improved skills training and education that our reforms aim to deliver. I take this opportunity to thank the noble Lord for his dedication, challenge and advocacy on this issue, as well as our other FE ambassadors, who have brought a breadth of knowledge and enthusiasm to our discussions.
The chair of the Education Select Committee, the right honourable Robert Halfon, called the White Paper a “sea change”. The Association of Colleges noted that it
“recognises the vital role that colleges and further education will play in levelling up for people and places whilst tackling long standing concerns about stagnating productivity”.
Employers such as the Co-op welcomed our reforms.
We know that to deliver the reforms successfully requires funding. That is why we have backed up the White Paper with £2.5 billion towards the national skills fund, £1.5 billion to improve the college estate, and £650 million extra into further education for 16 to 19 year-olds. The White Paper sets out our comprehensive programme for reform, and the Bill before us will provide the necessary statutory underpinning for change.
The Bill is divided into three sections that support the principles of the White Paper. First, it aims to provide a framework for ensuring that skills and post-16 education leads people towards a great job. That is why we are creating a statutory underpinning for local skills improvement plans, which we will shortly be trailblazing in some local areas. By putting employers and their representative bodies at the heart of the post-16 skills system, we are focusing on meeting local skills gaps and prioritising training in growth sectors. This will ensure that employers have the skills they need to drive growth in local areas; it will support opportunities for learners to get good jobs and help the existing workforce to retrain. This will help us get rid of the idea that career success can be found only in a big city.
Relevant providers will need to have regard to these plans when considering their technical education and training offer. These changes will also be supported by a new duty on further education institutions to review their provision to ensure that it meets local needs. In addition, the Bill supports the provision of the advanced technical and higher education skills the country needs by creating a strong link to employer-led standards. The Bill will reform the technical education system so that it is high-quality, stable and coherent. It does this by giving the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education powers to approve new categories of technical qualifications, simplifying a system in which there are currently over 12,000 qualifications. The Bill also gives a statutory footing to the collaborative relationship between the institute and Ofqual.
Perhaps the major plank of the Bill is that it supports the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement, as part of a flexible lifetime skills guarantee. This measure will be rolled out from 2025 and will give all adults access to the equivalent of four years of student loans for higher-level study at levels 4 to 6. The loans will be able to be used flexibly, full time or part time, for modules or full qualifications and for provision in colleges or universities. At the moment, maximum amounts for funding are set in relation to an academic year. The Bill will make it clear that maximum loan amounts can be set in other ways. The Government will consult on the details of the lifelong loan entitlement, including on how best to support students with the living costs of study, and whether equivalent and lower qualifications restrictions should be amended to support retraining and stimulate provision.
The ambition is to replace the two existing systems that offer government-financed loans to learners studying at levels 4 to 6 with the single LLE system. These two existing systems of higher education student finance and advanced learner loans provide funding support for different types of courses. The lifelong loan entitlement aims to create a simpler and clearer system, but it will require extensive operational changes to the student finance system and the types of course available, which is why it will be rolled out from 2025. It is the step change in the system that will give people the opportunity to upskill, retrain and reskill, providing the alternative to the notion that a standard three-year degree is the only route to success and giving people the flexibility to change their future.
Of course, it is important to ensure that there is sufficient provision for lower-level qualifications. That is why, separate from the Bill, the Government’s adult education budget will continue to fully fund courses in English and maths up to and including level 2 for adults who have not previously attained a GCSE grade C or, in new currency, grade 4. The national skills fund funds adults to complete their first level 3 qualification alongside the new skills boot camps.
These reforms mean very little if education or training provision is not of the highest quality. That is why the second part of the Bill proposes powers to make regulations to improve and secure the quality of FE initial teacher training by shaping the market for that provision. This power will be used only if these improvements cannot be achieved through working collaboratively with the sector. The Bill will also make it clear that the Office for Students has the ability to make assessments by reference to absolute student outcomes. This will give confidence that the same standard can be applied across all higher education providers and for all students, while continuing to take into account context and individual circumstances.
The third part of the Bill aims to ensure there are sufficient protections in place for learners. It will allow the Government to introduce a list of post-16 education or training providers. To be on this list, providers will need to meet conditions aimed at protecting learners against the negative impacts of potential provider failure. This issue, which relates particularly to independent training providers, was raised in this House during the passage of the Technical and Further Education Bill in 2017. I am glad to bring a solution to this issue back to the House today. This section of the Bill also gives powers to the Secretary of State, who took his place on the steps of the Throne as I began, to intervene in the statutory further education sector where local needs are not being met, or to direct mergers or structural change where that is the best way to secure improvement. Alongside the final part of the Bill, it will improve the efficiency of the FE insolvency regime. One of the strengths of the FE market is the flexibility of its provider base. These measures will give the impetus for this flexibility to be used to protect learners and provide education and training that has this clear path towards the labour market.
I am delighted that this Bill is before us today. We have an opportunity to begin the process of transforming opportunities for young people and adults. Events of the past year have shown us how important skills and further education will be to our recovery as both an economy and as a nation. As noble Lords have often said, this has been the Cinderella of the sector for too long. This reform is long overdue, but is only one step on a longer journey. We will work to ensure that the 50% of people who do not go to university will no longer be called “forgotten” and stuck in what are wrongly called “forgotten towns”. Instead, we will make skills and jobs available to everyone, wherever they are. This Bill will help provide those learners with high-quality provision, protection and the skills and education that can transform their lives. I beg to move.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
I thank the Minister for her kind wishes—a year older and, hopefully, a year wiser in the company of your Lordships.
I am opening this debate from the Opposition Front Bench, and I am able to do so after a lifetime of working with young people, developing their skills and encouraging lifelong learning. In recent years I was able to use that experience as the local government education spokesperson for Wales, specifically with a skills agenda as the lead portfolio holder in the Cardiff capital region, which covers 52% of the Welsh population. The regional skills partnership showed me that, by working together with all interested parties, real progress could be made to promote strategic and collaborative decision-making. Representatives from business, further and higher education training providers and national and local government joined together to share their knowledge and understanding of the sectors they represented, to ensure the region was able to respond to a demand-led approach to developing skills and talent. The lack of that level of shared collaboration across all sectors is a significant area of concern on the face of the Bill as it stands.
While wholesale changes to the way we support FE skills, adult learning and part-time HE are long overdue, this Bill remains inadequate to tackle the scale of the skills challenges that have resulted from years of neglect and austerity, exacerbated by the pandemic. As furlough ends, no community will be untouched by unemployment. It is vital, therefore, that a joined-up, place-based employment, skills and careers system offers adults and young people the recovery they deserve, by providing access to quality education and training opportunities. A range of choices and opportunities should be central to any reform, and changes to the post-16 education system should allow for progression and pathways between technical education, apprenticeships and existing further and higher education qualifications.
Among others, local government has an important role. Councils have direct functions to plan post-16 skills, support young people with specific needs and deliver adult and community learning and other related functions. Mayoral combined authorities have devolved responsibility for the adult education budget, which they have used to reshape the local further education offer, working with employers, FE providers and constituent local authorities.
There is, however, an overt emphasis in the Bill on an employer-led approach to develop local skills improvement plans alongside training providers. We offer that MCAs and local authorities should be strategic partners—and on the face of the Bill. Their wide-ranging knowledge and expertise on this agenda are currently missing, and we will be seeking amendments to develop collaboration, away from the overarching employer-led approach that currently dominates.
Therefore, can the Minister explain why metro mayors and combined authorities, many of which have democratic accountability for local skills and economic regeneration, have been excluded? How do the Government envisage LSIPs relating to existing local and regional economic strategies, especially where funding may be directly linked to delivery against them? And why are local enterprise partnerships not covered in the Bill?
Furthermore, the Bill does not provide support for any qualifications below level 3, despite lower-level qualifications offering many adult learners key progression routes. Nor does it support subjects outside a narrow band of technical disciplines. Labour is concerned that nearly 1 million priority jobs will be excluded from the LSG in sectors facing a skills shortage.
The Bill also appears to omit reskilling and second level 3 qualifications. So can the Minister confirm that the LSG does not cover subsequent level 3 courses? Does she agree that all adults should be eligible for retraining, given the impact of the pandemic and changing market needs? Is it not now time that the Government put the LSG on a statutory footing?
We are concerned that the detail of the lifetime loan entitlement is yet to be confirmed. It appears that it will only cover tuition costs for higher-tuition courses. Labour believes the system of loans, and in particular means-tested grants, should be extended to support adult learners’ living costs, and that universal credit conditions should be reformed so that the people who would benefit from attending college or accessing training while unemployed or in part-time employment do not lose out.
The planned introduction of the LSG in 2024 and the LLE in 2025 should also be brought forward by several years. Can the Minister assure the House that the Government will introduce these LLE amendments in Committee and ensure that they are not tabled at the 11th hour?
There is concern that many adults will be unable to take advantage of the opportunity to gain level 3 qualifications if they lack a level 2 qualification. The Bill omits the value of qualifications below level 3 in creating progression pathways for students. Recent Department for Education data has shown the return on investment of these qualifications and concluded that the present net value of qualifications below level 2 is higher than for level 3.
Another clear omission is funding for adult learners to take a second level 3 qualification. Many adult learners will have achieved their first level 3 many years ago and may have used it to pursue a career that is no longer viable. With the economic turmoil that has come from this pandemic, many adults will want and need to reskill rather than upskill—to switch sectors and enter new careers. Support for second level 3 qualifications could facilitate this.
Every area in the UK needs a mix of provision specific to their local context—to their community and sub-economy. However, the Bill is not explicit in certain features of the LSIP, including what constitutes “local”. Is it a specified area, or is the scope of further education provision included? Does the Minister believe that the definition of “local need” should incorporate a broad range of outcomes related to health and well-being, community participation and other social and economic outcomes that can be linked to community adult learning?
The Bill does provide for a statutory basis for LSIPs, with the Secretary of State gaining powers to designate employer representative bodies. I am pleased to see that he is here to hear it directly from me. But we are concerned that the Government’s desire for employers to take the lead in skill reform lacks clear structure and transparency and will render providers passive recipients of LSIPs. We will seek to amend the Bill to empower metro mayors and combined authorities to coproduce the plans, in recognition of the crucial they have to play.
We will seek to extend LSIP consultation to student representatives, trade unions, local and devolved government and other relevant agencies. We also intend to probe further how ERBs will be held to democratic accountability and the degree to which providers meet local needs. We are concerned that the Secretary of State has the power to select or sack ERBs, sign off on all LSIPs, dictate whether colleges fulfil these requirements, and to merge or replace colleges without recourse to local circumstances. The first port of call for approving local plans and remedying poor local performance should be local and not the centralisation of taking back control to Westminster. The Secretary of State’s powers must be narrowed to apply only in clearly defined, exceptional circumstances.
The Bill gives the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education—a non-departmental public body directly accountable to Ministers—the ultimate sign-off power for the approval and regulation of technical qualifications. We are concerned that this handing back, day to day, of political control of technical qualification regulation would undermine the independent status of Ofqual and risk a cumbersome new dual regulatory approval system. We will seek to amend the Bill to ensure that Ofqual remains the sole body.
We further believe that the failure to link this Bill to the apprenticeship levy is a missed opportunity, given that the underspend could be used to provide quality training, education or employment opportunities. It is especially disappointing that supported internships, which can play a huge role in supporting learners with learning difficulties to prepare for and enter the world of work, are missing from the Bill.
We urge the Government, in tandem with the introduction of the Bill, to prepare and publish a cross-departmental 10-year national strategy for education and skills to deliver on a wide policy agenda. Consultation must be wide so that the strategy and oversight of meaningful collaboration, as I outlined at the beginning, can be carried forward towards a better tomorrow for the people who have done so much during this past year to demonstrate the dependence we have on their skills and their hard work in running our services and industries.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I too wish the noble Baroness a happy birthday. I also look forward to hearing the maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Black.
We are finally getting there, are we not? There is the work that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has done and now she has been promoted to advising the Prime Minister on this area. There is Philip Augar’s report, which was so important. There is the Technical and Further Education Act, which the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, was part of; it is good to see him taking part in this debate. There seems to be a sort of sea-change taking place, which I very much welcome. I suspect that many of us will repeat the same issues.
I consider this the most important education Bill that your Lordships have considered in certainly the last 20 years. The skills and vocational education Bill arrives when we face huge skills shortages, high rates of youth unemployment and the uncertainties of the post-Brexit, post-pandemic world. Yet opportunities are there, not least the green revolution. The Bill must be about the education system that we want for our children and young people.
Many young people are being denied the opportunities that their academic peers have always received. We have an educational ethos in our country that celebrates and rewards the academically minded and treats the rest as second best. For most parents and, indeed, society, the hallmark of a successful education is passing the required number of GCSEs to progress into the sixth form and then getting good A-level grades to secure a university place. However, research tells us that an academic and knowledge-based curriculum is not suitable or worth while for 50% or so of our school pupils, yet we persist in putting these pupils in an academic straitjacket. Instead, we should provide a vocational education as good, respected and celebrated as the academic one. Would it not be uplifting to see banners outside school gates praising not only the A-level pass rate but the vocational success of our students?
The other key ingredient must be first-rate careers guidance and education. Every pupil should be given regular face-to-face support by a qualified careers teacher or officer to understand the pupil’s abilities, interests and passions, and to clearly let the pupil see the opportunities available and not try to push them into the sixth form. It might be more appropriate for them to go to a further education college or a UTC or to undergo an apprenticeship. By doing this, we will gradually change the mindset not just of pupils and parents but of society itself, so that vocational education is regarded as the right route for a large number of our students.
The Bill is an important beacon for changing attitudes and perceptions. It gives us the opportunity to realise that education should be an opportunity for life, so whether you are a mum who is now ready to go back and study or someone who wants to retrain so that they can improve their job prospects, that opportunity is freely available. There should be no barriers to learning. Everyone, no matter their circumstances, should be encouraged to have lifelong learning opportunities. Indeed, as our Prime Minister said:
“These new laws are the rocket fuel that we need to level up this country and ensure equal opportunities for all … I’m revolutionising the system so we can move past the outdated notion that there is only one route up the career ladder, and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to retrain or upskill at any point in their lives.”
They are passionate words from the Prime Minister. We must ensure that the Bill captures his rhetoric. I am sure there will be a large number of amendments that enable this to happen.
If we really mean lifelong learning opportunities for all, a number of areas need clarification and probably amendments. The lifetime loan entitlement would open up tuition fee loans for people taking level 4 and level 5 qualifications, which are especially important for unlocking higher technical skills. Many adults will be unable to take up these opportunities because there is no support for living costs while they are taking a course. Thus these people will be prevented from transforming their life chances and being part of the skilled workforce that the country and the economy need. We also need to look at the entitlement rules for those people who are unemployed and on universal credit and would benefit from attending college. The 16-hour rule is a barrier to those NEETs who could be upskilled or retrained.
As we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, the Bill offers no support for those students below level 3. Surely it is important that we recognise that this is part of the educational landscape. Many adults achieved their level 3 many years ago and maybe want to pursue a new career or reskill. Support could facilitate this. Should we not be making funding available for these learners?
I want to raise two other considerations, perhaps minor ones but important ones. Some people of faith, including Muslims, do not feel able to take on an interest-bearing loan. The Government identified this as a barrier to participation. What progress has been made on a sharia-compliant loan system? Students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those on universal credit struggle to get the technology they need. Will the Government consider making IT support available for these students? While we are talking about barriers, what progress has been made on the issue of 16 year- olds who are denied the opportunity to take part in the Kickstart programme because they are on universal credit?
Apprenticeships were one of the flagship policies and achievements of the coalition Government, but sadly we have seen the number fall 18% year on year, so that in 2019-20 it was down by 319,000. We know that any business with a payroll of more than £3 million has to pay 0.5% in a levy, but businesses are often unable to use all their levy, so it gets clawed back by the Treasury. A recent survey by Energy & Utility Skills received responses from 22 companies which employ 100,000 people, with over 4,000 apprenticeships, and found that half the levy they paid was going back to the Treasury. Could we not be imaginative and start using that levy in different ways? Some businesses are already being imaginative and using the levy to provide courses for their existing staff. At the Youth Unemployment Select Committee today, we heard one of the witnesses say that the apprenticeship scheme was in danger of becoming an adult learning scheme. That is a sad indictment of our high hopes for apprenticeships.
I reflect that a significant number of employers are concerned that young people entering apprenticeships and vocational training programmes do not have a sufficient foundation in practical skills and work readiness to enable them to progress as quickly as they might; often the shortcomings are not academic. Would it not be imaginative to use some of that levy which has to be returned to the Treasury to fund local employment engagement, perhaps with local schools?
If the Minister has time, perhaps she would be kind enough to write to me about regulation. The Bill will transfer powers from the independent regulator, Ofqual, to the less independent, non-government body, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. It is responsible for introducing its own T-levels while also regulating the broader qualification market. Is there not a risk of a real conflict of interest? The Bill would allow it to charge fees for the approval and accreditation of new qualifications already regulated by Ofqual. There is no information about how these fees will be regulated. The relationship between Ofqual and the IfATE needs detailing. The current proposals have the potential to cause overlap and confusion.
We have seen how other European countries, notably Germany and Switzerland, have valued the importance of vocational education and, as a result, have done far better than the UK in providing the skills that their economies need. Let this Bill, wisely amended, give every person the opportunity they need, as well as what the country and the economy need, to be successful.
Lord Bichard (CB) [V]
My Lords, I welcome the Bill because it acknowledges the importance of skills and vocational learning to the economy, productivity and, let us not forget, the capacity of people to fulfil their personal potential. I hope it will be a significant step towards reversing the huge decline in adult learning we have experienced in recent years which, as some of us believe, is overdue. But whether it is successful in doing that will depend not on bold ambitions and warm words but on the detailed delivery. In particular, it will depend on some issues which are either not covered at all in the Bill or referred to only in outline. I want to touch on one or two of those today.
The first is advice and guidance. The White Paper for skills and jobs rightly says that we need:
“Clear and outcomes-focused careers information”
and that it is
“fundamental to the success of our reforms.”
The White Paper says:
“We need impartial, lifelong careers advice and guidance available to people when they need it, regardless of age, circumstance, or background.”
I would also say that we need a system in which the Careers and Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service are working more effectively together to create an all-age careers system better able to support learners seeking to navigate what will be a much more complex system following the implementation of this legislation. I would also like to see us providing more face-to-face coaching, not just a better digital information bank. I think that will be especially important as we exit the pandemic. I know that Sir John Holman has been appointed to advise on all of this, but we still await his recommendations, and it is unfortunate that it has not been possible to incorporate them in the Bill. Perhaps the Minister can update us about where these recommendations are, when they will be published and how they will sit alongside the Bill.
The second issue is the lifelong learning entitlement. The Open University has pointed out that this is presented in the Bill as a bolt-on, creating a separate funding system for modular study. A more ambitious reform would have been to create a unified credit-based system for learning that does not distinguish between different modes of study. But leaving that to one side for the moment, Clauses 14 and 15 leave some very important questions unanswered—questions which I have raised before in the House in debates on lifelong learning. For example, will people be able to use their entitlement to study at an equivalent or lower level to their previous studies? The local skills improvement plans might well encourage them to do so. I know that this is subject to consultation, but could we not take action on this earlier? What will the repayment terms be for any loan? Will we continue—perversely, I think—to penalise students who choose to study at a distance? How exactly will the credit transfer arrangements work between providers?
Then there is the cost of study itself, including living costs. This is not addressed in the Bill; it is another matter for consultation, but it is key to the successful implementation of these reforms. The Welsh Government recently introduced reforms to tackle this by extending maintenance support, including means-tested grants, to all students, regardless of the mode of study. Importantly, they also introduced lower tuition fees for part-time study. As a result, they have been rewarded with a huge increase in participation, which is what we all want. Will the Minister tell us whether the Government are thinking along similar lines?
I agree with the principle of having the employer’s voice heard clearly in the skills system and for skills providers to be responsive to, and accountable to, local employers for their provision. Actually, some older Members will remember that this was one of the reasons why we once had a department for education and employment. Some colleges and independent training providers have too often focused on offering courses and programmes which generated much-needed funding but were not necessarily relevant to local employment needs. What I struggle with, though, is why this is being piloted with chambers of commerce and other representative bodies when they are not resourced for the task and sometimes do not have very strong membership bases. We already have skills advisory panels that bring together employers, providers and funding agencies and are supported by learning and enterprise councils, so do we really need to introduce additional complexity? Why not build on the existing skills advisory approach and make a more inclusive way of providing advice on employers’ needs?
Finally, as I suspect others may not raise it, I shall say a word about independent training providers. The Bill rightly focuses on supporting colleges and further education, but independent training providers at their best can be more fleet of foot and more responsive to employer and local skill needs. In my local area here in Gloucestershire, many providers feel that the skills Bill could make their existence more perilous. They recognise the importance of offering high-quality provision and being sustainable businesses, but many feel that they will be disadvantaged by, for example, not being able to bid into the skills accelerated development fund and being seen as second-tier providers for various contracts. During the passage of the Bill, we need to ensure that it is possible for independent training providers to continue to provide their best and to strengthen in the future.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, I warmly welcome the Bill. I begin by declaring my interests as chancellor of the University of Leicester, a visiting professor at King’s College London and a member of the boards of Thames Holdings Ltd and UKRI.
The principles and objectives of the Bill are very welcome. It is absolutely right to want to do more for further education colleges, to focus on technical and vocational skills, and to try to do more on lifelong learning, but there is a lot to do to flesh out those principles in practical legislation. The Government have several important consultation exercises under way at the moment, which will help them see how they intend to apply those principles. I hope the Minister can assure the House that we will have ample opportunity to review and revise this legislation as it goes through both Houses of Parliament in the light of the outcomes of their consultations.
While I welcome the principles, the really important matter is what they mean in practice. Here, I have to say that I am concerned about a deep confusion—an artificial conflict, perhaps—between “vocational” and “academic”. In her opening speech, the Minister herself referred to parents preferring that their child should have a vocational qualification rather than a degree. I am familiar with the research, published by the Social Market Foundation, on which that statement rests. I find it very hard to make sense of the question that was put to people in that opinion survey. I talk to universities, which tell me that 70% of their students are studying on a course accredited by an employer or an employer organisation; they are doing courses that are a licence to practise. The White Paper rightly refers to the need for nurses and engineers. These courses are also delivered by universities—are they academic or vocational? It is a false distinction, which should not be used to create conflict between higher and further education when both have an important role to play. You can do academic courses in further education colleges and vocational courses in universities. If distinctions are used to create conflict between these two parts of our education system—both very important—the cause that the Minister rightly supports will be put back rather than advancing.
I have met a young man at a workbench making a bit of kit to be launched on to a satellite as part of his doctoral training. It is an old Oxbridge mindset, the belief that universities are for the liberal arts—for gentlemen—while vocational courses are for training colleges, and that if a university dares to provide vocational training it must mean that it is a bad university. That model is one of the reasons we have the skills crisis that we worry about now; it is the wrong mindset for trying to tackle this problem. I very much hope, therefore, that the Minister will be able to assure us that she fully understands that universities—especially some of the less prestigious universities, whose origins are often as colleges of advanced technology and which have not lost sight of their original mission—are one of the instruments that she can use to fulfil her objectives.
This is also very important, and will be tested, in the Minister’s admirable objective of tackling the anomalies of level 4 and 5 funding—a peculiar feature of the system, going back to provisions in the 1992 Act. Augar was right to say in his report that we need a more flexible regime for levels 4 and 5. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, for her campaign on this. We do need a better funding arrangement for levels 4 and 5. At the moment they are niche, essentially nursing diplomas for women and engineering courses for men; I do not say that with any endorsement of the stereotypes but it seems to be the origin of the widely cited figure for earnings for some at levels 4 and 5. We need to make it easier and more flexible, but can the Minister assure the House that funding for levels 4 and 5 should be institution-blind? It should be delivered by FE colleges but could also be delivered by higher education institutions.
The new loan scheme is an exciting initiative. I confess to this House that, looking back on my record in government, one of the things I most regret is the decline in adult learning during my time as Minister. There are many complicated reasons for that. One was that we tried to apply the same funding model to adult learning as to 18 year-olds going to university. For an 18 year-old, taking on a loan when they are at a big fork in the road does not, thank heavens, put them off going to university. For adult learners, however, taking out a loan may be a very different decision and far more worrying. So, one lesson I learned from what we went through was that a single funding model may not work as well for adult learners as for younger people en route to university. I hope the Minister will reflect on that as the Government design this new single scheme.
I wished to comment further on the role of employers and the importance of individuals, but I see that time has passed. I just say to the Minister that while, of course, employers have an important voice, we should not forget the individual learner. He or she may be inspired to shape their life around a course or an occupation, and it might not be for a big industry in the area where they live; it might be in something exciting on the horizon for which there is not currently an employer. I very much hope that, in the course of our debate, the Minister will say that the individual shaping his or her destiny matters as much as the employer and the education institution.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, I strongly endorse the previous speech, particularly as it notes the crazy distinction between vocational and academic study. On these Benches, we welcome the commitment from the Government to the further education and skills sector as set out in the Bill. It is particularly pleasing to see that the Bill builds on the practical reforms outlined in the Skills for Jobs White Paper. In this context, I also strongly commend to the House the Church of England’s new vision for further education report, published at the end of April, which also recognises the key role that FE plays in driving individual, community and societal transformation.
I wish to make three points. First, how might learners be enabled or incentivised to upskill or reskill, particularly those such as the long-term furloughed or people heavily reliant on welfare payments, who have been particularly impacted by the pandemic? The Bill outlines structures and organisations required for delivering training but does not suggest how such people actually get to the training in the first place. Clearly, the welcome commitment to a reintroduction of maintenance grants is a significant part of this, yet the need, already referred to by other speakers, to cover basic living expenses while studying is an immediate and powerful potential barrier to learning. This could be an opportune time to reconsider the 16 hours-a-week work rule for those in receipt of universal credit, with proper safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the system. Great training is pointless if the people who need it are not incentivised to access it.
Secondly, how do the Government plan to ensure that local SME voices are heard and not overpowered by larger employers, which typically find it easier to meet expectations from Government? Over 80% of the UK economy is driven by the service sector, which is dominated by small and medium-sized employers. SMEs play a central role in levelling up, as they are typically more likely to employ those from disadvantaged groups with lower employment chances. This lies behind Wakefield Council’s launch, in March, of its new strategy to become a “Learning City and District”, one of the four pillars of which is to:
“Provide an inclusive jobs market for residents to find and sustain well paid employment, by ensuring access to learning is available for all levels and to all ages with increased participation from hard to reach/disadvantaged communities.”
An employer-centred focus is crucial to the success of the skills reforms. However, equally crucial is the development of longer-term thinking about the future skills needs of society. This means that meeting present perceived needs locally must be balanced by an appreciation of longer-term changes in future skills demand, particularly if we are to join up local and national provision.
Thirdly, colleges play a vital role in providing for students with specific learning difficulties and disabilities. According to the Association of Colleges, such students make up 17% of the overall intake, a figure which rises to 23% of 16 to 18 year-old learners. In 2019-20, local authorities placed over 64,000 students with education, health and care plans in colleges—90% of them in general FE colleges and the rest in specialist institutions. The funding regime does not provide support for students in FE who do not have EHCPs to anything like the degree required, yet the Bill makes no specific reference to such students, although we welcome the promised Green Paper due in the summer. It would be helpful if the Minister could consider how the appropriate degree of priority could be given to this diverse cohort of learners in policy and funding terms, and how that might best be reflected in the Bill, as it passes through the House.
Lord Puttnam (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on bringing forward a Bill to address an area which, for more years than I care to remember, has resisted every attempt to implement a coherent long-term employment policy. I am no fan of Dominic Cummings but, during his recent evidence to the Select Committee, he was precisely on the money in pointing out the lamentable record of successive British Governments to learn lessons from countries such as Norway, Finland and New Zealand —the noble Lord, Lord Storey, added Germany and Switzerland—which have successfully created well-thought-through skills and apprenticeship programmes. These policies have allowed many of them to race past us in offering appropriate pathways and opportunities for skilling and reskilling those for whom higher education was either unavailable or simply not all that attractive.
I have never been able to establish whether this is as a result of arrogance or ignorance but, either way, many sectors of our economy have been allowed to atrophy as a result of inattention and neglect. This has not been for lack of announcements, speeches or data; it is more to do with an inexplicable failure to follow through, fund and deliver. This Bill, if enacted with imagination and commitment, could prove a watershed. If the Government are serious about levelling up, they can be credited for at least giving themselves the legislative opportunity to prove it.
The Bill has the potential to become a vehicle for broadening and deepening apprenticeship schemes, for example by taking account of the mobility of freelance employment, but that should be the beginning of its ambition, not the end of it. While I broadly agree with the employer-led concept, a potential Catch-22 situation needs to be considered, whereby established incumbents find themselves favoured over those wishing to take advantage of new business opportunities, most especially in areas with diminishing growth prospects. I am sure the extension of things such as maintenance provision, as a counterbalance to embedded regional inequalities, is something the Minister will want to touch on in her response.
While well-intentioned, I am concerned that this Bill and the White Paper on which it is based are nowhere near imaginative enough in their interpretation of what future employment patterns might look like. Regrettably, when it comes to implementation, we invariably seem to find ourselves working from a 10 year-old playbook. I cannot have been the only person dumbfounded that “creativity”, having featured in the Secretary of State’s introduction, failed to reappear in either the Bill or the Skills for Jobs White Paper that preceded it. When she responds, could the Minister please explain this omission or possibly tell me that I need my glasses tested?
Creativity is an entirely sustainable asset—one the UK has proved to have in abundance. In my judgment, it will prove the great differentiator among ambitious, competitive nations in the digital world. Surely it needs to be incorporated into every aspect of the way that we think about skills and training for the future. For example, far too little thought has been given to how we cultivate greater agility in the workforce by encouraging transferrable skills across sectors. The White Paper described the need to develop
“higher-level technical skills in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths”.
Of course, STEM and digital skills should be at the forefront of how we plan for the future, but they have to walk hand in hand with creativity if we are serious about developing a truly successful economy.
A good example of this thinking comes from Demis Hassabis, the founder of the AI company DeepMind. He put it this way:
“Some of the most interesting areas of science are in the gaps between … subjects… What I’ve tried to do in building DeepMind is to find ‘glue people’, those who are world class in multiple domains, who possess the creativity to find analogies and points of contact between different subjects. Generally speaking, when that happens, the magic happens.”
The successful growth of companies such as DeepMind should serve as a warning regarding the dangers of a purely employer-led focus, because history suggests that incumbents are a lot less likely to spot where the next big opportunity will come from.
I find it unsurprising to learn that, in 2018, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended that education in these subjects should include the humanities, arts, crafts and design. That recommendation has now been rolled out right across North American universities. For example, 100% of undergraduates at MIT, one of the world’s leading technical institutes, study the arts, humanities and social sciences. In fact, those subjects now account for 25% of their overall class time.
Collaboration between a variety of talents and skills has to be the right way, possibly the only way, to ensure the success of a balanced competitive workforce—the kind of workforce that the Bill seeks to create. There will also be an overwhelming need for departmental collaboration. Can the Minister assure the House that the transition of support from the DWP into this new skills framework will be made as uncomplicated as possible? It will need to be if the Government’s levelling-up ambitions are to be fully realised.
Finally, on this vital issue of collaboration, the idea that improved provision for further education can be resourced only at the expense of higher education is to totally misunderstand the challenges of the global economy. Far from being in competition for resources, these two sectors should be encouraged to move in lock-step, as never before. This point was powerfully made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and I completely support what he said. In my view, ensuring a successful partnership between further and higher education represents exactly the type of approach that is needed to make this legislation a success. I do not see this as a political Bill so, given a thoughtful Committee stage and a listening Government, we have the opportunity to send a valuable and uncontentious piece of legislation for ratification in another place.
Lord Shipley (LD) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her introduction to the Bill which, in many respects, I welcome very strongly. It has a sense of direction; the Government have clearly been listening to the advice of employers and the education sector. I very much look forward to hearing shortly the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome.
I cannot recall a time when there has not been a skills shortage or a skills crisis. This is inevitable because the needs of our economy are constantly changing. However, there is a substantial difference today: the needs of our labour market, post Brexit and post Covid, are changing quickly. As an example, we do not have enough technicians or engineers, and there is a need to develop greater strength in digital skills at all levels. As a further example, the pandemic has resulted in a reduction in the number of apprenticeships available. There are not enough generally, nor at degree level.
The lifelong loan entitlement could be a boost to both individuals and employers, but I hope that, as the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said, the Government will not try to bolt it on to the current system of funding and will instead make it part of a reformed system of financial support. The Government’s forthcoming consultation should reflect the fact that loans by themselves may not be an attractive proposition to some adults, as indeed the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, pointed out a few minutes ago.
Recent government policy towards the FE sector and part-time higher education has led to both being treated as the poor relation of traditional academic learning. Funding per student has been lower in FE for too long. There has been a very worrying drop in participation rates in part-time higher education in recent years, caused by funding cuts and the HE loans system. It is vital that the silos between higher, further and adult education and apprenticeships are reduced. Further education and higher education should not have to compete against each other for resources. The ambition should be a unified skills system with expansion of the FE sector, apprenticeships and part-time higher education, with parity of esteem between these and traditional full-time, non-vocational academic routes.
I would like to make a point about progression routes. I welcome national skills funding to help adults have free access to level 3 qualifications through some 400 courses, but there is no mention of any qualifications below level 3, yet it is these which promote progression to higher levels. Six million adults were identified in the Augur review as not having qualifications at level 2, yet the total number of adult learners has been falling in recent years. If we want people to reach level 3 and above, more of them need to achieve level 2. I wonder if the Government have a plan.
The Government’s ambition to put employers at the centre of skills development is welcome. But the test of the new approach will come in how effective the forecasting of future requirements is for industries that are in the early stages of development. Long-term investment in the green economy, for example, will require new skills sets at all levels. As the Bill progresses through the House, I hope we can examine whether the Government are putting in place structures that will effectively identify skills needs five years and 10 years ahead and how our education system as a whole should adapt to deliver them.
I spoke earlier of the lifelong loan entitlement, and I understand that a consultation will start this summer, but secondary legislation can be expected only in 2024, with implementation in 2025. Given the impact of the pandemic, what is happening over the next four years to ensure that all those who need to access training can get it, in addition to meeting the needs of employers post Brexit? Does it have to take so long—four years—to effect this change?
The lifelong loan entitlement may be a crucial part of future plans, but a lot more detail is needed on the extent of entitlements, on the funding of modular systems, on repayment terms, on whether modular study will be permitted for all subject areas or just those defined by the Government, on whether students can get the same support for their costs irrespective of their method of study, and on whether existing graduates can use it to retrain.
Finally, I hope that we will take a close look at how local skills improvement plans will work in practice. It will not be the first time that such planning has been localised. That said, I wonder if the Government have a plan for bringing together the information from all the local skills improvement plans to shape national workforce planning? It will be extremely important to do so.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
I welcome the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome.
Baroness Black of Strome (CB) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is a great honour to have been appointed to your Lordships’ House and to speak here today for the first time. I draw the attention of the House to my current employment in higher education. I am sure that most noble Lords will remember only too clearly how they felt in those first few days and how grateful they were for the generosity of spirit shown to them by others. That paying forward of grace is a testament to the strength of community in this House and its all- embracing welcome, and I am both grateful and humbled to be a beneficiary.
There are so many who deserve my unreserved thanks for their kindness, from the justifiably legendary doorkeepers to the police officers and Black Rod, and indeed all staff and departments—including those in digital services, who have been unbelievably patient with the shortcomings of this technological dinosaur. I also wish to extend my thanks to Garter, who was somewhat relieved when I chose the simple “Strome” as my territorial designation, rather than the more complex Gaelic, “Tomnahurich”. I am so very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, for their support and guidance when introducing me to the workings of the House, and to my noble friend and mentor Lord Patel, who has always held my deepest respect and gratitude for the kindness shown to me in the 15 years that we have known each other. I recognise that I still have much to learn from his vast experience in this House, but I hope that I may contribute on matters within my domain, which might include science, justice, education, death and dying, anthropology, child protection and forensic investigation.
Many of our skills are transferred and learned from those closest to us, whether they are family, friends, teachers or mentors, and we cannot predict which will stand us in the best stead. Arguably, my most practical life skill was acquired at the age of 15, when I studied for an O-grade in secretarial studies. It was a class comprised exclusively of girls, who were all taught to touch type. I could never have predicted the benefits that an average of 95 words a minute would bring in the digital world that now dominates our lives.
A second skills set was taught by my father when preparing the rabbits, deer and pigeons that he would bring home for my mother to cook. It led me comfortably to my first job as a teenager, working in a butcher’s shop, and then to honing the dissection skills required by a human anatomist and to the practical skills and strong stomach required by a forensic anthropologist, whether working to identify the deceased in the aftermath of the war crimes in Kosovo or processing the mass fatalities of the Asian tsunami.
A third skills set was developed in the meeting rooms of the Women’s Institute, the Rotary and the Round Table, learning how to convey science to the public in a manner that was concise yet understandable. This served me well in the UK and at the International Criminal Court, where I have given evidence as an expert witness to assist juries in their deliberations.
My current role as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University affords me the great pleasure of working closely with our further education colleges, universities and civic partners, to embed the value of education in our local and regional communities. Operating as we do in an area of multiple deprivation, the partners are acutely aware that the lifelong acquisition of skills is critical to the development and future workforce placement of our young people.
I am supportive of this Bill in raising and promoting the quality and place-based relevance of post-16 skills provision, although I inwardly flinch at the partitioning of education into traditional age and sector-based silos. In my experience, education can be an effective route out of poverty, but it requires all parts of the ecosystem to work in progressive collaboration. We sometimes forget that our life habits and ambitions may be hard-wired long before we even enter secondary school, yet the discussions about “workplace” and “skills set” still come towards the end of that educational pipeline. Perhaps that is too late to have any realistic hope of breaking the educational poverty cycle that has become a generational and geographical norm for many.
Perhaps I may share a brief example. The Morecambe Bay Curriculum is a 25-year, educational, place-based community commitment. It is a civic collaboration between local residents, pre-school, every primary and secondary school in the region, Lancaster & Morecambe College, the universities, the local city authority, the NHS, the LEP, the chamber of commerce, businesses, employers and the Eden Project North. Many young people from this region come from homes with no prior experience of formal post-16 education and no experience of regular paid employment that leads to skilled jobs. If we wish to break that cycle, we need to sow the seeds of change much earlier.
Children as young as five will undertake little work experience placements with local businesses, developing a sense of pride in both belonging, and contributing, to their “place” while learning that each aspect of their own educational journey can evolve seamlessly into the next. We aim through that programme to make post-16 education and the concept of a “skilled job” the norm.
The role of early intervention in the success of the uptake of skills-based learning, its translation into the local workforce and then into regional economic growth and regeneration requires sustained commitment from all component parts. It will take the combined will of a joined-up community ecosystem to break the current cycle and educate those young people into skilled jobs.
I would simply request that, as we progress this Bill and focus, as we inevitably will, on a particular sector of our education system, we are mindful of changes that may need to be effected elsewhere if we are to maximise success. We will all benefit from a holistic approach, because strength and success lie with all our educational components working together seamlessly as an ecosystem—not just the colleges in isolation, but in genuine partnership with the schools and the universities.
In conclusion, it is an honour and a privilege to be a Member of this House and to be permitted to participate in its work.
Baroness Coussins (CB)
My Lords, it is a huge pleasure to follow such an outstanding maiden speech by my noble friend Lady Black of Strome. I am sure that all noble Lords will, like me, be in awe of her distinguished career and achievements. As a forensic anthropologist she has pioneered techniques of human identification both in the UK and worldwide which have helped bring people to justice. In the UK, her work on the sexual abuse of children marked a step change in the ability of the criminal justice system to identify paedophilia, and internationally, her work in Kosovo after the atrocities there, in Thailand after the tsunami and in Iraq have brought her work worldwide renown.
Glancing through her illustrious career, I have to say that I was pleased to discover one small thing we had in common: we both took Saturday jobs at the age of 12. I was a humble shelf stacker but, as we have heard, my noble friend had the foresight to get a job in a butcher’s shop, where she clearly learned things that would be useful in her later career in forensic anatomy. I know that my noble friend will bring her insight, knowledge and experience to this House and that we will all benefit from hearing from her. She is most welcome in your Lordships’ House and I congratulate her once more on her excellent maiden speech.
On the Bill, I declare my interests as co-chair of the APPG on Modern Languages and vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, and I hope that the Government and employers will take advantage of the opportunities this Bill offers to act on what they know about the importance of language skills—namely, that the UK’s deficit in foreign language skills damages the economy and inhibits recruitment and employability across all sectors and at all levels. Languages are not just an academic discipline but a vital technical skill that can boost export growth and social mobility. Foreign language skills are in particularly high demand in finance, IT, transport, fashion and hospitality.
There are marked regional disparities in the UK’s skills base. Regional weaknesses in the take-up of foreign languages correlate with regions of poor productivity and low skill levels. In the north-east in 2016, for example, only 43% of pupils sat a GCSE in a language, compared with 65% in inner London, and this gap has been widening year on year. Employers say that they are unhappy with the foreign language skills of school leavers and graduates in the UK and are increasingly forced to recruit from overseas to meet their needs. If the Government are serious about social mobility and levelling up, a boost to language skills would be a jolly good place to start.
We need the business community to step up and be very clear when it comes to its input in shaping the new local skills improvement plans to insist that language skills are needed and must be included. Research suggests that the UK economy is losing out on well over £50 billion a year in lost contracts because of a lack of language skills in the workforce. Viridian Solar, an SME based in Cambridgeshire that makes solar roofs, told me:
“Foreign language skills are important”
for “global export growth.”
Another Cambridge company, i-Teams, helps the next generation of science-based entrepreneurs develop business skills and has so far helped 90 start-ups. Its founder told me that
“language skills are a key advantage”
and said that innovators
“need to be able to communicate both through language and across cultures. It cannot be assumed that all the people with whom they must work … can speak English.”
And Alchemie, a large company specialising in sustainable technology for dyeing fabrics, has found:
“Language and cultural knowledge is very important to Alchemie in its expansion into China. A basic knowledge of Chinese for business purposes would be really useful for staff members. Further training or coaching in that is really important.”
New research released only last month by Aston Business School confirmed that language skills are a key driver for SME export success, revealing that firms making use of language capabilities are 30% more successful in exporting than those that do not. Export sales, growth and profits are all significantly increased by hiring people with language skills and cultural intelligence, language training for existing staff and investing in professional translation services.
Employers’ organisations and sector groups are also on board. The CBI’s chief UK policy director has said that better foreign language skills are
“critical to increasing the UK’s global competitiveness and to ensuring young people have the high level of cultural awareness that supports a successful career.”
The tourism sector trade association UKinbound asked its members what barriers they faced when recruiting a British national and 60% responded
“insufficient skills for the role”,
including foreign language skills. Some 23% of respondents to a British Chambers of Commerce survey said that German and Mandarin will be important to their business in the next five years, and 20% said French and Spanish. The BCC says the extent of our languages deficit is sobering, with the biggest language barriers in the fastest-growing markets. It wants to see commercial export skills at the heart of business education in both further and higher education, with fully integrated foreign language skills as part of that, as well as in schools and workplace training.
Finally, the Bill refers to FE colleges, but local skills improvement plans should also seek to build links with university-based training opportunities, and university language centres rather than modern language faculties are the best place to make connections with community colleges. So will the Minister ensure that no regional language skills gaps remain as a result of the new improvement plans and say what, if any, oversight or indeed override the DfE will have to correct any such gaps? Are the Government prepared to provide leadership and encouragement to local business communities to follow through on all the surveys, research and sector examples I have quoted today, perhaps by using the power the Bill will give the Government to issue guidance to support the development of the plans in order to ensure a place for language skills? Will the Minister also spell out how the DfE will be working with BEIS on this, given that department’s international remit and extensive networks, and experience of language skills? I very much look forward to her reply to this and my other questions.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her extraordinarily fine maiden speech. I am looking forward to learning a lot from her in a lot of different areas.
I too welcome this Bill. It is an important bit of legislation, possibly the most important for the levelling-up agenda in this Parliament. I have a few reservations and would appreciate reassurance on a couple of points from the Minister. I declare my interest as a visiting professor at King’s College London, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and chair of two private education companies Tes, and Access Creative College, a provider of further education training for the creative industries.
There is a huge amount to welcome in this Bill, but for me there are two features in particular: the lifelong loan allowance, which is being put on a statutory footing; and the introduction of modular funding, which a long-overdue reform that will bring valuable flexibility into our student funding system. However, I have some concern that the Treasury may water down the rocket fuel of the promised skills revolution. A number of noble Lords have already hinted at where this might arise. One of my concerns is around the rigidity of the current system that prevents people from studying at an equivalent or lower level than an award that they already have, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said in his excellent speech. To my mind, that makes a nonsense of the lifelong loan entitlement. I appreciate that the Government are consulting on it. I hope that the results of that consultation come out the right way, because if we stick to it, it will prevent people from reskilling effectively.
My other area of concern is around what I see as the Treasury’s persistently flawed conception of how to measure value for money in post-16 education. The idea that you can measure the worth of a course by the proportion of the student loan that ends up being repaid is far too reductive. If we stick with it, it will stop us from properly funding what are socially useful and valuable but lower-earning professions and paths in life. We already see hints that this is the prevailing view and that it will continue to be the prevailing view in the list of some 400 qualifications that are eligible for funding in the lifetime skills guarantee. That list of 400 qualifications is still too restrictive. As far as I can see, it does not include any creative arts courses, for example.
My concern, as this Bill makes its way through this place and the other place, is that when the section lands on the new student finance system, the Treasury uses this legislation’s fine print to further defund those areas of provision that have lower rates of repayment associated with them, through a mix of potential policy tools, including student number controls by subject, higher minimum entry requirements by subject and a variety of others, most notably the potential for much lower fee levels for those courses.
Those are all big risks as this Bill makes its way through this place. I would appreciate any reassurance that the Minister can give on that front. I am particularly concerned about what it would do for the provision of creative education courses. It is highly likely that, if we go down that path and defund courses on that basis, it will starve the supply of talent into some of our most promising industries as an economy—performing arts, creative design, creative computing, music technology, music performance and so on. That would be a sad outcome for us as a society and it would also be an economic nonsense. These were industries that were growing at five times the rate of GDP before the crisis, and we should not do them the disservice of starving them of talent as we come out of it.
My sense is that if the Treasury wants to save money, and I understand that it wants to invest money in other areas or education systems to support catch-up elsewhere, which is entirely understandable, I recommend that it looks at lowering the repayment threshold on the student loan as a far more sensible source of much larger sums of money. The Higher Education Policy Institute, for example, has calculated that lowering the repayment threshold to just below £20,000 from the current level of £27,295 would save £3.8 billion and reduce the proportion of the student loan that is not repaid to one-third, from current levels of over one-half. That seems a very sensible and more fruitful area of reform for the Treasury to look at.
Time is running out, but I welcome this Bill. It is a really important Bill. I congratulate the Minister and the Secretary of State for bringing it to Parliament. I will certainly be supporting it. However, it is clearly something of a down payment on a much bigger set of changes that, ultimately, we will need if we are going to have a joined-up system of post-16 education and skills. We have a rather bewildering array of regulatory and funding bodies out there in the landscape: the OfS, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, and so on. The time is surely coming, now that through this Bill we are introducing much more flexible systems of funding, for us to move to a joined-up system of regulation and funding for all post-16 education.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Non-Afl)
My Lords, like other noble Lords, I welcome this Bill and endorse the Government’s decision to give technical education the profile and priority that it deserves.
Unlike other noble Lords contributing to today’s debate, this is not an area on which I am a policy expert, but I hope to make a relevant contribution as someone who chose a technical education at the local FE college after leaving school at 16, and who, armed with that technical training, professional pride in my skills and an aptitude and enthusiasm to keep learning on the job as I progressed in my career, became Leader of your Lordships’ House. I have had the great privilege of working for and alongside, and of being supported by, some brilliant people with high academic credentials, and together we have been an effective team. I endorse the plea of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, not to create new divisions or false distinctions between people who are talented and gifted. I feel I must put on record that I love highly educated people. I am not looking to do anybody down here, least of all the noble Lord, Lord Willetts.
However, one of my concerns about the consequences of successive Governments prioritising university and getting a degree as pretty much the only route to an increasingly narrow definition of success is the lack of diversity in leadership roles across politics, Whitehall, the public sector more broadly, business and the media. In other words, we have the rather conflicted situation now where those in positions of real power or influence, regardless of where they may have started in life, have all followed the same university path and therefore tend to define success in their own image. Therefore, while I welcome this Bill and applaud all that the Government are doing in this area to promote skills and further education colleges, those of us who make decisions which affect everyone else still have work to do in how we think about technical education or those who do not go to university.
As we consider this legislation and look beyond it, I will highlight three big traps that we must avoid falling into. The first is seeing technical education as a consolation prize for those who, in the minds of graduates, do not have the potential to be like them. Some people learn to know; some of us learn to do. Some of us learn best by observing and absorbing rather than by studying theories. Non-graduates are often more strategic in their thinking because they rely on what they can see to understand and identify the problem that needs fixing for things to work better. Therefore, it is important that we recognise the value from this difference to achieving our collective goals if we are to see results which benefit all of us.
The second trap we need to avoid is assuming that anyone who follows a technical route is not ambitious, or to dismiss as unimportant what some people might see as modest ambition because it does not involve holding power over other people’s lives. We are all different. What is important in my mind is encouraging pride and professionalism in doing a job well, whatever it is, and showing respect for that when we see it.
The final trap is assuming that people who follow a technical route, or indeed anyone who does not have a degree, cannot become senior leaders in business, politics, the public sector or anywhere else. We have to get out of this mindset that somehow leadership is all about knowledge—it is not. It is about being able to understand and see the bigger picture and to communicate in bold strokes. That does not come from having a degree; it comes from experience, and a desire to engage and understand the world through the eyes of people who see it differently from us.
As one of your colleagues who is technically trained, who started out with modest ambitions and who has grown in confidence and ability as I have gone from job to job, I offer that perspective, with all due respect to those who have followed a different path and those who will be charged with implementing the results of this legislation. In addition to what the legislation seeks to achieve in improving technical education, I hope that through our scrutiny and debates we as parliamentarians change our perception of the potential of those for whom not going to university is the best route to their own definition of success, and that we aim to achieve much greater diversity in positions of power.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black. In this House, we always enthusiastically congratulate those who have made their maiden speech. On this occasion I thought hers was absolutely excellent, and I would like her to develop the origins of why she and I are technical dinosaurs—because I am, and she declared her objection to technology as well.
I strongly welcome the Bill, and the fact that the Secretary of State and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary have joined us. I welcome it because it shows a genuine commitment to further education, adult learning and the development of the technical education and learning process for the future. I fear, however, in the very short time I have, that I am going to have to concentrate on the things that worry me, rather than the things I am enthusiastic about such as the lifelong guarantee, the commitment to professional development in further education and private providers.
The reason I am concerned is that the opening speech by the Minister highlighted divisions. She was clearly following the script, if I might put it that way, because she is not like that at all. The divisions that grew up five years ago on the back of the referendum are almost embedded in our politics. The divide described this afternoon between town and city does not really exist. The divide between further and higher education does not really exist. The divide between the academic and technical does not really exist. I am very self-assured, as you all know, so there are rarely times in my life when I hear a speech and think I could not do better than that. This afternoon, however, the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was much better than the one I am making. It made many of the points I would have wished to have made.
Let me very quickly touch on my journey, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, touched on hers. I got my qualifications at evening class and day release and eventually, after six years, went to university. I did a vocational qualification on day release, and my A-levels in the evening. I saw no difference between those; I saw no reason why we should divide them. I see no reason why we should not be in favour of T-levels but strongly in favour of retaining BTEC national diplomas, which got my eldest son to Liverpool University and later to a master’s degree.
I see no reason why we should not learn from our own history. In metallurgy in Sheffield, it was the factory worker and the researcher who put their heads together. Now we have advanced apprenticeships with the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre at Sheffield University; I should have declared my interest in it. We have the commitment of Sheffield Hallam University with the Sheffield College and other colleges in South Yorkshire, and Huddersfield University with Barnsley college of technology—where I once taught in further education, and where many people, like my elder sons, got their education through FE. There is no divide: it is an artificial concept which I think is extremely dangerous. Please do not let us go down that route.
T-levels are one thing, and organising for people will not go down one route for life is another. This is why the appeal by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, in relation to what is happening with artificial intelligence and robotics is so important. These are not qualifications for life any more. There are no jobs for life. We need to return to learn on a continuing basis. I tried to instil this in the learning-age policy paper over 20 years ago when I was Secretary of State, when we set up learning and skills councils at local level that were designed to engage employers, colleges and individuals. Unfortunately, my own Government then centralised that and eventually killed it off. We have been around this road before. Some areas have very strong chambers and employer engagement. Some lack the capacity to do it. That is why what the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, said at the beginning of this debate is so important—that we draw people together to be able to do the job well.
In the meantime, do not defund courses that are valuable to learners, do not claw back money from further education as is happening at the moment, and do not defund or claw back money from residential colleges such as Northern College in South Yorkshire. Instead, let us join together—because we can on the Bill—to make this a really exemplary piece of legislation. Let us go forward in unity to offer people the education that they need at the time that they need it, and do so on the basis that they will progress through life in very different ways from where they started.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is one of those debate where I feel a degree of sympathy for the Minister, not only because she was nice about me when she started speaking, but because she may acquire a sore neck from having to turn around to answer people on her own Back Benches.
The noble Lord, Lord Willetts—he has clearly had enough now and is running away; I could not resist that, sorry—set a very high bar for us. He also made many of the points that I would have started with before my main point here, which is about special educational needs. The primary one is that we are going through part of a continuum, and that we are putting in place artificial barriers for further and higher education. That does not really work. Secondary school education cannot be seen as removed from this as well; it is part of a continuum. Where people start and how they go through is affected. The original block of their educational experience is going to affect the way they come through this. As my noble friend Lord Storey started by saying, if they do not get better career guidance, they will carry on with the same types of intervention, powers, hierarchies and activities they have always had, because that is the way you do it—that is the way you carry on. No doubt that is an important factor.
If we are to build up T-levels at levels 3, 4 and 5, replacing the status this sort of thing had a few years ago—or a few decades ago; I forget how old I am getting—we have to make sure that parents know they are career choices that will get people employed and make them a valid and interesting career, and we have to guide them through it. That will require real investment in those giving that advice. They have to be in the secondary schools, or in the initial phase that connection has to be made. It does not matter what is being given; if something becomes a secondary option, it is downplayed —end of.
To declare my interests, I am chairman of the company Microlink, which deals with assistive technology. I am president of the British Dyslexia Association. I am dyslexic and a user of assistive technology. I have not misspelled a word in years, but I have occasionally put the wrong one into many a message via voice technology and then not checking it. Many here will have suffered hearing that, I am afraid.
If we are to get the best out of all our students, we have to start dealing more coherently with special educational needs. At the moment we have a savage fight to get identification. Quite a while back, councils stopped putting £100 million a year into contesting people who wanted to get education, health and care plans. They lost 85% to 90% of those cases. We have a ridiculous system where the graduated approach we are supposed to be bringing in with the plans is not working. People are not getting identified because of the system.
What the Bill can do for the majority of those with special educational needs is make sure that those with moderate needs or those who are not identified are being picked up and offered the support that is easily available to them. Everybody’s phone, effectively, does voice recognition, so why do we not use voice recognition as a perfectly valid way of getting through an English test for those with dyslexia, dyspraxia or one of the other conditions? It is established in our lives. But no: someone who cannot do this has to take a spelling test.
I refer back to the hours I have inflicted on this House on the English test for apprenticeships. If you want to read all of it, then masochism is probably a part of your life, but this is something we should be adapting. There is a clause in the Bill on teacher training; we need to ensure that teachers can spot these conditions. Dyslexia is only one of the ones available: ADHD, dyspraxia, higher-functioning autism—they are all there, and that is just neurodiversity. How are we going to spot these conditions for people where it is not an absolute and who do not have the tiger parent to get it identified? Are we going to make sure that we can do this to get these people through the system?
We have a model to support this for level 4 and 5 qualifications requiring independent skill. It is called the disabled students’ allowance, and it has all the institutions that go with higher education, such as information capture—the sort of stuff we are doing now, which is being recorded by people using this for Hansard—which is now a given in higher education. Most of the colleges that run higher education courses will run through levels 4 and 5. Can we make sure they are all integrated—it is not that big an ask—so that somebody who cannot take notes from a lecture given as part of a course is presented with the information they need to study? If it is in an electronic format, they can get it into a verbal format. Voice to text and text to voice are very old hat now: how many people read books in the form of audiobooks?
We are not asking for the world here. These sorts of changes help, and they also help those who do not have these problems or are not on these spectrums. Can we make sure that this is integrated into our approach? If it is not, we will make life needlessly difficult. Please let us not get sucked into the idea that only higher needs need to be paid attention to, because that is a small group. It is those who are just failing and continue to fail that we should be giving some thought to.
Lord Patel (CB) [V]
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington. It is an enormous pleasure to add my congratulations to my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her brilliant maiden speech. She is undoubtedly a world leader in forensic science and its use in the criminal justice system, and in forensic anthropology. I have known her for many years. “Tenacious” and “determined” are words I associate with her. She tried to recruit me once to help raise funds for a new mortuary in her department. I declined, so she set up a competition between 10 crime writers: the first one to raise £1 million from their readers would have the mortuary named after her or him. She raised over £2 million. Her newly unveiled portrait in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh will, I wager, become the most talked about portrait among viewers for three reasons: its size—it is big—it’s title, “Unknown Man”, and the various images within it. I have little doubt that the noble Baroness will make a huge contribution to the House, and I wish her well.
I declare my interests as Professor Emeritus at the University of Dundee and as a former Chancellor there. I support the principle of the Bill and congratulate the Government on bringing the legislation. I am also pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, is taking the Bill through your Lordships’ House. I say this because I witnessed her passion for and commitment to improving the lives of disadvantaged young people through creating opportunities for education and skills training when she was a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility.
My comments mainly relate to the need for education in STEM subjects. The Bill sets out government plans to produce a skills revolution and to introduce flexible loans, and a promise to strengthen jobs. The intention is to drive up opportunities, reduce ethnic disparities and narrow pay gaps, all of which is welcome.
Simply offering more further education and training courses alone will not deliver on the levelling-up agenda. Young people need clear advice and guidance on how to access courses, what it will cost them and what is on offer. They will need to be able to see at first hand what kind of jobs are available. Key to all this is the need for high-quality careers advice for young people and adults—an area where the Bill has very little to say, despite the acknowledgement in the Skills for Jobs White Paper that careers provision is an important element of the overall education system.
EngineeringUK, together with seven other STEM and careers organisations, highlights this in its recent report, Securing the Future: STEM Careers Provision in Schools and Colleges in England. It finds that schools and colleges struggle to deliver STEM careers provision to many of their young people. Time and funding are cited as key barriers by careers leaders surveyed for the report, with 70% saying that staff time was an issue and 46% saying lack of funding was a barrier.
The report also finds that the digital divide that has affected young people’s learning throughout the United Kingdom since the start of the pandemic has also affected STEM careers activities in schools and colleges. The report found that 68% of schools with above average free school meals eligibility said that a lack of access to technology and the internet was a barrier, compared with 36% of schools with below average FSM. I hope that my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox might say more regarding the digital divide following her committee’s fantastic report on the subject.
Going back to a lack of careers advice, will the Government commit to publishing a fully funded careers strategy alongside the Bill to help unlock the skills reforms in the Bill and build on the Skills for Jobs White Paper? It sets out the Government’s blueprint for reshaping the technical skills system to better support the needs of the local labour market and the wider economy, with local skills improvement plans being the key component. Clause 1 encapsulates the Government’s plans to deliver on the above. With a fast-evolving labour market, effective local skills planning is important to identify specific skill needs across the country, including demand for skill needs in the engineering sector, the wider STEM-based industry and the economy.
Real-time labour market data is important for ensuring policy reforms to education and skills and emerging sector needs. I would welcome more clarity about how the local skills improvement plans proposed in the Bill will feed into national workforce planning, as has already been mentioned. How will DfE and BEIS work together to ensure a strategic approach to addressing the skills gap? How will information within local skills improvement plans help shape and inform national industrial policy and workforce planning? How will the Government use the reforms in the Bill to identify and respond to low-density regional skills needs important to the overall strategic direction of the UK, such as specialised engineering skills?
I realise that the Minister may not be able to answer all my questions today; she may agree to write. I look forward to the Committee stage of the Bill.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
My Lords, I had a good education; what I have made of it is perhaps a different matter. Sixty years ago, I was taking my A-levels and S-levels. At 17, I left school and went to work. I have said that I have no regrets about that, but I would not recommend it.
It is perhaps relevant to agree with the delightful maiden speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, regarding the great advantage my wife had—along with my noble friend Lady Stowell—in getting secretarial skills. How I miss the ability to take shorthand and to type. How I miss the digital tools that many noble Lords feel embarrassed by not having to hand and that the current generation has. But it will please the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, that I did go and work in Holland and learn Dutch.
I am a fan of this Bill. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for introducing it and for us to be able to talk about it. It obviously derives from the Skills for Jobs White Paper, and we all know that there is—and I am not given to hyperbole—a real crisis in skills in this country. It is having an effect on productivity in our industries and service industries, and at every level.
In my view, localism is the key, and the Bill draws on that. We know that resources for further and technical education vary enormously at local level. I believe that the employer-led LSIPs are an important factor in addressing this problem, and I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport—I am sorry to see that she is leaving the Chamber at this moment, as I disagree with her. I believe that employers will guarantee that the resources, the buildings and the trainers and teachers are in the right place. This whole strategy will have a huge benefit from employer participation in deliberating on the employment of assets.
Perhaps I can deal with practical aspects of the Bill; I will concentrate on my own experience as an employer. It will not surprise noble Lords—knowing that I am a horticulturalist and a farmer in intensive horticultural production—to learn that many people working in that industry, in both the field and the packhouse, are seasonal workers. The whole business of Brexit has revealed the flaw in this strategy and the need for a skills base in horticulture and intensive agriculture. We need skills training and skilled workers, and we need automation in the field and the packhouse because we can no longer rely on this skilled workforce. Who speaks for these people? Who speaks for seasonal workers in getting skills? That is why this Bill is important in giving employers the opportunity to make sure that they have these opportunities.
I also have another interest in that I am the group leader on the visitor economy section for the Midlands Engine APPG. This is another area in which seasonal work is very much the rule. Take the seaside strip of Lincolnshire—Skegness, Mablethorpe, Cleethorpes and that area—where as many as 40% of people are, in some way or another, employed in the seasonal economy based on recreation and leisure. There is no harm in that—there is nothing wrong in it—but we ought to realise that they too need opportunities to train and to find alternative out-of-season employment, which might well be to their advantage. Who speaks for them? I like to think that at least I do so, here today.
If we are to build back better, we need bricklayers, plumbers and engineers—all the practical people whose absence from our daily lives has only to be witnessed by anybody trying to get any construction work done in their home or factory. The need for training in these basic skills, which have largely been forgotten, is essential.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I first join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her maiden speech. Not only was it an excellent speech but she gave us a glimpse of her background, which is so fascinating that, had I been in charge, I could have let her go on for ages and listened to more of it. I know it will be a very good background for the contributions she will make to our debates in future, and I wish her well.
I also join others in generally welcoming this Bill. A lot of people have said that we have not done enough about skills before; that is why we welcome the Bill. We need to be really careful about this. We have tried to do a lot about skills, but we have never got it right—there is a big difference. Over the last 30 years, 70 pieces of legislation or government interventions have tried to make our skills provision and training better than they are. Anyone here who was a Minister would possibly say, as I do when I look back on my time in office, that they are not satisfied with what was able to be done on the skills agenda. Doing something for the first time is good but it is different from trying to get it right this time. That is how I will approach my contributions to this issue as we go through.
Two things have been done wrong in the past, and they were referred to by my noble friend Lord Puttnam. One is a lack of persistence: Governments have started along this track, then dropped it. Secondly, it has never been a priority for money; they have given some money but never enough, and lessons can be learned there as well.
I want to say briefly—this has been touched on by my noble friend Lord Puttnam and the noble Lord, Lord Johnson—that the division between creative and technical is a false one. If ever in our history there was a time when we could separate creative subjects and the humanities from technical subjects and the sciences, it is not now. We need to drop that language and those thoughts, because success will lie with the people who can bring those things together. That goes to the argument about the lifelong loan entitlement, which I broadly welcome. I have two questions on that. The first is that I am not sure for which subjects the grant will be available. I hope it will not exclude creative subjects, because that would not be good for the agenda before us.
I welcome modular learning with some caution: it is not as easy to organise or do as linear learning. Something we have done wrong in the past with vocational studies is to make it modular but not give students and learners the opportunity to link one module with the other. The joins are where it goes wrong, so my advice to the Minister is: watch the joins and mind the gap. We have to make sure that people can move from one module to the other.
I want to spend my time on the local skills improvement plans, which I gather are going to be called LSIPs, so that is how I will refer to them. The Government have said that employers and businesses are at the centre of the creation of local skills improvement plans. I cannot disagree with that; I cannot say that they should not be at the centre or not be listened to. They are important, but I am worried about how much emphasis the Government are placing upon the leadership of employers and businesses at the centre, at the heart, or in the driving seat of these LSIPs, depending on which words you choose to use. Although they are important to this plan, so are others.
Learners are at the centre of what we want to do, as are providers and our locality and its needs. The local economy in that area is also at the centre, and whoever can guess what the skills of the future will be also needs to be at the centre of these LSIPs. It is a more complicated Bill than just being about putting employers and businesses in the driving seat. At the moment, I am not sure that the Bill really recognises that complexity or gives some indication of which route the Government will wish to take. That is what the Committee and Report stages will be about. I hope that we will have the opportunity to flesh it out then.
We are asking employers to become partners in the education process, and that is a big ask; it is not their core job. It is not what they worry about in the middle of the night or get up in the morning thinking about. We are asking them to become educationalists while they have other worries, especially now; they have other things to prioritise. I am not sure what happens and what powers the Government will have when it goes wrong: when the businesses do not lead us in the right direction or take a back rather than a front seat.
The challenge here is to get the partnership right between the providers and employers. I worry that the Bill is written almost as a customer/provider relationship. There is an invitation to employers to lead the show and a legal obligation on the providers to provide the learning courses. The Government will be taking a power to sack colleges or hit them over the head if they do not deliver on the local plans. It is not imaginative or creative, or the sound basis for a meaningful partnership, so I want to look at that as we go through the Bill.
I know that having too many people in the driving seat can lead us nowhere; I understand that, and that leadership is important. But we want partnership with a purpose in which everyone has a role and a responsibility, and everybody needs to be held accountable in that. How we write that into the detail of the Bill will be vital in making sure that the wish across this House for the Bill to be a success comes to fruition.
Baroness Janke (LD) [V]
I too offer my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her impressive and extremely entertaining maiden speech. I am sure that we are all looking forward to her contributions to our work.
Like other noble Lords, I welcome many of the proposals in the Bill, particularly to make it easier for adults and young people to study more flexibly, allowing them to space out their studies, transfer credits between institutions and take up more part-time study. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has just said, the principle of colleges and employers working together underpins much of the Bill. It rests, too, on the leadership of employers. My experience leads me to agree very much with the issues she identified. Yet it is important that this is a co-operative and fully accountable partnership. Will the Bill create a duty on schools and universities to collaborate with colleges and employers in the development of skills plans, so that the training on offer meets the needs of local areas and of the national economic strategy?
As a former council leader, I have seen that the actual experience can be very patchy: stronger in some areas than others. In sectors where there are many SMEs the employers’ input can be limited, for a variety of reasons. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, sometimes employers are not well represented by particular employer organisations which vary in strength in different areas. There needs to be better accountability and understanding of the difficulties involved. The present system gives no incentive for proper co-ordination. Instead, it focuses on delivery of qualifications rather than on the long-term strategic priorities.
I would welcome a better understanding from the Minister as to how she sees this working. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, also said, I am sure that we will want to explore this area during the passage of the Bill. I also emphasise that local authorities should be key players in any future collaboration. Many people face great difficulties in accessing education, whether part-time or full-time. They may be care leavers or have special educational needs, as my noble friend Lord Addington mentioned, or not in education or training. They may be long-term unemployed people. They face difficult barriers and would need access to a whole range of local services to help them to be ready for work or training.
Local authorities are of course essential in providing these sorts of services. They link with adult education provision and other support, such as mental health, housing, debt management, support for parents and childcare. Their involvement will be essential to prevent those most in need of support and training being left behind. As a former adult learning tutor, I know that the role of local authorities in adult and community provision has been a bedrock, providing many adults with opportunities to train and upskill. For many adult learners, adult education is the first step that they take. It gives them confidence and so often inspires people to take up further learning opportunities. The current budget has been halved; I very much support the LGA proposal to reinstate this budget as a fundamental building block in the provisions of the Bill.
It is also important that financial support is considered essential if poorer students are not to be penalised. Flexible and part-time learning is essential for potential learners. My own experience is that, although I went into higher education when I left school, I subsequently took a degree with the Open University. I experienced for myself the great difficulties that one has in trying to keep up the commitment to learning while either bringing up a family or working and needing to prioritise earning a living. These can really undermine the motivation of people who are trying and gain qualifications or skills or, indeed, add a new dimension to their lives through study. I underline here the need to revisit the benefits system so that those acquiring new skills will have their needs fully taken into account and not be excluded from benefits.
I also emphasise the importance of longer-term strategic goals. Anyone involved in education over the last 20 years has experienced constantly shifting grounds in how the system operates, in its objectives, and in the local and national priorities. We need to recognise some long-term objectives and ensure that our training and education objectives and skills acquisition link fully to the economic strategy and its requirements. In recent years, many of us have found the unhelpful element of competition in post-16 provision counterproductive, with an overemphasis on delivering qualifications rather than focusing on strategic and local long to medium-term priorities.
So I hope the Bill will ensure that the providers of post-16 education and training are aligned and not preoccupied with short-term expediency and quick fixes that do not really take us further forward. We certainly welcome the Government’s interest and ambitions for skills and lifelong learning, in particular the strong collaboration of cross-providers. The new lifelong learning entitlement is a huge step forward, but there must be access to all, and we must address the skills shortfall of so many citizens if we are to face the challenges of the future. We support much of the content of this Bill and look forward to taking forward these issues through its passage.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, it may be worth noting that the Back-Bench advisory limit of six minutes per speaker will allow us to finish at around 8 pm this evening.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox of Soho, is appearing remotely. We can see her but we cannot hear her.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
We will go to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am very sorry that we have not been able to hear the chair of the Covid-19 Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox. I hope we will be able to hear her contribution at some point during this debate.
I draw the House’s attention to my role as a director of the Careers & Enterprise Company. I am also delighted to be one of the FE ambassadors that my noble friend the Minister mentioned earlier on. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her excellent maiden speech. I am entirely in agreement with her that one of the most useful skills I have ever been taught is to touch-type.
I welcome the Bill, as other noble Lords have done, and also the White Paper on which it was based. It has confirmed and elevated the importance of further education, and it is a clear commitment not only to boost skills but to strengthen our economy and increase individual productivity. In the time available I will focus on the involvement of employers in skills needs and, if there is time, say a little bit about the lifelong learning entitlement.
The involvement of employers in identifying skills needs, which is in Chapter 1 of the Bill, I entirely support—and there is wide support for this, as we have heard—the aim for there to be a more strategic relationship between employers and further education and training providers. However, I have spoken to Loughborough College locally, which is already working with more than 700 employers—and I am sure that many other colleges would say the same. So there is a feeling that perhaps what is being asked is not always new but is being pulled together in one place for the first time.
Other noble Lords have mentioned the local skills improvement plans, which will obviously be very important. But, as my noble friend the Minister said, they are really only being piloted in certain areas now. I hope that I can prevail on her, and through her to the Secretary of State and to the skills Minister, that in the course of rolling out the local skills improvement partnerships, we should not undo what is already there.
As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, careers education is of critical importance. It gives a strong underpinning to the Bill; although it is not mentioned in the Bill, it was mentioned in the White Paper, where there was a commitment to careers hubs. Careers hubs have improved careers provision by 92% in the two years since they were started. They are a central plank of the White Paper, they are set up and delivered through the Careers & Enterprise Company and they are designed to bring together employers, schools, colleges, apprenticeship and training providers and others aligned to national skills and local jobs. They have already established themselves as anchor institutions in local areas, not just as careers programmes in schools and colleges but also as the link with the local economic strategy, because they are tailored to be responsive to local economic need.
I hope that Ministers are aware that careers hubs offer the Bill three things. The first is that they are the key route for local businesses of all sizes into schools and colleges. I know from my time both as a local Member of Parliament and as Education Secretary that that is often the missing link. Schools and colleges want to work with local employers and businesses but are unsure how to make those connections. I entirely take the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, that those who run businesses are not educationalists—but many of them obviously have a great interest in working with young people and learners locally. But again, bridging that gap into schools and colleges is often tricky, and that is where the careers hubs come into force.
The second way in which careers hubs can underpin the Bill is by renewing the emphasis on vocational and technical learning and building the right level of skills into our economy—hubs can be an enabler for these reforms—and the third way is by helping the Government’s levelling-up agenda. So I am pleased to see that employers and providers are being directed to work with the Careers & Enterprise Company’s network and careers hubs when establishing local skills improvement plans. Can the Minister say in her remarks at the end how the Government intend to keep careers hubs at the forefront of their thinking as they develop trail-blazing local strategic improvement plans and roll them out across the country?
I turn briefly to the Bill’s definition of “employer representative bodies”. It would be helpful now—or certainly in Committee—for Ministers to explain who they think the employer representative bodies are. This ties in with the future role of the LEPs and what their responsibilities will be. Clause 2 of the Bill talks about an employer representative body as being
“reasonably representative of the employers operating within the specified area”.
“Reasonably representative” is very broad, and I wonder who will decide how the members of an employer representative body are indeed reasonably representative.
I also draw attention, as others have done, to the local need point. Of course, exactly as my noble friend the Minister said in her opening remarks, we want people to stay in their local areas, to have jobs and to improve their prospects locally. There is also a need to identify future jobs—particularly in relation to future technologies, for example, or industries such as the growing industry around green jobs—and emerging skills needs and to see those on a national level too. Again, I hope that the Minister will be able to clarify how the local skills improvement plans feed into a national overall skills strategy and how that is then communicated back to the colleges and providers.
Briefly, on lifelong learning entitlement, as others have said, it seems somewhat confusing. We recognise that many people will have several careers now. The Bill is trying to address the long-held policy ambition of helping people to reskill throughout their working lives. A big argument advanced by the Association of Colleges is that level 3 should also be eligible for the lifelong loan entitlement. So can my noble friend say what the process will be for determining which courses will be eligible for the lifelong loan entitlement?
We welcome this Bill across the House, I am sure, and I hope that we will be able to enhance it as it goes through future stages.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
I hope that I can call the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox of Soho.
Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]
The irony clearly weighs heavy when I have wi-fi issues. I apologise, but the internet completely collapsed in my home—fingers crossed that it works this time. You would think that I would have been able to crack it, but I appreciate that I am the least qualified person, perhaps, in many ways.
I too commend the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her maiden speech. She is an absolute heroine to many of us. I can still see in my mind’s eye her visceral explanation of cutting into flesh for the first time, which may haunt me to my later days. In fact, she might have tempted me to swap careers had I not already become a Member of your Lordships’ House. That is one important dimension of this interesting and important Bill that I shall talk about as part of my role as chancellor of the Open University.
As noble Lords will know, because many in the House today are graduates of the OU as well as honorary graduates—we even have a wonderful ex-chancellor in the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, as well—the OU is the largest university in the UK. It provides part-time learning through all people’s lives and careers. Perhaps less known to people is the fact that 70% of OU learners are also in full-time work, which is why this Bill is so important in unlocking the relationship between work and vocational technical training and between employers and study.
Furthermore, as I referenced in declaring my own interest in perhaps changing careers, there are some concerns from the Open University about the way in which this is constructed—particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, mentioned in his earlier remarks, there are concerns about the lifelong learning entitlement and how it is structured. The OU would be extremely keen to see it structured in the most creative and imaginative way possible to prevent too much rigidity around learning requirements and to make sure that we really allow for part-time learners who may be in work who may want to go sideways in their career. It is unclear yet to me whether, if I became a forensic anthropologist as a Member of the House of Lords, that would be down, up or sideways. But jokes apart, we must make sure that people are enabled to take sideways and forward leaps and, potentially, upgrade their skills but slightly downgrade what might be seen as their natural career prospects. The Open University has concerns around the LLE requirement and how it is structured, and I would be very keen to hear the Minister’s response on this.
Similarly, the OU, as will be known to many Members of your Lordships’ House, has seen a collapse of more than 67% in part-time learners—not just for the Open University but in those going into higher education over the last decade. The Government themselves have recognised that this is cataclysmic for our economy, and we must make sure that we build back the capacity for part-time learning right at the heart of this Bill and put at the heart of it the importance of part-time learners for the economy and wider society.
I always joke in the OU degree ceremonies that part-time learners are no such thing at all. Normally, they are double-time learners, holding down a family and making sure that they also study. It can sometimes take five or even 10 years but, in all my interactions with OU students, they have been people dedicated to improving their learning through their career and the various ducks, dives, weaves and twists that life takes. We want to be clear at the Open University that this Bill will represent part-time learners very clearly—and, as I say, without too much rigidity about requirements, particularly in Clauses 14, 15 and 17. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to that.
The Open University is one hat that I wear very proudly, and I am thrilled to be its chancellor and champion of all the types of learning that it represents. I have also recently chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on the long-term implications of Covid. As other noble Lords have alluded to, particularly my noble friend Lord Patel, we have done work recently to look at the hybrid nature of our world right now. As some noble Lords may know, I have a long-standing interest in digital skills and, surprise surprise, that came out very clearly from our work. So I am pleased to see a recognition that we need these technical skills in this Bill, but I hope that it goes far enough and fast enough.
As I think the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, very articulately declared, we cannot design for the here and now; we need to look ahead to the next decade and think about what those skills will constitute and look like. We have found consistently that not only is there a lack of skills right now for employers, there are also huge concerns among employers about what skills will be available in the next decade to take on the challenges that we have not yet even managed to quantify or think about. We in our committee report called for a closer partnership between government and employers to tackle professional qualifications and digital skills to help, for example, a nurse or anybody dealing with any kind of front-line service to have a deeper understanding as part of their professional development. I hope that we take again an imaginative and creative view of what that looks like.
I end by reiterating the point made by my noble friend Lord Puttnam about Demis Hassabis and the importance of creativity and imagination. I am always struck by the words of Sugata Mitra, the great tech entrepreneur, who did a huge amount to open up learning and access, who said that learning is the new skill, and imagination, creation and asking questions should be at the core of skill. We must bear that in mind as we take this Bill forward; we must not get too stuck in rigid ways of thinking about skills, as they will shift immeasurably over the next decades. It may be best to equip people with the ability to ask questions that they want answered and equip them with the ability to personalise their studies through their whole lifelong journey.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]
My Lords, what a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, particularly in her last comments, as part of what has been a really interesting debate, with an excellent maiden speech in it. I remind noble Lords of my interests in the register relating to education, particularly my work with my clients, Purpose and 01-Edu.
There is of course much to welcome in this Bill but, sadly, as my noble friend Lord Blunkett said, time prevents me from dwelling on those elements. However, it is welcome that the Government are prioritising adult skills and to hear the Minister stress the need to focus on the needs of those not going on from school to university but going on to learn other skills. The combination of globalisation, new technology and climate change mitigation means continued rapid changes in the demand for skills. The World Economic Forum projects that almost half the skills needed for employees to work effectively will change in just the next four years—so deskilling is rampant. It is therefore the urgent responsibility of every Government around the world to transform their skills infrastructure so that it is highly flexible and to anticipate as well as react to the needs of the labour market, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said. Skills policy is now as much about changing in-work skills as it is about helping those at the start of their working lives, which appeared to be an assumption in the Minister’s opening speech.
Here in the UK, decades of underfunding of an overly complex skills system, persistent low productivity, Brexit uncertainty, and widening regional prosperity gaps make an emphasis on this all the more important. The Institute for the Future of Work’s recent report, The Amazonian Era, highlights recent trends, with worker management platforms rapidly deskilling people, from the warehouse floor to hollowing out supervisor roles—deskilling by algorithm. Yet this Bill seems to assume that skills qualifications act like a ratchet and that, once you have got a level 3, the only way is up, to level 4 and beyond. But skills are not like a platform computer game moving up through the levels; they are less Super Mario and more Snakes and Ladders. Personally, I would advocate the development of individual skills accounts over the loan system advocated in this Bill, using a mix of funding from the Treasury, employers and individuals, rather than what is being proposed.
In my remaining time, I want to focus on the diverse needs of three very different groups: the deskilled, the always reskilling, and the perennial professionals. On the deskilled, can the Minister confirm that the local skills improvement plans will fully integrate with welfare-to-work provision? In 2009, when I moved as a Minister from the DfE to the DWP, I struggled to get effective integration of skills and welfare policy—perhaps my weakness. But one department measures success in qualification outcomes while the other does so in job outcomes—and they work to very different timeframes. That has to be fixed through changes to the universal credit regime.
We also need an all-age careers advice service—and I enjoyed the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan —that aligns with a business advice service. For example, the move to a net-zero economy will create huge opportunities as we transition to new ways of living in our homes and at work. We will have new skills systems and businesses growing to meet those opportunities and anticipate these changes rather than just reacting to them. The fact that Wrexham College only recently became the first FE college to offer training in electric vehicle maintenance is truly shocking. For this group—the deskilled—the qualification ecosystem needs to be more dynamic.
Then there are those sectors, especially in the digital economy, that will always move too fast for qualifications to keep up. I am currently working with Nicolas Sadirac and 01 Founders, which is opening its first school in London later this year to train full stack software engineers. This proven system does not charge tuition fees, is a two-year course and has virtually a 100% employment rate at an average starting salary of over £40,000.
This model—no prior attainment, applying by playing an online game, no teachers and no qualifications—freaks out policymakers because it explodes all the foundations of what we understand about good education, but employers are desperate for this talent because it works. It has a highly dynamic curriculum and does not wait for qualifications to adjust to labour market demand. What is this Bill doing to support more innovative skills training like this, which is hardwired to deliver the shortage skills we need to grow successfully across the country? Does the Minister foresee funding skills measured by job outcomes as well as qualification outcomes?
Finally, I must say something about the training of professionals and here I will focus on teachers. The Government are currently engaged in a review of initial teacher training. Last week they quietly published a document titled Delivering World-Class Teacher Development, which does not mention universities once. It is part of a move that appears to be one of statist centralisation where they want to control the content and method of teacher training to fit Ministers’ judgments on what is best.
This is a grotesque attack on the academic freedom of universities that may destroy the very system supplying teachers into our schools. It betrays a view that teaching is little more than a craft skill, rather than a profession that needs both continuous academic and practice-based development. Can the Minister reassure me, and the many ITT providers I am talking to through the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Teaching Profession, that there will always be a place for universities like Oxford, UCL and Sunderland in teacher training? Our adult skills infrastructure must meet the needs of great professions like teaching, as well as traditional trades and emerging jobs. In doing so, it must fully respect the role of academic vocational training.
This is a really important Bill, but it is no more than a start. I look forward to trying to help improve it and I hope that Ministers are listening to the real-world reality of change and reflecting that policy thinking needs to change to take account of rapid deskilling and the diversity of needs we all face.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, for a fantastic and fascinating maiden speech. Secondly, I need to declare rather a list of interests. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, kindly pointed out, I have become an adviser on skills to the Prime Minister. I was a member of the Augar panel, which reported to the review of post-18 education and funding, and I am also a professor at King’s College London.
I am delighted that the Government are introducing this Bill. A system which offers all adult citizens the chance to obtain high-quality education and training is not just fundamental to our economy; it is central to our future as a country committed—I hope—to opportunity, second chances, openness and making the whole idea of shared citizenship a reality. I believe that the measures incorporated in this Bill are an important step towards creating such a system.
I have argued for many years that our post-18 education and training system is indefensibly lopsided. The gap in spending and the tension between higher education and vocational provision has widened and become even more entrenched. But the Prime Minister last year announced reforms in which two concrete objectives were set. I think these are fundamental, and this Bill will contribute to meeting them. They are about the need to bring higher and further education closer together, and about tackling the great divide which has opened up between the well-resourced and well-signposted opportunities for young people leaving school to go into full-time higher education, and the world of part-time and adult retraining—an area in which we used to be global leaders. As other noble Lords have already pointed out, the last decades have seen us go backwards in a way that it is vital we correct.
When the Augar review reported two years ago, the first recommendation we made was:
“The government should introduce a single lifelong learning loan allowance”
for adults. The Government accepted this and consequently are working quite hard to transform the whole student higher education funding system. The clauses in this Bill are only part of what will be needed to deliver the new system, but they are fundamental foundation stones for what I hope—and I know other noble Lords also hope—will genuinely transform the system of higher and further education in this country in a way that will be good for everybody.
As well as a very divided system of post-18 education, we have managed in this country to create an extraordinarily complicated one. This is reflected in the Bill, which contains a number of specific reforms designed to clarify and simplify. In my remaining time, I would like to comment on two in particular: the regulation of post-16 education and training providers, and the clauses which deal with education and training for local needs.
In 2017, along with other noble Lords, I was quite involved in the passage of the Technical and Further Education Act, which included provisions to protect students in the event of college failures. However, there were no equivalent provisions in the Act for independent training providers. The need to protect all students, trainees and apprentices has been evident for a long time. While the independent training provider sector contains many truly excellent, innovative and effective organisations, that part of our system and its overall reputation have been bedevilled by regular failures and scandals. In 2017, the Government declared they were unwilling to amend the Act then and there but would consider the issue. The mills of government grind slow, but they have considered, and what we now have proposed is a single unified system of protection for learners which I hope other noble Lords will join me in welcoming.
I will comment very briefly on the proposal to create local skills improvement plans. These have attracted a lot of attention this afternoon and I look forward to further comment and discussion. As many noble Lords will be aware, our college network was in large part created by local businesses and employers. Colleges therefore responded very directly to changing local business needs because they talked all the time to individual local employers.
Over the years, those organic links have in many places withered away. Of course, there are a number of fantastic colleges, but it is very much individual principals and employers who make them as excellent and responsive as they are. Far too often, colleges—for very good reasons —spend most of their time and energy focusing on their relationships with public funding bodies and not with local employers. The White Paper’s fundamental goal of bringing employers right back in and making this part of the infrastructure seems to be absolutely correct.
Clearly, just creating LSIPs is not going to revolutionise everything; there are other important reforms in the White Paper which will, for example, give colleges far more autonomy. But putting employers in the system in a structured way—not via other public bodies where members are selected and appointed centrally, but as a group of local employers—is a necessary part of creating that responsive system we all need.
It has been an enormous pleasure to speak today. I hope that the Bill and our discussions on it will take us forward into a new era and we will look back on this as an important and major part of what this Government have done for the skills, education and future of this country.
Lord Stunell (LD) [V]
My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her outstanding maiden speech. I look forward very much to meeting her face-to-face very soon.
This country’s skills deficit is enormous, and it hits a wide range of sectors and industries. Despite periodic reforms, practically every employer in each sector says that those who complete their formal training are still not job ready. At the same time, there is a huge pool of people of all ages with ambition and drive who would love to have the opportunity to develop their skills and transform their employment chances, and who are frustrated that there is no suitable route for them to follow. While I sincerely hope that this skills Bill will succeed at last in joining up the supply and demand, noble Lords will perhaps forgive me if my hope is not entirely matched by my expectations.
I want to outline the dire gap that there is between ambition and reality by its application to the construction industry. The construction industry is strategic for the delivery of practically every government policy. Whether it is free ports, new prisons, 300,000 homes a year, or 40 new hospitals; whether it is a mighty levelling-up agenda, or simply the vital overhaul of 20 million existing homes to make them fit for zero-carbon Britain in 2050; none of that can happen without a flourishing construction industry to deliver them. The ambition is there, but the capacity is not. I hope that this Bill will go some way toward bridging that gap.
Construction faces a desperate workforce and skills crisis. The Construction Industry Training Board says that an extra 217,000 people will need to be recruited in the next four years to deliver on the ambitious targets set before it. This is not about hod-carriers but about skilled tradespeople, professionals at all levels, and a range of completely new skills, some of which your Lordships might never have heard of before.
After the outflow of EU 27 workers from the industry post Brexit, we needed to at least double the output of new entrants simply to plug that gap. On top of that, however, we also need to train for the new skills required to deliver zero-carbon homes and to retrofit 20 million existing homes. We will need completely new roles, ranging from heat-pump installers and air-pressure testers to retrofit co-ordinators and energy managers. Your Lordships may never have heard of those job titles, but all of them were major bottlenecks in the delivery of the ill-fated green homes grant fiasco last winter. Now, the forthcoming building safety Bill will ratchet up another shortage, this time of fire safety engineers.
I am indebted to the CITB for sharing figures that show that, at present, about 100,000 people take up construction-related courses in the further education sector each year. The problem with that is that only 24% directly enter the industry, while another 16% take up construction-related apprenticeships. The remaining 60% of further education construction starters do not reach the construction workforce at all. It is even worse than that, as many of those apprentice starters do not finish their training, and by some accounts up to half of them also leave the sector. Therefore, out of every 100 trainee starters in further education, only around 30 finish up working in the industry.
And who exactly makes it through the training to the workforce? Some 84% are men. The industry has the most unequal gendered workforce in Britain, and only 6% of that workforce is BAME, about half the national proportion. There is plenty of evidence of the industry’s consequential problems: low skills at every level of activity. The stark evidence emerging from the Grenfell Tower inquiry shows that it is not just a shortage of good bricklayers that is the problem but capacity and competency from top to bottom. Poor productivity, consistently the worst of all our major industries, and very low investment in research and innovation, leads to a depressing spiral of poor quality, low profitability and multiple business failures.
I simply say to noble Lords that, in the construction industry, there just has to be a total rethink of the training provision, and that should include but certainly not be limited to: who actually provides the training; what that training is; who is going to foot the bill for the training; and how to make it attractive to young BAME people and to women. Those questions have to be answered first by the Government. This skills Bill has to be the next step towards putting training in the industry, for the industry, at the top of the agenda. Otherwise, every other policy target and best wish of the Government will certainly be missed.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of the Baker Dearing trust. I have four comments on this Bill. First, I welcome its proposals to create a skills plan for each town in the country. Secondly, it has missed the opportunity to revolutionise digital skills, which are the weakest part of our present education system. Thirdly, I am very concerned that this Bill could lead to the separation of technical education from academic education, a concern shared by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. Fourthly, I will move an amendment to make the Baker clause a statutory duty, rather than dependent upon ministerial advice.
First, I am glad to see that skills plans will now emerge for every town in England, reflecting the needs of the local medium and small-sized businesses. These plans will reveal the skills that the FE colleges will need to teach. It will certainly put industry at the heart of education. This is exactly what university technical colleges have been doing for the last 10 years. The governing body of a UTC is controlled by the local businesses and the local university. The university comes in to teach, and the local businesses bring in projects for the students to work on in teams. I thank the Government for adopting the UTC principle of combining technical and academic education.
Secondly, all the evidence that we are getting in the Select Committee on Youth Unemployment reveals that there is a dramatic shortage of digital skills. Businesses, students and even the unemployed all say that they suffer from not having digital skills. In a survey of 1,000 companies big and small, ranging from nuclear to pubs, 76% said that they lack digital skills, notably data analysis with AI, and this restricts their growth and reduces their profits. We have also been sent evidence—and this I find totally surprising—that, since 2015, in schools for 11 to 16 year-olds, 40% fewer students are being taught about computing than six years ago. That is a staggering statistic in the digital age; it beggars belief. What the Government need to do is to provide all students with a laptop and an internet connection; computing should be taught from the age of 11 for at least one hour a week and that should grow each year. GCSE computing science should be a compulsory subject. There are 75,000 computer GCSE entries: it sounds a lot, but it is 1.5% of the total and fewer than those who take Spanish GCSE. This will need a revolution in teacher training, for all teachers should be expected to acquire digital skills.
Thirdly, I fear that this Bill will separate technical education from academic education, so that there is virtually no connection between them when they should be going hand-in-hand. At 16, school leavers can go to FE colleges, start apprenticeships or go to a provider of technical education where their training will reflect the needs of local employers, and that is good. However, less than a quarter of young people who start at an FE college at 16 will progress to level 4, a critical age where the skills gap really begins, and an insignificant number will then start a higher or degree apprenticeship.
Most students at 16 will stay on in the sixth forms at their schools, and the heads of those schools will tell them that the only way that they can get into university is to stay in school and study academic A-Levels. There are no engineering A-levels and very few technical ones. Technical education between 16 and 18 barely exists because the courses are costly and the teachers are few, so it is not surprising that many 18-year-olds leave with no employability skills. No wonder that 16 to 18 unemployment is now 14.4% and likely to rise.
Evidence presented to the Select Committee on Youth Unemployment is that employers do not want just exam results but employability skills, such as having worked in teams, made things with hands, designed things on computers and engaged in problem-solving. They are looking for adaptability, creativity—which the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, mentioned earlier today—and imagination. This will not happen if technical and academic education are separated in two separate silos—one marked “technical and vocational” and the other “academic”. What happens then to the parity of esteem? The Government should act to ensure that this educational apartheid does not come about.
Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]
My Lords, I would like to start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her interesting and fascinating maiden speech, from which I personally learned a great deal, and, equally, by saying how proud I am to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, because his ideas and what he has achieved in education policy are also very interesting and have taught me a great deal.
For many years, I have been heavily engaged in the lifetime learning debate, which is increasingly important because of the longevity of our population and the impact that technology is having on employment. Added to this, we have just lived through a pandemic which has caused considerable disruption to the labour market, resulting in changes that are going to be very long-lasting.
I want to congratulate the Government on the reforms to post-16 education that this Bill seeks to implement. As the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, has already outlined, this Bill will give employers greater input into skills development and ensure that there is stronger regulation and consistency of qualifications. This Bill also responds to the current skills gap in the economy and places duties on education and training providers in specific areas to co-operate with designated employer representative bodies to develop, review and revise plans.
We live in a society where people are living longer and a great many of us are working much later in life than previous generations were able to do. It is projected that someone entering the workforce today will change careers five to seven times during their working life. We know that many jobs may significantly change or become obsolete because of technology change. It is also likely that many children born this year will eventually end up in careers that, at present, do not exist. There needs to be significant investment in lifelong learning and a fundamental rethink of the way we deliver education. Our current school system, where compulsory education finishes at 16, increasingly does not prepare pupils for modern life in a labour market that is changing so rapidly. In the future, we will need most people of working age to participate—perhaps more than once and perhaps many times—in further education to keep up with labour market changes.
It is, therefore, disappointing that in the last 10 years there has been a 26% fall in the total number of people in England of all ages accessing undergraduate higher education. This has been driven by a significant decline in part-time higher education. Now, there are 67% fewer part-time undergraduate students in higher education than a decade ago. The Government have acknowledged that this is a problem, and this Bill is an important start in trying to reverse this trend.
However, in its current form, the Bill does not go far enough in reforming our education sector. There is an opportunity to ensure that the education system provides equal access and support for learners, regardless of where the learning takes place. Rather than creating a unified, credit-based funding system, the Bill creates separate funding systems for those who study module by module compared to those who study a full degree. Education of technical skills or qualifications should be given the same level of importance and respect, and there should be one funding system that does not separate them. Our society needs people to gain degree qualifications, and it is crucial that the Government do not undervalue our universities; apprenticeships and other technical qualifications are different and they teach different skills, but they are just as valuable and should be given equal status.
In a world where an 18-year-old leaving school today will likely work well into their mid-70s, or even later, and where the labour market is likely to go through significant change, investment in lifelong learning is crucial. This Bill makes an important start, and I support what it aims to achieve. However, much more needs to be done to support the lifelong learning education system that we are going to need in the future. I look forward to being a participant in this Bill, which aims to do just that.
Lord Layard (Lab) [V]
My Lords, we should really welcome this Bill, because, as we know, our country does a pretty good job with its graduates but a much less good job with the other 50%. If we are looking for reasons for the difference in the treatment of these two, we should look immediately at the different ways in which they are funded. If you are going down the academic—the route to university—the funding automatically follows the student. Any sixth form or university, therefore, has total freedom to put on a course and admit students, because it knows that if it attracts students, they will be funded, student by student. This system has produced one of the most dynamic learning systems in the world. The non-university route is totally different. The FE college or other provider has to contract, with the Education and Skills Funding Agency, for its budget year by year. The total budget is capped, and it is the Government, therefore—not the students or providers—who decide how many places there are in the sector.
Over the last 10 years, the result has been quite extraordinary. In the 10 years before Covid, the further education budget for people over 18 was cut, in real terms, by 50%. Even if you add in the funding for apprenticeships, the cut is over a third, while, at the same time, university funding has soared. The difference is just incredible. This situation and this system cannot be allowed to continue. Elementary fairness requires that we provide automatic funding for every qualified person, whether they go down the route to university or the route through further education.
This is the moment to make the change, because the Government have, to their great credit, announced that they plan a lifetime skills guarantee, which provides free education up to level 3, independent of age. The guarantee would be a historic landmark if it were put in the Bill, which it has to be. But there needs to be a mechanism to make sure that the guarantee can be implemented, because you cannot implement such a guarantee with the existing system of funding, which has no mechanism for reflecting the demand from the students.
The Bill therefore needs two more clauses: one to put the lifetime skills guarantee in law, and a second to state that by, say, 2025, all colleges and other approved providers should receive automatic in-year funding for any student covered by the lifetime skills guarantee. That is my main proposal.
I will end on the subject of apprenticeships. In the year before Covid, nearly one-third of all 18 year-olds were not in any form of education or work-based training. That is amazing—what a disaster. In my view, most of them should have been on a level 2 or 3 apprenticeship, or on a pre-apprenticeship course, but currently, there are simply not enough apprenticeship places to meet the existing demand from young people. It is not a cultural problem; it is a problem with the supply of places. Yet at the same time, half of all apprenticeship starts are not for young people but for people aged over 25, many of them long-standing employees getting top-up training that should be paid for by the employer. In addition, as the department’s own research shows, the benefit-cost ratio for apprenticeships for those aged over 25 is barely half what it is for apprenticeships for those aged under 25.
Many more of our apprenticeships have to be directed at young people. In my view, the state’s prime duty in education is to get every young person a proper start in life and a proper skill. Until we have done that, there should not be any apprenticeship money—or nearly none—for the over-25s. At the very least, there should be a legal requirement in the Bill that, by 2025, no more than, say, one-quarter of apprenticeship funding goes to people over 25.
This is a Bill with enormous potential to transform people’s lives and to improve our economy, but I believe that it needs at least three additional features. First, if it is to mean anything, the lifetime skills guarantee should be in the law; secondly, there should be automatic in-year funding for every student exercising the lifetime skills guarantee; and, thirdly, there should be a maximum limit of, say, one-quarter on the share of apprenticeship funding going to people over 25. I hope the Minister will be able to consider and support these proposals.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her excellent maiden speech.
I rise with some trepidation, as this is the first time that I have spoken in an education debate. My reason for doing so is to raise issues about what is not in the Bill. Although the Minister mentioned the green revolution in her opening remarks, she failed to note that there is not a whisper of reskilling to meet the challenge of climate change in the Bill itself.
Like others, I welcome the Bill. For far too long, lifelong learning has been seen as being a bit quirky. It must instead become an acknowledged norm. We must make it easier for people to upskill or reskill, so that they can redirect their efforts to where there are going to be opportunities in future developments as we reshape our economy to meet the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and threats to our natural world.
This Bill should represent a pivotal moment for supporting UK efforts to move to a prosperous zero-carbon economy and society. It could help with building public understanding and confidence and the behaviour change needed to meet net zero and to protect our finite natural resources. It could offer impetus for green jobs and the competitiveness benefit that comes with them. However, it does none of those things. It is silent on the massive skills shortages in sectors that will be crucial to building a greener economy. There is no provision to embed climate and sustainability considerations into the post-16 framework, despite strong evidence from business, educators and learners on the need to do so.
Given that there is unlikely to be further legislation in this area for some time, this Bill is where these gaps must be addressed. The Government are well aware of this, which makes it rather puzzling that there is a lack of even a signalling of their intent to address how they will join up their strategy to achieve net zero with the planned reforms of the post-16 and skills system.
The Government have a 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, which highlights the opportunity to unlock hundreds of thousands of jobs in the transition from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a more sustainable one—one that will support a just transition for workers. They have the Green Jobs Taskforce, set up jointly by BEIS and the Department for Education, whose remit is to support the UK to transition to a net-zero economy and deliver a green recovery by developing recommendations for an action plan for government, business, education institutions and trade unions to support 2 million good-quality green jobs and the skills that will be needed by 2030. The taskforce finished its work in April this year and has not yet reported. How do the Government plan to incorporate the task force’s findings?
Is it indeed the case that local skills improvement plans would be prepared without reference to strategic objectives such as the net-zero targets or the associated sector-specific strategies, such as the industrial decarbonisation strategy, the transport decarbonisation strategy, the energy White Paper, the nature strategy and the heating and building strategy? Can the Minister reassure me that these crucial underpinnings of how we build back better—in the Government’s own words—will be taken into account in LSIPs? If so, how will that happen?
It is unclear how the Bill will offer support to workers transitioning from industries such as oil and gas, or to fossil fuel heating engineers who will require retraining and reskilling. Current policy plans mean that workers transitioning out of high-carbon sectors who already possess level 3 qualifications would not be able to access the lifelong learning entitlement. Maybe the lifetime skills guarantee level 3 entitlement could be put on a statutory footing and extended to include subsequent qualifications where relevant.
The interrelated climate, biodiversity and Covid challenges have intensified questions from students, teachers and parents about the purpose of education. The learning approaches and analytics they need and want are those that are necessary to tackle global and local crises. This Bill is an opportunity to embed climate and sustainability aspects in both non-vocational and vocational 16 to 19 provision, as well for older adult learners. I hope that the Government, in later stages of the Bill’s passage through your Lordships’ House, will address the green gap within it.
Baroness Wyld (Con)
My Lords, I add my warm congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome—I am in awe. I also slightly wish that I had had my first job in a butcher’s shop, rather than packaging up the pear drops in the newsagent, then I too could have been an international high-flyer. It was a brilliant maiden speech.
I need to declare a few interests. I am a non-executive board member at Ofsted, from August I will serve on the Court of Newcastle University, and I had a temporary role on a committee at Ofqual towards the end of last year.
I of course welcome this Bill. As it so happens, my dad was an FE lecturer in Tyneside until his retirement. I remember very well when I was growing up meeting some of his students. We would bump into them in town or they would come round and thank him. A lot of them had come to education later in life and would talk about how their confidence had been transformed, so I am particularly pleased to speak on this issue today.
In my own maiden speech four years ago, I said that the pace of the technological revolution meant that the Government must use the tools they have to ensure that the labour market can adapt as nimbly as possible to an unprecedented pace of change. The Bill is certainly a step in the right direction, although there are areas I want to probe.
The Government are clearly passionate in their determination to level up and to ensure that we see a tangible link between skills and retraining and local jobs, and there is a very clear rationale for the local skills improvement plans. I agree that employers should be at the forefront of this. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister is aware that the pace of change in work- places means that we must think beyond the immediate jobs requirements of local employers, because we need to ensure a long-term employment market in which all can thrive according to their talent and hard work.
It is with this in mind that I gently ask my noble friend whether she can reassure me that we are definitely going far enough to empower local communities. Voters across the UK have just given a big vote of confidence in local leadership—for example, in re-electing local mayors. How will local leaders, with their in-depth understanding of demographic trends, existing skills, market trends and local infrastructure, be involved in the plans? Although I was unable to speak in the Queen’s Speech debate, I read it all back, and several noble Lords across the House expressed concern at a sense of “Whitehall knows best”. My noble friend absolutely has my sympathy, as she knows—this is an age-old dilemma for Governments who want to grip an agenda—but I would be grateful for some reassurance.
Like others, I turn now to lifelong learning. The Government are to be commended for the funding for level 3 qualifications, but I share concerns about those who could, in effect, be frozen out because they have an existing qualification. Does this not contradict the principle of retraining? As far as the loan entitlement provided for in Part 1 is concerned—the Government can consult on it—again, in principle all is good. It is absolutely right that we disrupt the status quo away from a one-size-fits-all approach, but I want to be sure as the Bill progresses that we really understand how gaining skills and/or retraining can work in practice, and do not make an assumption that policy and legislative change translates into easy decisions for, for example, a cash-strapped, time-poor 45 year-old.
There are lots of points on the detail that will need to be worked through, but there are immediately some glaring questions which others have raised and I share concern about, particularly regarding the equivalent or lower qualification rules, which my noble friend mentioned in her opening speech. Surely the pace of change we have discussed at some length today means that those with all sorts of qualifications will find themselves in need of retraining; again, I go back to the need for a nimble system.
More broadly, I support the Government’s optimistic message on lifelong learning and retraining but, ultimately, it is not me they have to persuade. We do not need a huge leap of imagination to understand how daunting the thought of taking on a loan in order to train or retrain can be to those who, through no fault of their own, have lost their job or have effectively been frozen out of the jobs market as a result of childcare pressures or caring responsibilities. Therefore, I urge the Government and employers—because I do not think government can or should solve every problem—to prioritise the social infrastructure that will enable more people to realise their ambitions and be part of a sustained recovery.
The Government acknowledge that the funding and loans system is complex. The more complex the system, the greater the need for clearer signposting. There is a lot of work to be done to develop a consumer- friendly system, particularly for the hard to reach. We are talking about lifelong learning, so we need to match that with a genuine understanding of the factors that affect decisions and resilience at every stage of life. But for all the challenges I have highlighted, I am absolutely confident that there is a way through. I look forward to working with the Government, who have my full support as they take the Bill forward.
Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)
My Lords, I welcome a Bill which focuses on lifelong learning and is committed to enhancing skills among the many young and indeed older people who do not go to university. I also welcome a Bill which aims to enhance the further education sector and support outstanding teaching as well as emphasising collaboration between employers and education and training providers, with the provisos made by my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley. Lastly, I welcome a Bill which seeks to correct the injustice of considerable financial support for students in universities against negligible financial support for students studying in FE colleges.
We undoubtedly have serious skills gaps compared to other OECD countries, with shortages of skilled employees in many sectors and low levels of productivity. This reflects too little investment by government and employers in alternative qualifications to university degrees. This has been particularly apparent in the last decade, when the coalition Government and the Conservative Government who followed them slashed further education, cutting colleges’ incomes by 50%.
Having welcomed the aims of the Bill, I turn to some of its limitations. As a piece of legislation, it is short on detail; it is a skeleton with too little flesh on it to allow us to understand how it will work in practice in key areas. This perhaps explains the long timescale for implementation, which will not be until 2024-25 for core proposals. The Bill reads a bit like a work in progress rather than the end of a detailed policy-making approach culminating—rather than beginning—with a piece of legislation. In a post-Covid world, action will be needed urgently and cannot be delayed for four years. This is especially true of training and educational support for the unemployed after furlough ends.
As others have said, the Bill’s implementation is also dependent on a large injection of resources, both in the short and the longer term. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has questioned whether these resources will be forthcoming and whether detailed calculations of the costs entailed have been undertaken. What is the total price of the Bill when implemented, and when will the Government start injecting new resources?
Let me illustrate this with respect to FE colleges. Their funding has been insufficient. They need more, and they need longer-term funding settlements. This much was recognised, as the Minister knows, in the White Paper. It becomes even more salient when their funding is compared with that of schools and universities —as my noble friend Lord Layard has already mentioned—since they are much less well off in funding per student. Recent research by the IPPR found that to keep up with demographic pressures and inflation, over the last 10 years we would have had to invest £2.1 billion more per annum in adult skills and £2.7 billion more in 16 to 19 year-olds in FE. The Government must provide for future needs and redress the long-standing past underinvestment. Are the Government committed to starting the process in the next spending review, and will they move to long-term, multiyear simplified funding? Without this, the colleges will not be able to develop their curriculum and the range of courses needed to meet the outcomes of discussions with employers on local skills needs, nor will they be able to pay the salaries needed to attract high-quality lecturers to develop and teach new programmes.
I want to pick out one important area for new courses that may not emerge from locally based identifications of skills needs but requires a national scheme. This concerns the green economy. The Government’s commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 requires a big shift to education and skills training to stall climate change. The Bill is a lost opportunity as it fails to link the Government’s goals on decarbonisation in energy, transport, and buildings, sustainable land management and carbon sequestration. Not only will those entering the labour force for the first time need to be prepared for green jobs, but many who currently work in fossil fuel sectors will need retraining. Why does the Bill make little or no reference to net zero? Should there not be a requirement for skills improvement plans to refer to national objectives on the green economy?
Lastly, I want to touch on the lifetime skills guarantee, on which the Government are still consulting. I am really glad that the gist of the Augar report’s recommendations on student support has been accepted, but the Government must provide more detail on eligibility, whatever the level or type of course the student is training in. Who will be eligible in terms of the range of subjects? I hope the range will be very wide and not narrow. They also need to consider, as others have said, how to support the maintenance needs of students from disadvantaged backgrounds—or are the Government just going to ignore this? There will be a great deal of work to be done in Committee in this area and, I fear, in many other areas too.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB) [V]
My Lords, I too welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, and congratulate her on an impressive maiden speech. I very much welcome this Bill, as it is clearly appropriate to revisit how current legislation is meeting the needs of students, employees, potential employees and employers, in a rapidly changing world. Let me declare my interests: I have been actively involved in encouraging the establishment of the institute for agriculture and horticulture, TIAH, which is under way, to help improve the image of the sector, provide signposting to quality-approved courses and CPD opportunities, and establish a national register. The support of Defra on this has been very welcome. I am also a fellow of City & Guilds.
The key objectives of the Bill are laudable and very welcome. Putting employers at the heart of post-16 skills policy has been the intention of previous policies. That is easily stated but more difficult to apply in practice. To devolve responsibility to local level, to have local skills improvement plans and employer representative bodies, must be the correct approach. What is unclear from the Bill is how this intention links to national skills priorities for each industry sector, how this relates to regional priorities—in particular, the involvement of local enterprise partnerships—and whether local employer representative bodies to be designated by the Secretary of State are intended to represent all industry sectors within a given local area.
Too often in the past, employer representative bodies have been dominated by large industrial employers and new high-tech sectors regarded as sexy and attractive. Other sectors, which are crucial but fragmented and characterised by SME employers, are sometimes not recognised and therefore not included. This is particularly true of the rural sector and agri-food businesses. They are not identified as sectors with skills gaps in the White Paper but are hugely important and provide exciting opportunities for those choosing a career. I hope the Minister can provide reassurance on this point and, in doing so, give a definition of “local”. Is local a county or parish definition, or something else?
The need to facilitate and encourage lifelong learning is vital; even more so as we emerge from the Covid experience, when many who have been furloughed or made redundant may have wished to retrain. A lifelong loan entitlement is an interesting concept and we await the consultation with interest. However, to wait until 2025 before this loan becomes available is regrettable. In my view, we will miss an important window, when such a facility would be very helpful. I hope that the Government have learned lessons from the student loan experience in determining the thresholds and timetables for repayment. I support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in this respect.
I will now comment on the changes to the regulatory framework proposed in the Bill. In my view, there is potential for significant confusion, as referenced by other Peers in this debate. Government support for vocational training and skills development, with T-levels et cetera, is very welcome. The ability of students to achieve degree-level qualifications as an alternative to attending university, with all its associated costs, must be correct. There is, however, some concerning potential overlap among the regulatory bodies. The Bill must be clear about the relevant roles of the Office for Students, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, Ofqual and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education—particularly the latter two bodies. Unless I have misinterpreted the wording, it appears that the new roles envisaged would create a two-tier and rather cumbersome regulatory approval system. The last thing we need is confusion, duplication and an additional load of bureaucracy. Within this new framework, it is essential that the authority of Ofqual and its accountability to Parliament are not diluted.
We also need to be aware of the administrative costs of regulatory oversight. I speak as a former chair of the Regulatory Policy Committee. Every new or amended regulator adds a new level of cost. The total cost of the suite of regulators in this space will be substantial.
I fully appreciate the need for nationally recognised industry standards. It is important that statutory control, as proposed in the Bill, particularly the role and influence of the Secretary of State, does not lead to overcentralised control or inhibit competition on skills provision in the marketplace.
I conclude by raising a concern about rural and land-based education. The Minister will be aware of the deep concern in the north of England about the proposed closure of Newton Rigg College in Cumbria. The failure to find a solution so far, and the possible loss of this geographically important college and its unique role in serving the needs of the uplands sector, as well as woodland and forestry management, is, I hope, not a signal that the Government do not regard rural as important. I left school aged 15 and the only formal education I received afterwards was in Northumberland, in what is now called a land-based college, very similar to Newton Rigg. As it was for the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, this was through evening classes and day-release courses.
As has been stressed a number of times today, we must ensure that young people and those who wish to retrain are well informed on course availability, including rural, land-based and agricultural courses, and have every opportunity to choose a career as a consequence. In the light of climate change, our net-zero ambitions, the importance of food security and opportunities within the rural economy, I hope the Government continue to regard this sector as important. I fully support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, on the need for seasonal workers in the agricultural and horticultural sectors.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. I begin, as many others have, by paying a tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, who made a fascinating and somewhat gruesome maiden speech. I look forward to hearing her again on those subjects and in more detail. I long for the day when this Chamber is full again, when we can have a proper debate, without too many colleagues Zooming in.
I will concentrate on one issue in particular, which is an aspect of the construction industry, about which the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, spoke with some passion and deep knowledge. I declare my interest as the founder and chairman of the William Morris Craft Fellowship programme and the first vice-president of the Heritage Crafts Association.
As many of your Lordships know, I am passionate about restoring buildings, particularly this one and Lincoln Cathedral, which I look at from my home every time I am back on the weekends or in recess. I am acutely conscious that great buildings, such as this one, Lincoln Cathedral and churches around the country—often focal points of their local communities—are in greater danger than they have been for many a long year. It is partly a consequence of the pandemic: many churches have been shut for months and have deteriorated. Many are bat-infested, which is a real problem that I have talked about in your Lordships’ House before. We owe these buildings to craftsmen and, more recently to crafts men and women, through the ages. One evening every month in Lincoln Cathedral, when we generally pray for those who have been benefactors or achieved great things, we pray for the unknown by name who created that great building. It is the same here and in every parish church in the country.
We founded the William Morris Craft Fellowship, named after that great pioneer—also a great socialist, but I will not talk about that—in the 19th century because of his dedication to the arts and proper restoration. We sought to find mainly young crafts men and women around the country who showed enormous potential but who had all been through a long apprenticeship. I say in parenthesis that one of the things that disturbs me about the Bill is that it does not confront “apprenticeship” properly. The word has been too loosely used in recent years, even attached to flower-arranging courses that last nine months—although I say nothing against flower arranging.
To master a craft is a long, arduous and challenging business. We were looking for those who had done so, who had shown great interest in kindred crafts—because you cannot be master of your own unless you understand others—and who showed the potential to be able to take charge of important sites. Over the last 35 years since we founded this fellowship, we have chosen well over 100 mainly young men and women who have gone on to do all manner of things, including writing notable books about the subject.
That is why I am so much in sympathy with my noble friend Lord Willetts when he talked about not having an artificial distinction between the academic and the vocational. I am a great believer in vocation. I consider that those of us in this place, and in the other place where I had the honour to serve for 40 years, are following a vocation to public service. It is desperately important that we encourage more and more young people to realise that by working with their hands they are also using their brains and helping to create or preserve things of great beauty.
I mentioned the other day, when we were we were talking about the Environment Bill, the importance of constructing buildings of quality today—I cited the Prince of Wales on Poundbury—but the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, was right: there are not enough who have mastered their crafts. I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, about the delay in the implementation of aspects of the Bill, but I hope there will be a real emphasis on encouraging young people to embrace real crafts and to help to create or preserve those buildings of beauty in which the history of our country is embodied and will continue to be built.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure as always to follow one of the interesting speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. However, on this occasion it is an even greater pleasure to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her maiden speech. I have a bit of history with her: her current position is pro-vice-chancellor for engagement at Lancaster University, and when I was chair of the council I—along with others on the panel—appointed her. It was the easiest appointment I have ever made in my life, and that does not reflect on the quality of the other applicants. Sue is tremendous and she will make a great contribution to this House.
We are talking today about a very serious subject: that of decades of public policy failure on Britain’s part in education. We have made multiple efforts: the technical schools of the 1944 Act that never happened; the training boards that Labour established in the 1960s but were then thought unsatisfactory; and the learning and skills councils established by my noble friend Lord Blunkett but then abolished. There has been no stability of approach and no stable institutions, and we have huge problems.
I first came across this issue when I worked with my noble friend Lord Mandelson at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills at the fag end of the Labour Government. We suddenly realised, based on the work of my noble friend Lord Sainsbury and his Gatsby Foundation, that we were facing a real crisis in technicians: if we were not able to have sufficiently highly qualified technicians, how could we be a successful economy working at the frontier of knowledge? We have heard today from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about the lack of training in digital skills and computing. Another worry is construction. This Government, rightly, have huge ambitions for public investment—we are raising it from something like 2% to 4% of GDP—but if we do not have the workers how are they going to fulfil those ambitions?
I welcome the Bill. I would not say that the present Secretary of State for Education was one of the Conservatives whom I most admire—I admire many Conservatives, by the way—but I praise him for taking up the cause of further education. I hope his efforts will have more success than the past decades of failure.
One of the most shocking things that I have learned in this debate is from my noble friend Lord Layard, who had enormous influence over the policies of the Blair and Brown Governments, when he said that today we are in a situation where one-third of 18 year- olds are not in any form of education or training. That is a recipe for a low-pay, low-skill economy with massive inequalities for decades to come. It is a recipe for social disaster in the world of knowledge, advanced technology, artificial intelligence and all that which we are moving into. We have to do something about it.
The funding of lifelong learning, the introduction of modular courses and efforts to secure greater employer involvement are all admirable. However, there are a couple of matters about which I worry. First, I worry that the whole approach is too centralised. I have always been very sceptical of the Skills Funding Agency, which holds the whole system in an iron grip and does not allow for local flexibility and initiative. I would like mayors and combined authorities working with employers to develop skills improvement plans on a localised basis in England. Secondly, the education system needs collaboration, not polarisation. I saw this at Lancaster, a very good university, where we had a very good partnership with Barrow’s college of further education to train graduate engineers for the Vickers yard.
Such collaboration between colleges and universities should be strengthened; we should not be trying to force the systems apart. That is very important. I worry that we are allowing ourselves to think that university expansion has reached its limit. We in this country are supposed to admire places like Asia. Well, in places such as South Korea something like 70% of children are going to university, so do not let us have any artificial limits.
I shall make a final point. We must be prepared to put public money into this. We can make choices about it, but I think personally that my own party’s commitment to abolish tuition fees is ridiculous, given the amount of money that we have to spend on other aspects of education. On the government side, the Conservatives have to recognise that further education and apprenticeships have been an area of massive underfunding. We need a joint commitment to create stable institutions and to provide the funding that will lead to a transformation in this field.
Lord Bilimoria (CB) [V]
My Lords, the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill represents an opportunity to create a more agile and jobs-focused skills system that is underpinned by local collaboration between further education, higher education and business. Strengthening collaboration with business can help us to identify and respond to skills demands through providing short courses that support employment and provide a talent pipeline for job creation.
For local skills improvement plans to be successful, they must leverage the input and strengths of businesses, along with further and higher education providers. Partnerships between colleges and universities can build clear pathways for people to learn new skills and support employers to recruit and upskill their workforce across the different stages of education and training. Local strategies should complement the work of LEPs and combined authorities in skills planning and harmonise the efforts of regional actors. A fragmented approach across different geographies risks confusing employers and leaving gaps in coverage.
The Government must go faster to support adult learning, ahead of the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement. The CBI, of which I am president, in its Learning for Life report found that, by 2030, nine in 10 people will need to upskill or retrain in order to prevent skills gaps emerging in the UK. Covid-19 has thrown this challenge into even sharper focus, with an urgent need to respond to increasing unemployment. The introduction of a lifelong loan entitlement is a positive step to enable more adults to acquire the skills they need to flourish. However, the 2025 timeline needs to be accelerated in order to support the reskilling that our economy demands. In the interim, the Government should work with further education and higher education providers to incentivise and upskill through more flexible, modular and bite-sized courses.
To build on the Bill and deliver on the priority of boosting adult education, the national skills fund must also provide support for individuals facing the biggest barriers to learning, thus supporting those with the greatest retraining needs. This will be essential to mitigate the job displacement being caused by the pandemic and will help the UK to seize the benefits of an increasingly digital and green economy. We need a levelling-up of opportunity for people to build their skills, but that will require significant business investment. Realising the Government’s ambitions for this Bill will require fundamental levy reform. Addressing skills gaps in our economy and giving everyone access to the education and training they need will cost approximately £130 billion over the next decade. That is what the CBI has estimated. The Government must create the right incentives to unlock business investment in every town, city and region.
In its current form, the apprenticeship levy serves as a barrier to investment in skills. It is distorting investment as firms try to make training fit awkwardly into an apprenticeship. Many firms are also reticent about investing in further skills support until they have spent their full levy fund. A flexible skills and training levy could unleash business investment in both people and workplaces, and could capitalise on the increase in employer demand for the more modular, skills-based provision that the Government are proud of. Does the Minister agree with that?
The Government have also taken steps to make it easier for employers to transfer funds to SMEs in their supply chains. While levy payers are keen to help smaller firms invest in apprentices, that does not overcome the wider challenges, including those faced by SMEs. The fundamental issue is that employers are being forced to address all their training needs via the apprenticeship route, leading to most levy payers underspending their pot of funds. We have reached an impasse with the Government, with the Department for Education pointing the finger at Her Majesty’s Treasury. Will the noble Baroness the Minister clarify the situation?
The Open University has said clearly that the Bill is a key opportunity to reverse the calamitous decline in part-time students in higher education in England. I hope that the Minister will agree that it is essential that this is not missed. I was proud to be the youngest university chancellor in the country at the time, from 2005 to 2010 at the Thames Valley University, now the University of West London. I saw at first hand the amazing number of mature and part-time learners, but that has sadly declined hugely now.
Professor John Holford, who was a fellow commissioner on the Centenary Commission on Adult Education that reported in November 2019, has made some really important points. He says that a Bill which focuses on skills and productivity is important, but post-16 education is also vital for many other reasons too. For example, it can help individuals and communities who are struggling to counteract loneliness and isolation in the wake of Covid. We need to recognise the wider educational role of the further education sector.
Schools and universities celebrate learning for vocational qualifications, but they also teach philosophy, ethics, art and music, which are the tools needed for active citizens. Further education alone is denied that breadth. Educational breadth is needed so that adult education can engage with those who are most in need. Education has often not worked for them in the past. They do not see education as a route to earning more. Adult education needs to be able to offer the kind of learning that will enthuse and engage people. Does the Minister agree? Very often, this will build their confidence so that they can go on to study further for a qualification to progress towards better work, improved health and well-being, along with other outcomes that benefit themselves and their communities.
This Bill offers no new support for students studying below level 3. That pathway is vital to the post-16 educational landscape. Without adequate support in the adult education budget for lower-level qualifications, many students will not be ready and able to take up the level 3 offers that are included in the Bill. Does the Minister agree with this?
The preparation of local skills improvement plans must involve wide consultation not just with employers but with professionals, including community adult education providers such as the institutes for adult learning, general further education colleges and local authority community adult learning representatives.
In conclusion, I am proud to be chancellor of the University of Birmingham. Earlier on, my fellow chancellor, the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, made such an important point in this debate. Far too often, people have a mindset that further education equals technical and vocational, while university education equals academic. Universities are also proud to offer vocational training and qualifications, whether that be in filmmaking or engineering.
The Deputy Speaker (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)
The noble Lord, Lord Flight, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I join in the congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, for a most interesting speech. I welcome this ambitious Bill and the lifetime skills guarantee, both for filling our skills gap and for the personal fulfilment it offers for many who were ill-served by secondary education or need to change direction. I declare interests as a former chair and current fellow of the Working Men’s College, chair of the Department for Education’s stakeholder group for Gypsy, Traveller and Roma education and other positions as listed in the register. I am also grateful for the extensive guidance sent to us on the working of the new plans.
While I very much support expanded provision of higher-level technical education, whose dearth has so much impaired our competitiveness and domestic standards for so long, I want to focus on provision for that large number who need a second chance by widening access to further education.
The fact is that, in 2019, 34.1% of students—over one-third—failed to get a standard pass at grade 4 in GCSE maths or English, the gateway to almost all forms of further education, and that is without counting the number who drop out of education long before the GCSE years. The noble Baroness the Minister will be aware that many Gypsy and Traveller children do this because of the relentless bullying and prejudice which many schools seem unable to eradicate. I am indebted to the Education Policy Institute and the excellent report, The Forgotten Third, for its analysis of the reasons for inadequate attainment. It shows the dismal outcomes in unemployment and low-level crime for this deplorably large proportion of our school students. Needless to say, lack of innate ability does not feature. These are young people who are in the main capable of earning a living and making a contribution to society. They need enhanced access to a second chance.
So, I have a series of questions. How will lifelong entitlement work for them? It seems to be available only for study at higher technical and degree level. How will skills acceleration and local skills improvement plans work for them? In relation to the obligation on colleges and designated institutions to make regular assessments of local needs, how will the colleges take account of school dropouts and school leavers not equipped for available work? It should be said again that there is no evidence that these young people are all lacking in intelligence, although some may have limited aspirations. What account will the proposed government intervention process take of these factors?
In principle, my points all concern access to vocational qualifications. The basic question is: what scope is there for funded initial or foundation courses to enable access to traineeships, apprenticeships and the rest of further education for non-achievers in English and maths? What provision is there for tutoring and mentoring, which are particularly important because of the Covid-related gaps in education, and how will careers advice and guidance on these and other access arrangements be made available? According to the Traveller Movement, Gypsies and Irish Travellers in 2017-18 obtained only 40 traineeships out of 17,700 and 180 apprenticeships out of 216,000.
It is also important for improved teacher training to include the cultural backgrounds of students, including the culture and heritage of that large group of minority ethnic students, not least Gypsies, Travellers and Roma children, who appear prominently in the numbers failed by the system. There have been many incidents of ethnicity-based bullying and prejudice in the further education sector for those few Gypsies, Travellers and Roma students who have surmounted the obstacles to getting in, and it may be similar for other students from minority ethnic backgrounds. Such training would not only be just but would increase the effectiveness of teaching. The same applies to the Office for Students. What assurances can the Minister give us on that point?
In conclusion, as it stands, this potentially useful Bill has little to contribute to levelling up. It is rightly aimed at strengthening the economy but misses the opportunity to include the many who need, and deserve, a fairer chance.
Baroness Verma (Con)
My Lords, I join all noble Lords in thanking my noble friend the Minster for the way she introduced this very important piece of legislation today. I also join them in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her maiden speech.
The Bill highlights areas that in my view have for far too long not received the government attention that reflects their importance. If we are to be an outward-facing global country, the development of skills permitted by the Bill will be critical. The key areas that I want to address briefly today concern the lifelong learning that should be available to all if we are to become that global, competitive country. There is no such thing as “a job for life” anymore. We live in a world where all jobs are expected to be fluid and interchangeable, and to have technology and digital skills at the centre of their roles. Whether it is in construction or in the new emerging economy, our future job roles will need all those skills, from basic technology to intricate digital mapping and AI skills.
Therefore, access to skills training and opportunities to move across sectors will be critical for an agile and quick-reacting economy such as ours. As others have said, will my noble friend ensure that there are no barriers to accessing new qualifications, even if people have already benefited from entry-level qualifications? Lifelong learning must mean exactly that. Employment needs are changing at pace and we must not stop at entry-level roles, as that in itself stops employment development.
I also place a strong emphasis on the importance of language skills. So many times we hear of people from minority communities being exploited in poorly paid roles or, sadly, in some instances being subject to modern-day slavery simply because they lack language skills. It is not good enough to have funding provided to local authorities without clear evidence of how that funding provides tangible, measurable results. The pandemic has shone a light on the fragility of communities in their struggle to protect themselves from not just the pandemic but abuse. They lack access to educational tools and support for families in multigenerational households. We need to address the poverty of learning. I say to my noble friend that these are deeply embedded, long-standing problems that have been ignored for decades.
I will also touch on life skills and experiences. Like many noble Lords, I have participated in educational political surgeries with schools. I recently did one with a high school in Gloucester. There, I was really encouraged to hear the thoughtful and pragmatic approach students had to the world around them. The key points that stuck in my mind included whether focusing on exams at the end of a year was an outdated approach to measuring a student’s potential. Some are great at sitting exams, but many are not. They want a true reflection of their abilities to be measured, rather than just leaving it to the end of the year. Real life does not exist in vacuums, so why should the student experience?
The students also wanted greater exposure to real-life skills such as financial literacy, budgets, and debt management. I thank one particular student called Rose, who made the point so beautifully that I realised how poorly qualified I had been when I left school to manage the businesses I manage now. They were incredibly sensible and practical asks for those thinking about the future jobs market.
Careers advice needs to be delivered by a combination of factors, with technical, business and academic-informed provision. This does not stop or start with young people, but should be available for everyone. Employment will undoubtedly change many times over in our working lifetimes, but people in their mid-40s upwards who might lose their jobs because of the pandemic will need skills to meet the new and current requirements of the jobs market today and in the future. We cannot airbrush these groups out because they do not make a loud noise. Their past experiences mean they need the new skills. I therefore urge my noble friend to make support easily accessible to these groups. Please do not forget that we have a pool of people who will feel that they have been left behind.
Finally, let us celebrate alternative routes to top jobs. Let us treat alternatives to degrees with parity. I have raised this in the House on many occasions: how are the Government monitoring career progression across the Civil Service and Whitehall, where we see less and less inclusion and diversity as we go higher up the organisation? Will my noble friend go back to looking at the levelling-up agenda being not just for the private sector but for all sectors where education and skills play a huge role, so we reach the large pockets of the population who remain on the edges of communities, without hope or help? Let this important Bill be the real game-changer for those communities with untapped potential, such as those in my city of Leicester, that will need ongoing support, particularly after the pandemic.
Lord Bradley (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I join in the congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her excellent maiden speech. I declare my interests in the register, particularly my position as chair of council at the University of Salford. I am particularly interested in the provisions in the Bill in respect of bringing together the higher and further education sectors, and providing greater parity of esteem between the various routes, academic and vocational, that one can travel down to secure a quality job. That blurring of the lines between academic and technical education is at the heart of the University of Salford’s mission. Its founding institution was the Royal Technical Institute of Salford, which was established in 1896 to train the workforce of the industrial revolutions.
Over 125 years later, the university is dedicated to powering the fourth industrial revolution. Today, academics are working hand in glove with employers, both public sector and private sector, to transform higher education. The university offers industry-focused degrees, designed with employers and with real-world experience baked in from day one, alongside new routes such as higher and degree apprenticeships. It is this legacy that the university is now building on, with its ambitions to develop an institute of technology. This innovatory project will bring together, in partnership, employees and further education colleges across Greater Manchester, to offer a range of level 4 and 5 courses, higher technical qualifications across digital, engineering and data, to plug the missing middle skills gap that we know employers are so desperately crying out for.
Turning to the legislation itself, I will focus on two areas. Of course I welcome the principle of the lifelong loan entitlement. Access to funding for training and retraining throughout one’s life will be a critical foundation for any aspiration to build a vibrant economy after the coronavirus, However, despite the positive mood music on the lifelong loan entitlement, the Government are leaving us hanging on for the detail. I look forward to seeing the specifics in due course, but I would like to outline two broad principles that I hope the Government will keep in mind when they decide this funding scheme, and perhaps they will respond to them today.
First, parity of esteem between further education and higher education cannot be achieved by simply increasing the funding going to further education at the expense of higher education. Colleges and universities working in partnership to deliver pathways that are right for the individual learner is how we achieve their ambitions, not by promoting further competition between these parts of the education and skills sector, as colleges and universities race to secure limited resources. The funding system, along with the regulatory system, across further and higher education needs to promote collaboration and co-operation, not competition. It is also worth stating that meeting our country’s economic aspirations is not just about more people choosing to do higher technical qualifications rather than going to university. It is about making sure that people go on to further education rather than stopping their learning at level 2 or 3. Our main challenge is not too many people going to university, but that too many people finish education too soon.
The cost of fees is only part of the issue when it comes to securing greater numbers of adult learners through further and higher education. We know that mature students are more debt-averse and cost-conscious than maybe school and college leavers. We have seen this in the sharp decline in mature students, following the raising of tuition fees and the ending of maintenance grants in recent years. Alongside the lifelong learning entitlement, the Government need to consider what maintenance and cost of living support can be provided, especially for adult learners who might have to reduce their hours to enable them to work and study part-time, and for a block period of shorter time-intensive courses. Again, I would welcome a response from the Minister on that today.
I quickly turn to the second matter, the OfS. I have grave concerns about the Government’s plan to allow the OfS to set minimum baselines on quality that do not have regard to students’ background, institution type, subject or location. This move seems at odds with the aspiration to level up access to education and training. It could well also have unintended consequences. There is a real risk that universities will be disincentivised from increasing access to further and higher education to those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and from introducing more flexible modes of study.
I conclude with another word of caution to the Government on the Bill. Where collaboration is already taking place in local areas between many local actors—including colleges, schools, universities, businesses, local government, the NHS, elected mayors and combined authorities, as we have in Greater Manchester—support it to flourish. In my area at the University of Salford, we are already leading a consortium of employees and colleges to develop new technical qualifications to meet local skills needs. The university and college sector has already committed to working together. Where structures are in place for joint working, do not seek to replace them for the sake of it. Work with those places to deepen and enhance those structures, recognising the unique needs, strengths and challenges of individual places.
The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)
My Lords, I warmly welcome the Bill, which I believe is absolutely key to the recovery of our industrial and commercial base post Covid and post Brexit. I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her maiden speech. I shall be very brief and make just a couple of observations.
Last year, in a debate in your Lordships’ House on the economy, I flagged up the case of an exemplar skills, training and retraining centre: the Marches centre in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. It was experiencing funding issues, and I tried to connect it with government. I was unable to obtain any real sort of response at all from Treasury officials, so I advised the business that I would connect it with the Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street. His office was extremely sympathetic, but unfortunately no success was achieved. The training business has survived but in a much reduced way.
It occurs to me that part of that problem was that neither Bridgnorth nor Shropshire and the Welsh Marches benefits from the same level of training and skills education support enjoyed by the large West Midlands conurbations. With this Bill, such a situation must not be allowed to happen.
I have two questions for my noble friend on the Front Bench. How closely are the Skills Ministers and Business Ministers working together to ensure that the Bill is supported and inputted to by business? It is vital that business takes the lead in skills training; it knows exactly what the needs are at the coalface. Secondly, with many training providers facing cash-flow issues due to reduced and considerably leaner numbers from Covid restrictions, what support will those providers be given? Without training providers, the Bill’s deliverables will not be met.
The Bill is an excellent opportunity to provide and enhance the skills of our national workforce, and I welcome it.
Baroness Henig (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her outstanding maiden speech, and welcome her to the House of Lords. I know she has made a huge contribution to the higher education sector, most recently and presently at Lancaster University. Her expertise and experience will be of great value in our future debates. I look forward to working with her on this Bill in the forth- coming weeks.
Who could argue with the principal aims of the Bill—to transform post-16 education and training, to boost skills and productivity, to involve employers more closely in course planning and provision, to get more people into work and to launch a new lifetime skills guarantee? What is there not to like? But let me just stop there a minute. We are learning that this Government speak in headlines—ringing headlines that are echoed in the press and social media—but then frequently there is little or no follow-through.
It is important to make it clear that to deliver the transformation that is needed in post-16 provision, a transformation which it is quite clear from the debate so far that we all support, to deliver the objectives of this Bill, we must acknowledge that significant changes are needed, changes to structures, attitudes and funding. On these crucial areas, the Bill is largely silent.
I have been involved in post-16 education in various ways, having served as a governor of an FE and an adult education college. Post-16 education, especially 16-19 education, is incredibly fragmented. There are 11-18 grammar schools, faith schools, 11-18 academies, comprehensives, sixth-form colleges, FE colleges and, very occasionally, tertiary colleges. Perhaps the Minister can confirm that putting employers at the heart of the post-16 skills system relates to their relationship with the local FE college only, but what of the other units providing post-16 education? Will adult education colleges be involved? Will other education providers be drawn into collaboration and, if so, how will this happen?
To be successful, local plans must bring together all schools and colleges in an area, as the noble Baroness, Lady Black, so vividly reminded us in her story about the schools working together with the college in the Lancaster area. Employer groups need to include such major employers as the NHS, local government and local universities. Can the Minister clarify the intentions here because unless there is significant collaboration in local areas across the area, the aims of this Bill will never be achieved?
There is also a huge issue around parity of esteem, and the Minister pointed this out in her opening remarks. Parental choices and student preferences have not changed that much in the past 50 years. Leaving aside public schools—although they cast a long shadow—grammar schools and 11-18 faith schools remain very popular with parents, followed by 11-18 local academies and sixth-form colleges. I regret to tell noble Lords this, but in the local areas that I know well, students are not clamouring to go to the local FE college, even when they want to pursue courses in computer games technology or basic health skills.
I was talking to my 18-year old grandson about this issue recently. He attended a sixth-form college in the north-east. I asked him whether any of his former schoolmates went to the local FE college. His reply was swift and telling: “Only if they couldn’t get in anywhere else.” That showed me that attitudes and perceptions have not changed very much. We all know the problem, dating back to the Education Act 1944, that technical schools and technical education never developed as envisaged, and that in the past two decades all the emphasis has been on getting a university place, not on developing practical technical expertise or getting technical qualifications.
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has been working incredibly hard in recent years to change this situation, but the difficulties that he has encountered show the magnitude of the problems that we are still facing in this area. It will take great effort and a huge transformation of technical provision throughout the country to change perceptions. It is something that we must do, but it will not be easy, and it requires long-term investment.
The Bill is silent for the most part on funding issues, yet we know that one reason why FE colleges have struggled in recent years and have had to cut courses and narrow curriculums is lack of funding and constant cuts to budget. Post-16 education funding is at present not fair and not rational for all the competing institution. My noble friend Lord Layard pointed this out very clearly.
If the Government mean what they are saying about wanting to improve opportunities and boost skills, particularly among disadvantaged students, they must commit to long-term funding, not just for post-16 FE colleges but in a whole range of social welfare provision, to enable poorer, more disadvantaged and unemployed individuals to access courses, train and retrain and become more skilled.
Among the briefings sent to me for this debate was a sobering statistic that 13 million adults in this country—that is nearly one in four people over 18—lack level 2 qualifications, equivalent to GCSEs. Some 9 million adults lack functional literacy and numeracy skills. The Bill has a lot of heavy lifting to do, and it will need major investment over many years if it is to be more than aspirational. We want it to be successful, and I await the evidence in Committee that the investment will be forthcoming.
Baroness Hollins (CB) [V]
My Lords, I am proud to be a fellow of City Lit, the leading adult education college in the country, which, alongside other institutes of adult learning, works hard to ensure that all adults, whatever their age or stage in life, can receive high-quality education and learning throughout their lives. However, during this stage of recovery from the pandemic, many people may not yet be ready for retraining or reskilling and will need to rebuild their confidence first, for example, people with a lower level of formal skill, those with long Covid or people who have been in the same sector for decades and are still unprepared for a career change.
The Bill introduces a new duty for further education providers to review how well the education or training provided by the institution meets local needs, with new powers for the Secretary of State to intervene where providers are not meeting local needs, as seen through the lens of the needs of local employers. There is also a focus on technical qualifications and on careers in certain sectors at level 3 and above. However, surely the definition of local needs should incorporate a broader range of outcomes, for example, progression into work for students taking non-accredited courses or qualifications below level 3. Indeed, recent Department for Education data has shown that the return on investment for qualifications below level 2 is higher than that for level 3. As my noble friend Lord Bilimoria and others have emphasised, without adequate support for these lower-level qualifications, many students will not be ready and able to take up the level 3 offers which are featured in the Bill. The Government response to a recent consultation on these qualifications is promised later in the year, and I suggest that this consultation will need to be properly considered alongside the provisions in the Bill. I look forward to the Minister’s thoughts on these points.
Education institutions across the country have been impacted by the pandemic but throughout lockdown have continued to deliver high-quality provision by accelerating the development of online courses, retaining many of the strengths of venue-based provisions, such as interaction with tutors and other students, and the ability to draw on learning resources in a range of media. Now that social distancing restrictions are gradually lifting, institutions will look to blend online with in-person provision to offer a range of courses which have greater flexibility than ever before. This is a key time to codesign some of this future provision with local employers and other local stakeholders. However, colleges and providers will be unable to maximise this without an increase in infrastructure, support and investment.
A core purpose of lifelong learning has always been to give people purpose through new experiences and knowledge and by connecting them with other like-minded individuals. We have some amazing institutions that work hard to ensure that everyone is enabled to learn and improve themselves as well as to hold roles within their communities. These institutions provide pastoral support on top of meeting the educational needs of their students. What have I learned during my life about the skills that all citizens need for an uncertain but exciting future, especially during and after a pandemic? First, more traditional approaches to further and higher education are in need of a rethink. In further education there is an aspiration to develop close links between education, business and the cultural and creative sectors. I want to see educational institutions become inclusive places that allow each and every person to find personal fulfilment—places which fully understand the ethical underpinning that enables equality of opportunity, where people can learn from each other, across traditional disciplines, learning to fuse arts, science and humanities to enrich them all. If we do not support the next generation to do this, we will be failing them.
To me, the pandemic launched a cultural revolution which has left some people feeling out of their depth and others thriving because of the resilience and adaptability for which their life experiences and education to date has prepared them. We can learn from their differing experiences. It is becoming clearer that being a digitally competent and confident communicator who is able to work anywhere and manage one’s own time is more important than being a compliant worker who clocks in and out on time. Being able to balance one’s work and personal life is critical too. Some people have perhaps not developed emotionally and in other ways that enable them to manage these boundaries well enough.
We need to be careful not to put all learners in one box, which the Bill and White Paper are at risk of doing. My own interest is to make sure that adults with learning disabilities are not left behind, and that this future strategy ensures that individuals who need high-quality education but may experience significant barriers to accessing it are better catered for. Institutions such as City Lit, offering world-leading provision for adults with learning disabilities, the deaf community and people who stammer or struggle with communication issues, must be able to continue this invaluable work. As we consider the Bill, let us ensure that no one is left out.
Lord Jones (Lab) [V]
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her speech.
Over half a century in Westminster’s Houses, I have seen countless Bills, presented by successive Governments— Bill after Bill—and today we have the noble Baroness’s Bill. Britain is still striving to find the holy grail of skills and it is truly a worthy, welcome and urgent objective. One recollects the embattled Chancellor Denis Healey exhorting Britain’s manufacturing companies to drive down unit costs. Today’s Chancellor, Mr Sunak, urges British industry to raise its productivity—not much change over 45 years as Britain struggles to hold on to her manufacturing base.
The Federal Republic of Germany is a mighty industrial presence in Europe, a formidable competitor, a huge exporter, and renowned for engineering skills. Did not Chancellor Bismarck forge a lasting technical skills template in the 19th century? How can we persuade more school leavers to compete to take up apprenticeships? How can we persuade more young women to enter this crucial field? Female entry is woefully low but a successful apprentice in our blue-chip companies might find that the world is her oyster. In the Times the noble Lord, Lord Baker, revealed that the big engineering, motor and aircraft companies pay their apprentices salaries of £12,000 to £20,000 per year, and some even more.
Does the Minister agree that parents of high-school leavers should be told formally and in a timely fashion about these salaries, prospects and activities? Should not head teachers encourage their students to apply for apprenticeships in the most positive manner, as a priority? Do we envisage in the future school tables for apprenticeships gained? It is far-fetched, perhaps, but how better to spur matters forward for the national future?
Ultimately, so much depends upon the head teacher. Today, young women are storming the rugby pitches, soccer fields, cricket squares and the boxing ring. A far better place might be the aerospace shop floor where excellent apprenticeships lead to salaries of £25,000 per year and much more, consequent upon qualification, bonus and shift work. Overall, the modern shop floor is spotlessly clean, well policed by health and safety and complete with pension and holiday. The current industrial playbook demands high-quality housekeeping in today’s factory environment. Rolls-Royce, Nissan, Tata and Airbus all have close, local links with their adjacent FE colleges.
Take, for instance Airbus—the register refers to my interests—which furnishes a splendid example in north-east Wales, my homeland and one-time constituency. It is a 6,000-strong establishment of world-class skills, a reservoir of unbeatable technical prowess and the equal of any comparable factory in the world. It makes the wings that fly the unsurpassed Airbus fleet. Each year a large cohort of able apprentices enter mainstream production. This company earns many billions in exports for Britain and has outstripped its mighty competitor, Boeing. It is the jewel in the crown of Welsh industry and the foundation of its famed advance is leadership, fine apprenticeships, FE and business collaboration, and skills excellence.
The FE college in this renowned mix is Coleg Cambria, which is near the factory runway. It has British awards and competition wins aplenty. The paramount requirement in post-16 education is always the leadership skill of the principal, the CEO. This establishment had fine leadership from Wil Edmunds OBE and David Jones OBE. These able professionals always liaised with head of plant, the professional acknowledged throughout Europe, Mr Paul McKinlay—a brilliant leader. The business world of north-east Wales is the customer for skills. Skills training fails if the business world is shut out. I am keenly aware that unions make up this global and local success in aerospace.
To conclude, in the helpful Explanatory Notes in annexe A on page 23 on provision, there is reference to
“the competence of the Senedd”.
Will the Minister expand on this? How and when was there consultation on the Bill with Senedd Ministers and officials? There may not be time for the Minister to answer; if so, will she please write on the points I have raised?
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as a council member of City & Guilds. I am very much looking forward to Committee. It has been a pretty challenging Second Reading so far and I am confident that we can do some things to improve this Bill. My own suggestion will be that we should broaden the definition of outcomes in Clause 17 to cover mental health in higher education.
Going into HE is a huge step change for most children. In JCB’s apprenticeships provision, which is pretty remote and therefore provides the facilities a university might, it goes to immense lengths to look after the mental and general well-being of their apprentices. To my mind, universities fall well short of that standard.
When I tried a few years ago to see whether it might be possible to persuade universities to rely more on teacher recommendations to pick out students who were underperforming for reasons of background but might turn out to be extremely good students none the less, they said that they could not do that as they never got to know their students well enough over the course of three years to evaluate whether the teacher recommendations had been accurate enough.
Universities can be lonely, frightening, isolating places. The NHS mental health provision can take some long while to catch up with the move from home to university. I am sure that many of us have stories of friends or relations who have had a mental health crisis at university. In my case, a colleague of mine had a son at a Russell Group university, who happened to be on a course where there did not seem to be much social life revolving around it. He was going back to his student accommodation, where there was not a lot of social life, and it was a chance telephone call from a fairly distant university friend to this child’s mother that prevented the suicide.
It really is not acceptable these days that we allow these sorts of things to go on, when we know they are happening and we know we can do something about it. Universities can and should come up to speed. I do not think that we should find ourselves in a situation where we are giving universities a bad mark—it is something that they can all do well enough and come up to speed on, given a bit of oversight, so that they know they will be watched on it and that this is something they have to do. Clause 17 gives us an opportunity to make some serious progress in this area.
On local skills, I am very much in the same camp as my noble friend Lord Willetts. This is a matter of our children, not just businesses; it is not just the interests of the businesses that matter but what our children are and could become. It is ridiculous to imagine that all children in Eastbourne, where I live, are destined to become either waiters or brickies. I am sure that there are just as many musicians, programmers and engineers in our cohort as there are in the middle of some well-provided city. We are a town of 100,000 people, with no academic state sixth-form provision. It would be very sad if that same attitude of provision was to be extended to vocational education as well.
There is a big role in this area for a national input on skills, on what is needed and on where the jobs are going to come from over the next 20 years. Not all employer groups have good coverage of industries, good skills and good cohesion; not all know what they need in a changing world. We have to support the local structures that we are going to build with a very strong understanding of what is happening in the world outside, and therefore an understanding of how to support those of our children whose destinies are not to work in the local economy.
In that context, I very much hope, along with the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, that we will do something serious about careers information, advice and guidance. There is an opportunity in this Bill to embed that in a structure that can truly nurture it, to build on the current but much divided successful institutions and provide something that will be part of someone’s lifelong education, which they can turn to whenever they need, and to build on a flexible and modular education that they will receive. Perhaps it will move out of schools, where it really struggles, and into the world of FE, making it much easier for people to obtain the information that they need when they think that they want to change a career.
Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the problem that the Bill addresses has been with us for a very long time. Our education system has long been guided by a single model of human excellence: you start your education in a school and keep progressing until you get to a university degree. If you are smart enough and have the resources and inclination, you might do post- graduate work and end your education with a doctorate. But that is not important; what is important is that you must have a university degree—you must be certified by the university to have acquired a certain body of knowledge and skills. If you are not good enough to go to university, what do you do? You turn to technical education, to the polytechnic, and if you cannot make that, you walk out of the education system altogether.
In short, there has been a deep divide between university and technical education, between higher and further education, and between successfully negotiating the obstacles to higher education and failing to do so. This divide has had some profound consequences for our society and economy. Since university education is the only marker of success and the basis of individuals’ self-respect, everyone wants to go for it, with the result that there is inflation in the pursuit of degrees. Secondly, just as a GP thinks of himself as a failed consultant, the person who fails to make it to university thinks of himself as a failed university graduate. This leads to a tremendous amount of bitterness and sadness, and a lack of self-worth on the part of the individual. The system also means that practical intelligence, being good with one’s hands and mechanical skills are treated as inferior and not valued at all.
Obviously, there is no movement from university to technical education; they are parallel universes and you are confined to one or the other. This has been our problem for the last 150 years. Various attempts have been made to tackle the problem; this Bill is a very sincere and profound attempt to do so. It has some very good ideas—I do not need to spell them out—and the idea that individuals who are interested in higher education would have lifelong access to resources is one that levels up opportunities and is to be greatly welcomed.
Before ending, I want very briefly to point out three or four limitations of the Bill, and I very much hope that the Minister will take account of them. First, it concentrates on technical education and treats it as wholly separate from university education. As in the present system, there is no movement from one to the other; each is encapsulated in its own little stream.
Secondly, and this worries me even more than the first point, technical education is seen and justified almost entirely in instrumental terms. There are skills that a society or region needs, and the question is how you persuade students to go for those skills. What is now suggested, therefore, is a kind of industrial fodder—like parliamentary fodder perhaps, but in the case of industrial fodder students will become not so much respectable individuals trained in the art of thinking for themselves but rather individuals who are masters of certain skills, which they are able to sell.
This has a very important consequence, which I must emphasise, on the regional or local orientation of the education system. Each locality, area or region must indicate its employment needs, but how is this to be done? By employer representative bodies providing a list of skills. That, in my view, is to give employers an enormous amount of power and influence. They will suggest which skills are to be produced, and we know what the limitations of that will be. They are not democratically elected, and so the result will be that you create almost a kind of corporate state, where the state works hand in glove with large employer organisations. I fear the consequences of that.
Finally, in order to execute a system of this kind, the state obviously has a tendency to become heavily bureaucratic. This is one noteworthy feature of the Bill that many of your Lordships has pointed out. It gives the Secretary of State the power to indicate which employer representative bodies to recognise and which to withdraw recognition from, and to ask whether the sector is functioning properly and which provider institutions are not satisfactorily run. Again, this gives the state an enormous amount of power in the field of education, the like of which we have not seen in this country before—not even under Mrs Thatcher. So, while the objectives are valuable, I very much hope that the means to realise them will be just as civilised and humane.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome this important Bill. Skills are fundamental to our future well-being both as a nation and as individuals. In order to succeed in an increasingly complex, competitive, technologically driven, net zero-targeting world, we need the right skills in the right places for the right people at the right time. The Bill includes many proposals to enable that. Most of what I wanted to say has been more eloquently expressed by other noble Lords, so I will confine myself to questions in three areas that I believe may need some further thought, relating to small businesses, independent training providers and careers education.
The Bill rightly focuses on ensuring that skills are relevant to local needs, mainly through local skills improvement plans, created and managed by local partnerships and led by employer representative bodies. The Government play a central role through designating the employer representative body for each local area and then through approving the actual plans. This sounds to me more like a top-down, centrally driven approach than a truly local one.
So how will LSIPs engage smaller businesses, particularly in areas with few major employers, where most employers are small? How will the Government ensure that LSIPs are not dominated by the views of larger, better-resourced employers in determining local skills needs and allocating available funding? How will LSIPs build on and work with existing local partnerships, such as LEPs, careers hubs, skills advisory panels and local digital skills partnerships?
On independent training providers, I have a rather different perspective from my noble friend Lady Wolf, who I am rather relieved to see is no longer in her place. ITPs provide a substantial proportion of skills training, including in the great majority of apprenticeships and traineeships. They are an essential and valuable part of the system. Many are small, but they bring much-needed responsiveness, innovation and competition to the skills training marketplace. Yet the Bill seems focused on constraining them through requirements to meet potentially onerous conditions for inclusion in the list of relevant providers.
Before joining noble Lords, I ran a small independent business providing employability training for young Londoners. Our work was commissioned by bodies such as the former London Development Agency, Barnardo’s, Nacro, schools, colleges and local authorities. These provided stringent supervision and oversight. But, as a small business focused on service delivery, we would have struggled to meet the sorts of conditions suggested in the Bill—for example, for insurance cover against possible cessation of training. Such a sledge- hammer approach risks penalising all ITPs for the failings of a few.
So how will independent training providers be more positively engaged in the development and delivery of local skills improvement plans? Will the Minister commit to ensuring full consultation before details of the register of training providers and of the conditions ITPs have to meet are finalised?
Many noble Lords have emphasised the importance of impartial, independent, expert and personal information, advice and guidance, including the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, just now. Careers education and guidance have improved significantly in recent years, helped by the careers strategy launched in 2017, which ended last year. But there is still some way to go to ensure that everyone has access to high-quality careers advice, that its provision covers all ages and circumstances and that it is provided by well-trained, highly qualified professionals with an understanding of the skills scene, both locally and nationally, including pathways for acquiring skills in areas such as creativity—as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam—and entrepreneurship, which we have heard rather less about. Yet the Bill makes no reference at all to careers information and guidance.
Will the Government consider including a right to professional careers guidance as part of the lifetime skills guarantee? Will the provision of good careers education be made a formal requirement for colleges to achieve high Ofsted ratings? Finally, will the Minister commit to producing an updated careers strategy to support the aims of the Bill, including the extension of career hubs to cover the entire country?
I support many other suggestions made by noble Lords, including the desire to see the Baker clause given statutory force and a more flexible apprenticeship levy. I fervently hope that the Bill, when it leaves this House, will be even better crafted to create the skills system we so badly need. I like the description of the Bill by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, as a “down- payment”. Will the Government complement it with a comprehensive, overarching, cross-departmental, long-term education and skills strategy, so that the Bill will prove to be much more than just another of the regular reorganisations of our education and training furniture that have so signally failed to deliver in the past?
As my new noble friend Lady Black of Strome suggested in her splendid maiden speech, we need to create an education ecosystem that brings together the talents and energy of all participants in delivering the skills we need, including SMEs, ITPs and careers professionals.
Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]
My Lords, I speak today to add my support for this Bill and to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her maiden speech. The United Kingdom stands at a reset moment. It has delivered on the vote for Brexit, is forging a new trading relationship with our European allies and is charting a course towards global Britain. While the UK was among the hardest hit by Covid-19, it is now finding a way out of the global pandemic, emerging as a world leader in the design, development and distribution of effective vaccines. But if we are to make the most of this reset moment, we will need to unlock the talent, prosperity and potential of our regions, communities and people. In order to do this, there needs to be a real focus on developing the skills required not only for a 21st-century skills revolution but to create the economic powerhouse that will drive the United Kingdom forward. We will need every element of British talent.
In many ways, the UK is well positioned to do just this. We are one of the most prosperous countries in the world, with an open and vibrant economy. Our national institutions are robust and our people are among the most educated in the world. But there are also clear challenges. While levels of prosperity in the UK remain much higher than other nations and increased further during the first half of the 2010s, in more recent years this prosperity has been stagnating. One of the key drivers of this stagnation has been declining enterprise conditions, including skills shortages and barriers to doing business. England, for example, has three times more low-skilled people among those aged 16 to 19 than the best-performing countries such as Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands. In many ways, this was less visible while we had unrestricted immigration. But now that we can feel the impact of more controlled migration, we can see the need to really focus on upskilling our own people. This is a good thing, and one that we should hugely welcome.
So why is this Bill so welcome, and why has our existing approach to skills development simply been insufficient? For the past 20 years, the UK poverty rate has shimmied at around 20% of the population. In the Labour years, just about every income transfer that could be thrown at this challenge was thrown, and the level still shimmied at or around 20%. In the coalition days, just about every employment intervention was thrown at this challenge, and the level still shimmied at or around 20%. If we have learnt anything in the past 20 years, it is that we cannot solve poverty through income transfer alone, or through supporting people into low-paid work alone.
The poverty data shows that if you are on the national living wage, it takes all adults in a household working full-time to lift a family out of poverty. Even then, 10% of such households are still in poverty. These families cannot work any more hours. They need to increase the value of each hour they work. To do this requires increased skills.
The way to ensure that families who are doing everything right are out of poverty is to invest in their skill level and enable them to be able to earn more for each hour they work. This Bill is therefore hugely important as part of an anti-poverty strategy, but to actually level up requires us to develop those with the lowest levels of skills at a faster rate even than those who are already skilled. This will require opportunity, so there is one area where I would specifically like to probe a little on this matter.
The current welfare system is not really designed as a support mechanism for those on low incomes to upskill. It is designed as an anti-poverty tool and to support people as they transition into work and up their hours. So I ask my noble friend the Minister: what changes are the Government considering to universal credit conditionality to support their excellent approach to skills development?
But this Bill is important not only as an anti-poverty tool; it is also hugely important for employers. Many businesses report a deterioration of local conditions for enterprise, including skills shortages and barriers to doing business. Assessments of adult skills generally point to skills mismatches and many employers report that a lack of skilled workers is a major and increasing bottleneck for their operations, affecting their capacity to innovate. On average, 26% of vacancies are generated by skills shortages within businesses. This is as high as 36% in, say, the south-east. Across a range of sectors, there is a growing employer demand for the skills that higher technical education provides.
The White Paper highlights the need for technicians, engineers and health and social care professionals to meet the many vital challenges we face as a society. Investing in these skills at both a local and a national level is critical to improving our productivity and international competitiveness. Our skills system has been very efficient at producing graduates but has been less able to help people get the quality technical skills that employers want. A stat that we have heard quoted today is that 4% of young people achieve a qualification at higher technical level by the age of 25, compared with the 33% who get a degree or above. Just imagine if we could have a society where 33% achieve higher technical level qualifications as well as 33% getting a degree.
I am delighted to be supporting a Bill that will enable people to invest in their ability to earn more for each hour they work, that will enable employers to develop their businesses using the incredible talents of the British people and that will enable us to compete on the world stage at this critical moment of transition for us as a nation.
Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I agree very much with a lot of what the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, has just said. But I shall be listening to the Minister respond—I hope—to the questions from the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Puttnam, and to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, made about the cuts.
Of course, I must welcome what was—no doubt about it—an awesome maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome. I fully admit that I had read about her in the past and was in awe of what she was doing and what she had achieved. Her speech was absolutely magnificent.
First, I declare my interests—no, let us do the Lords’ interests. At present, there are about a dozen ex or current university vice-chancellors in the Lords and, last time I checked, over 40 university chancellors. I am unaware of any leader or ex-leader of further education being in the Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, made the point about the cuts to FE. If that had happened in higher education, there were 40 chancellors waiting in the Lords to pounce on Ministers.
In 12 years in government, in several departments, I never met a civil servant who had further education experience and, as far as I am aware, no one in the Cabinet has been through further education. It is a bold claim, of course, but I doubt that many Members of the House have had actual FE experience as a student—and as for the Commons, such experience today would be a rarity. This makes the Bill even more important. It is concerned with important aspects of life that policymakers and lawmakers have no hands-on experience of. Those are not quite the criteria to get it right.
I left secondary technical school in 1957. There were two such 13-plus schools in Birmingham, one specialising in engineering at Handsworth and the other in Bournville specialising in construction. It is amazing: these are of course two of the sectors where there are skills gaps existing now that this Bill is supposed to address, but there were only ever two technical schools in Birmingham. I did three years day release in further education while I was doing my indentured apprenticeship for a mechanical engineering Ordinary National Certificate, and two nights a week to get my endorsements in electrical and English—although I suspect I never really made it in the latter.
In the FE college at the time, there was abundant adult education, as there was in some secondary schools. For many years in the period 1972 to 1997, I served on the board of an FE college, so I was aware at first hand of the changes from pure technical skill to a more comprehensive range of courses, and the change from local authority control. I think our first action on the board, post local authority, was to change the name of the college so that people knew where it was. This was far more important than it sounds, by the way, from a marketing point of view.
In some ways, I missed the phase where colleges became more competitive and aggressive, and indeed remote from their communities—although I was shocked, when taking over from my friend the late Lord Corbett of Castle Vale as chair of the local community organisation, by the negative approach of a city centre further education college to a campus at Castle Vale. That was caused purely by remoteness.
I freely admit I am now more out of date, but I want the Government to succeed in this endeavour for the good of the country—as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, this is not a political Bill. But I fear a further narrowing of the existing provision and curriculum. It appears the educator voice is missing, which cannot be a surprise given my introductory remarks, and there is clearly no accountability to communities. I am not, however, fearful of employer involvement in courses. This was very strongly the case in the 1950s and 1970s, but employers are not the same. Today they are more “here today, gone tomorrow” than in the days before our deindustrialisation. Some strategic stability is required and therefore a partnership with educators is vital—and I have to say that I think this should include professional organisations such as the chartered institutions. I do not think anybody has referred to those today. They were crucial in FE, in awarding certificates, along with the old Ministry of Education.
The range of courses has got utterly out of control due to the market. But we need to be careful about classifying qualifications that have so-called “low economic value” and therefore restricting choice and flexibility. Low economic value to one can be the salvation for another new enterprise or product. We have an unequal nation where levelling up is not I hope intended to make us all the same, but we need to ensure that the Bill works for more diverse, non-traditional cohorts of students.
Further education, unlike higher education—I have a mixed experience of a sandwich course at a college of advanced technology and then, after a 10-year gap, post-graduate work—can be more transformative. It can help build the alert democracy and support the aspirations of all, going well beyond skills preparation for jobs. For some, it may be the only route to any qualifications they ever obtain, but there needs to be LA involvement, maybe through the mayors. We ignore our local capacity at our peril. Indeed, I once read that a nation’s greatest asset was the capacity and willingness of its people to work. This Bill must improve our human asset base.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I feel I should declare my FE experience, which was shorthand at Wagga Wagga College in Australia and a very brief, and perhaps best glossed over, experience of farm mechanics a long time ago.
I will start with some older history, however: human history, or rather prehistory. Some 400,000 years ago, in the East African Rift Valley, the human species faced a huge threat: a massive ecological change. The very foundations of their world had shifted. Archaeological evidence shows that those ancient humans—individuals just like you and me—developed new skills and technology, and used their creativity to develop new forms of communication, all remarkably quickly. That is an account drawn from a major study in the journal Science Advances, published last year. I hope your Lordships’ House will see the parallels with what we face today.
We face a climate emergency, the state of our nature is dire and our current growth-driven economic model has left us in a crisis of poverty and inequality. Massive change is needed—yet, for all the Bill’s talk of the future and the need for transition, neither it nor the policy summary make any mention of climate or nature. There is only a brief mention of them in the impact assessment. Your Lordships’ House has found itself in this situation with multiple recent Bills, and other Bills have left here only after the addition of at least some reference to climate and nature. I hope that we can do that again. As the country that is the chair of COP, with a Government who like to attach the words “world leading” to “green”, it is quite astonishing that we should find ourselves in this position again.
I point noble Lords to the excellent Peers for the Planet briefing on these issues, which goes into far greater depth than I have time to do today. However, I will tick off some points. First, the global economy has to be green, and, even in the Government’s own terms, there is a significant competitive advantage in enabling UK workers to upskill in green areas. Secondly, the Government have, or are promising, a whole range of sector-specific strategies, but we see no sign of how these will be joined up with the local skills improvement plans. Thirdly, we get from the Government a very narrow idea of what future skills are needed—there seem to be a lot of hard hats involved and, of course, the ubiquitous digital skills. Of course we need a huge amount of improvement in those areas, but equally urgent are skills in sustainable land management, nature-based solutions and ecosystem management—hard-toed boots perhaps, but caked in healthy life-rich soil rather than hard concrete. Fourthly, we see no way in which the Bill feeds into the need for a just transition for individuals and communities, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, powerfully illuminated.
Young people are demanding that their education include far more information about climate and sustainability. They understand that it is central to every part of their future life—so why are the Government not able to consider this in every part of education in our society? The sustainable development goals to which the Government signed up and the systems thinking that underlies them should be in every part and level of education.
That brings me to some points about what is in the Bill. I begin with the expert remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport. I would associate myself with everything that she said but focus particularly on one point: she said that the local skills improvement plans need to be coproduced by communities, politicians, educators, students and businesses. From the Government, we are hearing very much a sole focus on business, and we know that the loud business voices are likely to be the big ones, which are not the major part of our economy. As the excellent University and College Union briefing on this Bill notes, the educator voice is missing from the Government’s plans. I want to focus on and extend the noble Baroness’s point about students, for if students are not at the heart of designing courses, they are unlikely to meet their needs, not just for a narrow set of technical competencies but for life in a fast-transforming world.
We now come to the big issue: what is education for? The majority of today’s speakers have focused on employment, but we all need lifelong learning and continuing education in varying forms and fitting various places in the Government’s classifications, from level 2 upwards. We need to function in society as community members, voters, parents and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, noted, users of the financial sector. In a society with an epidemic of mental ill-health, we should not underplay the value of learning new skills, finding new places in society for public health, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, noted.
The Minister said in her introduction that 34% of working-age graduates are not in high-skilled employment. I really hope she will acknowledge that that does not mean they are not using the skills they obtained from that education. Employment is not the only place those skills are needed. That is where I find myself, considerably to my surprise, in agreement with the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Johnson. Setting further and higher education against each other, even in opposition to each other, and suggesting that funding should not be available to those with higher qualifications for so-called lower-level courses further hardens what is already an extraordinarily hierarchical system.
I fear that the Minister, in response, may say I am drawing the brush too widely, that these are matters for other Bills and other days. I go back to the first words of the Bill:
“A Bill to make provision about local skills improvement plans; to make provision relating to further education”.
Education is not and cannot be just about jobs or serving the economy.
Lord Triesman (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interests as a board member of the Capital City College Group and chair of the advisory board of Learning Development Training, a private further and higher education provider. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who raised some important issues. I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, and look forward to hearing more about her life.
FE and skills were described by the Minister, and many others, as a Cinderella service in education. However, Cinderella did actually get to the ball: FE rarely has. This is not new; we have a record of neglect. In his history of the loss of British influence, Corelli Barnett set out a two-centuries’ long failure to foster a coherent skills base, which equipped us so poorly as an industrial power before each world war and then again afterwards. Yet we routinely say that the Government must do better, and despite efforts in FE and some exceptional colleges—I pick just one, Bridgwater & Taunton College—the Government themselves routinely do no better. This legislation is a major opportunity for more than 2.2 million students per year currently to develop career opportunities. I welcome that, but the devil is in the detail.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, set out an extensive set of details we will need to amend, especially given the extent of cuts in recent years. The Bill faces a world of profound social and cultural change. Work is restructuring and sometimes vanishing at an unprecedented rate. AI will accelerate the change. Personal and group identities and aspirations are changing, and I believe there is a concomitant acceleration of social fragmentation. Access to information and knowledge is unparalleled, and with changing technologies has come a growth in personal demand for choice—an insistence on personal choice which will not be amenable to strict direction.
The world of skills providers is no longer the traditional rationalist, calculative, instrumental and depersonalised one. It still demands expertise, not least because of its complexity, but it is now more characterised by being networked, information-based, personal, risky and often post industrial. There is a demand for new competences, the capability to withstand more competition, to deal with faster technical and environmental change and to know that there are no jobs for life. They flow from the structural changes in industry and occupations, and all these changes in the nature of workplaces, work/life balance, and the dreadful fact that some households have people now in the third generation of unemployment —truly left behind—pose a great challenge. This must surely focus us on enabling personal aspiration wherever the aspiration can be met in the UK.
The Bill has to achieve vital goals. First, it must overcome chronic poor productivity against the background I have tried to describe. It must ensure high skill levels are achieved and geographically distributed, but allow for enhanced personal mobility. That means far more lifelong learning and far better literacy and numeracy. Raising skills would drive the UK to being a high-supply, high-demand economy and away from low productivity but, if it is to succeed, the financial support of students must be far more explicit than it is in the Bill, especially up to level 3 and as people change career course.
Secondly, the Bill has to respond to the need for work readiness. The better the qualifications of students, the better employers say their applicants are prepared. It is right to focus on employability, but experience shows that employers are not always expert at reading the runes about the future rather than identifying their immediate needs. If the Bill is to succeed, there will need to be serious consultations about developments in business demand. With the best will in the world, that cannot rely exclusively on employers. There is a significant role for government industrial strategy, for skills advisory councils and certainly for individual students.
Next, a third of adults engage in no formal learning whatever after leaving school, yet they live in a world which is changing rapidly and constantly, so the Bill must address the motivational barriers from early learning onwards. This is not just a matter for colleges, sixth-form colleges or indeed the many entities in this space. They need to work collaboratively; it is a whole-society issue. It is fundamentally an issue of economic and social resilience for the United Kingdom, and we must learn the lessons of the last couple of years. Perhaps our most valuable asset is our ability to co-operate.
Finally, a simple switch between university and skills funding, as several noble Lords have said, is surely misconceived. To prosper in a world of rapid technological change and innovation, and with the growing importance of creativity, including the arts, in our economy, it is essential to develop people who can work through the challenges of fundamental rethinking. A significant proportion will have to be able to deal in conceptual analysis, and this has been a central example of progress in history. Professor Robert Reich’s huge influence on boosting the competitiveness of the United States economy was built on this thought. In short, higher education provides the necessary condition for education-led prosperity, as it is also a wide basis for vocational qualification. Yet we must also meet the needs of the sufficient conditions, and that is where the skills agenda and this Bill can be transformative. This is the foundation of meaningful parity of esteem. Let us not embark on a turf war between HE and FE funding—that can never help. We, and the Bill, will be tested on the promotion of an all-through co-operation, not on robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of the Royal Veterinary College and former chancellor of Cranfield University and my various environmental interests. It is really great to be number 50 on a speakers’ list; everything that could be said has been said, but unfortunately I have not yet said it, so I will try to be brief.
I welcome the Bill in principle for its provisions on technical skills education and lifelong learning opportunities for all, but it misses a real opportunity that has already been raised by a number of Peers. The twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity decline are the biggest existential threats globally; the Bill needs to respond to that and to take an ambitious approach to developing the wide range of skills to meet our global climate and nature goals and to exploit new UK and global markets and jobs that these goals are already creating.
We need to move to a prosperous zero-carbon economy and society with the help of the Bill. It should be a catalyst for building the wider public understanding and behavioural change fundamental to meeting net zero and reversing biodiversity loss, such as in the case of those challenges driven by our rising consumption across the globe. This is not just my view—businesses, educators and learners have all expressed their views and provided strong evidence that climate and sustainability considerations need to be embedded into our post-16 framework.
Local skills improvement plans have been raised by many noble Lords; they must not just be driven by local employers but take account of government priorities and strategies, such as the industrial decarbonisation strategy, the energy White Paper, the nature strategy and the heating and building strategies. This Government appear to have quite a lot of strategies. With skills for nature-based solutions, ecosystem management, drainage and even tree planting, we will need to think of the future. A child starting school this summer will leave in 2035 and will move into labour markets that will be largely zero carbon. The Bill also needs to offer support to workers transitioning out of high-carbon sectors or intensive agriculture who already possess level 3 qualifications but will not be able to access the lifelong loan entitlement. That needs to be changed.
Along with many other noble Lords, I want to voice my comments about the mood music around higher and further education at the moment, which might well impact on this Bill and on post-16 education. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Johnson, that there should not be a false conflict between further and higher education; they should work in collaboration and not compete for resources. Ensuring parity of esteem is important, but it should be by investing in further education, not by taking funds away from higher education and levelling down.
At times, the Government are almost hostile to higher education, with the result that courses are being judged on student outcomes defined partly by getting degree-level jobs, whatever they are, and earning appropriate incomes. It seems to be obligatory at this point to declare your education, so here I go: I have an MA in Classics from Edinburgh University, a highly relevant degree, but not exactly job orientated in some people’s views. For reasons best known to myself and a complete mystery to my mother, I took a job as a secretary for two years post graduation, which would have screwed up Edinburgh’s outcome measures, had they existed 50 years ago.
I believe that we need careful scrutiny of Clause 17 on quality assessment for higher education. Metrics of quality need to take account of contextual factors, if they are not to jeopardise widening access for the less advantaged. They must take account of how students define their success and the flexibility that they will need in the fast-changing job market.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, this has been an extraordinarily wide-ranging debate. I thank the Minister for her co-operation and for having meetings with us beforehand. I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on a brilliant maiden speech. I noticed all the Lancaster connections, with the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, being Lancastrians; my daughter and her husband met at Lancaster 30 years ago, so it has fond memories for me too. I hope we shall hear much more from her in the future, whether it is on the living or the dead.
Given all the very many briefings we have received from far and wide, I start by asking the Minister what discussions the Bill team had with stakeholders before drafting the Bill. Did they take advice from the Association of Colleges, the Open University, City & Guilds—I declare my interest as a vice-president, having worked there for 20 years—or from the Federation of Awarding Bodies, which held a discussion this morning that threw up some interesting questions that I had not thought of, or from independent training providers? We heard from the noble Lords, Lord Bichard and Lord Aberdare, about the importance of independent training providers, and other awarding organisations. If so, did the Government take their advice or, given all the amendments that we seem to be throwing up, did they proceed without reference to those whose professional lives have been devoted to skills, colleges and adult education?
I am also involved in the Professional Qualifications Bill, where the Minister keeps telling us he will “assuage” us, as he attempts to convince the Committee that all is well with that Bill. Will the Minister hope to “assuage” us this afternoon, I wonder?
Of course, we are all delighted to have a skills Bill; as we know, skills and further education are too often overlooked. Like the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I blame it in part on the fact that almost all officials and politicians have gone the university route. They have had little or no contact with work-based, vocational qualifications, nor indeed with further education, as they have followed the gilded path of academia, often regarding trade, if they regard it at all, as another less privileged world. How wonderful that the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, is a shining example of how very mistaken that view is.
The growth in apprenticeships is beginning to erode the divide and curiously, one outcome of Covid may be that university experience with no face-to-face teaching, socialising or drunken raves may be looking less inviting to the young school leavers. So we approach this Bill with high hopes and expectations but, having read the myriad briefs, those hopes and expectations are not as high as they might be.
If I am one of the winders, I like to namecheck, but I am afraid I will have to apologise this time. I have listened to everyone, including when I was doing my duty on the Woolsack—I am quite capable of multitasking —but time will not permit me to acknowledge all the insightful contributions we have heard today.
I am sorry the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, is not in his place. I welcomed his piece in yesterday’s Times, with his well-reasoned arguments for abandoning the ELQ rules whereby you cannot get funding for studying for an equivalent or lower-level qualification than one you already possess, even in a completely different subject area and when it could open doors to other employments. I hope the Government will look at this again, because it really is very detrimental.
We welcome the lifelong learning entitlement, although we Liberal Democrats regret that it is in the form of a loan. We heard the reasons why from both the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld. Many adults will be reluctant to incur debt when, mid-life, they have responsibilities to families, so pursuing their own improvement could seem selfish. We wish to see this as a grant, a skills wallet, which we are sure would pay for itself as the recipient’s earning power and self-esteem increase.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, we are also anxious not to lose sight of the value of levels 1, 2 and 3 qualifications. Level 1 can often be the stepping stone for those who have never passed any exams to gain new confidence and the desire to continue to learn. We saw this many times with NVQs at level 1, derided by the snobbish press as “not very qualified”. Actually, they applied that to all the NVQs, which just shows how ignorant and prejudiced some journalists can be. At City & Guilds we saw non-learners grow in stature when awarded a national qualification—a national certificate—and given a real incentive to continue. The Minister says that they do not feature in this legislation because they are catered for elsewhere. Perhaps she could clarify that.
All the questions I would have asked have, of course, by now already been asked—just not by me, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said. I will concentrate on a handful of areas in which we would really like to hear the Minister’s reply and hope to be assuaged. The first is the relationship between Ofqual and IfATE, which has already been raised. The Minister said this would be collaborative. Will it be collaborative? Will it duplicate? Will it make things much more complex? The fear is that these two organisations will make the situation more complex.
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, talked passionately about enforcing the Baker clause. When the technical education Bill was going through, this was the only amendment the Government accepted. Of course, it was a Conservative amendment. All our brilliant Liberal Democrat amendments got thrown out. Then an election was called so we were not even able to have ping-pong. The Baker clause is a very valuable thing whereby people have to go into schools, at an early enough stage that the youngsters still have decisions to make, to tell them about UTCs, colleges and all the other possibilities.
This leads us on to the whole business of careers information and guidance, which a great number of noble Lords brought up, including the noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Lucas, and my noble friend Lord Stunell in connection with the construction industry particularly. It is vital that young people are shown the possibilities at a very early stage. There is evidence that youngsters at the age of six or seven have already gender-stereotyped particular jobs. This is not good for them, the economy or anybody.
Schools need to collaborate with colleges. Schools have all sorts of incentives for wanting to hang on to their pupils and to make them do GCSEs and A-levels. My noble friend Lord Storey asked: would it not be wonderful if schools celebrated their apprenticeships? I remember, in the balmy days of coalition government when I was in the DfE, saying to Michael Gove: “For goodness’ sake, get the schools to celebrate their apprenticeship leavers. If they’re putting up a placard outside the school saying, ‘These kids have all gone on to university’, put up another one saying, ‘These ones have gone on to apprenticeships’.” He said, “What a very good idea, Sue”, and did absolutely nothing about it—but there we are.
If we are to work with the colleges, one of the inequities that needs to be redressed is the difference in pay between college teachers and schoolteachers. It really is not right, so will the Minister please take that away and try to do something about it?
One of my major concerns when the technical education Bill was going through was that T-levels were technical—just “technical”. As we have heard from the noble Lords, Lord Puttnam, Lord Johnson and Lord Cormack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, a whole range of craft and creative industry qualifications really deserve their place. Not only are they good for careers and economy but, by goodness, they increase our quality of life. Yet this emphasis all the time on technical qualifications rather implies that craft does not matter; it does, and we need to do something about it.
I had another bit of paper somewhere; I have just a couple more things. We fully endorse funding for modular and short courses. That is absolutely essential, but why not until 2025? As we have already heard, that really needs to come forward. We need it as soon as possible.
We also notice with concern the sad drop-off in part-time learners from both the Open University and Birkbeck, but I also read that there has been a 26% fall in undergraduate higher education in the last decade. Where are all our young people going? What are they doing? This really is not good enough. We need a full-time push to try to get skills and education back on the agenda. If this Bill can be the catalyst for that, that will be terrific.
I have a last bit of paper somewhere, except that I have lost it. No, here we are. We have too much paper in this place. I have to say that, when you sit for six hours in the Chamber with a mask on, some of your rationale does disappear.
We have had an absolutely wonderful variety of speeches. All of us in the Chamber are committed to skills and education, and to the Bill going through and improving skills and education opportunities for everybody, but we have also heard major concerns that it really does need amendment. I feel sure that we shall all be prepared to work cross-party to try to ensure that we improve the future for young people and adults, and that the Bill ends up as a major contribution to the economy and the well-being of all of us. I look forward to the Minister’s reply and to Committee.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a fascinating and in many ways stimulating debate. Perhaps that was inevitable given that participants included four former Secretaries of State for Education. For more than an hour, we had the company of the current holder of that post, which does him some credit. Four former Education Ministers also spoke.
As my noble friend Lord Rooker pointed out, in his typically forthright style, many noble Lords referenced positions held in higher education institutions. To the best of my recollection, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, was the only Member to declare a position as a board member of an FE college, far less a school. That is another aspect of the divide that we need to bridge if our calls for parity of esteem are to have the ring of authenticity.
I am pleased to wish the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, a warm welcome to your Lordships’ House. I add my congratulations on her remarkable maiden speech. I do not know the noble Baroness, but I certainly know of her. She was a professor at the University of Dundee, my home city, so I was aware that she had created the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification there. It has now gained an international reputation.
This Bill has been a long time coming, because it is the first piece of government education legislation laid before Parliament for almost five years. That is so far in the past that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, was then the Education Secretary. We are now on her third successor.
The data shows that 16 to 19 education in England has suffered a huge funding squeeze, as my noble friends Lady Blackstone and Lord Layard stated. Between 2010-11 and 2018-19, real-terms funding per student in sixth forms and colleges fell by 16%. Technical students received 23% less funding than academic students. Recent additional funding of £400 million announced by the Government focused on technical education will, I am afraid, reverse only a quarter of these cuts.
The Bill does not deal with fundamental resourcing issues, but these have to underpin any serious attempt to transform post-16 education and training, which the policy summary notes claim is the main aim of this legislation. The impact assessment identifies the huge decline in adult education, apparently without appreciating the irony, given that the adult education budget has been slashed by half in real terms, which has led to a sharp decline in adult learners and particularly in workplace learning. The Government’s recent pettiness in axing the Union Learning Fund showed that Ministers are more interested in playing politics than supporting workplace learners. None of the Bill’s objectives will be achieved if these issues remain unaddressed.
The Bill covers only FE providers and sixth-form colleges. It makes no reference to schools, yet they play a vital role in equipping young people with the skills they need to thrive in life. The White Paper stressed the importance of good careers education in schools, a point made in today’s debate by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, yet the Bill does not mention that either. A significant number of schools deliver technical qualifications —some have been accepted to pilot T-levels —and it is difficult to understand how a meaningful local skills strategy can exclude post-16 provision in schools.
One of the main planks of the Bill is the introduction of a lifetime skills guarantee, albeit, as many noble Lords have said, with a rather narrow focus within the technical disciplines that it will support. Almost 1 million priority jobs will be excluded from the lifetime skills guarantee in sectors facing a skills shortage. What about Wednesbury Woman who wants to retrain as a computer programmer, or Mansfield Man who wants to go into hospitality? What is in the Bill for them? Inexplicably, hospitality—a sector desperate for new staff and suffering terribly from the effects of lockdown—is excluded.
One significant barrier for adult learners is the cost of study, an issue not included in the Bill despite being highlighted in its impact assessment. Perhaps the Minister can explain that conundrum. While provisions are made for a lifetime loan entitlement, it is unfortunate that its details are yet to be revealed. The effect of this is that they cannot be scrutinised by noble Lords today and must be delayed until Committee.
Lifelong learning must mean just that, as many noble Lords have said. People should have access to training and reskilling throughout their lives, but there remain concerns that the LLE may see participants being saddled with substantial debts, especially if the Government fail to deliver on the recommendation of the Augar review that maintenance grants should be reinstated for people from low-income households, as advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. We are told this is an issue on which the Government will consult. I have to ask: why? Wales has shown that these grants attract many into training, so why yet more delay?
The question of delay also concerns the LSG, which will not be introduced until 2024, and the LLE a year later. The Minister referred to complexities in this regard involving the modular system, but the many people facing unemployment in the coming weeks and months needs access to courses now to help them to retrain and upskill. What does the Minister say people should do in the interim while this is being developed?
The Government say that their main focus is on helping the country recover from the pandemic’s damage to the economy and spreading opportunity more evenly across the regions—worthy aims. Local skills improvement plans are identified as the means of achieving that, but the employer representative bodies in the legislation seem designed to be creatures of direct ministerial control; several noble Lords have registered their concern about that. While it is right that our skills system should be better at identifying and meeting the skills needs of employers, designating them the exclusive drivers of technical education, as my noble friend Lady Morris said, gives them too much power. Employers certainly have a contribution to make, but to suggest that no other bodies have anything to offer is surely wrongheaded, not least because employers do not have a great track record in training their employees for future patterns of work and developing skills demands. After all, the Government introduced the apprenticeship levy specifically because encouragement had failed.
The noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, referenced the West Midlands metro mayor. I wonder what Mr Street’s reaction is to being completely sidelined, along with other metro mayors, combined authorities, local enterprise partnerships and universities. We will bring forward amendments that empower these bodies to co-produce local plans in recognition of their own vital roles.
The Minister has important questions to answer here. Top of the list is to explain the membership, functions and central government control of employer representative bodies. How will they undertake their planning, particularly when starting from scratch? How will ERBs be held to account, and how will the extent to which providers are meeting local needs be measured and assessed? What will happen if a metro mayor disagrees with the ERB? What role is envisaged for local enterprise partnerships, which are not mentioned in the Bill at all? Yesterday’s issue of the Local Government Chronicle carried an article claiming LEPs were to be evolved rather than abolished. Can the Minister confirm that, and whether such evolution will be the subject of consultation?
My noble friend Lady Wilcox made the important point that supported internships, which can play a major role in supporting learners with learning difficulties to prepare for and enter the world of work, must be added to the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, also spoke passionately of the need for the inclusion of supported internships, which should be an integral part of local skills plans. This is sure to be addressed in Committee.
The Bill’s centralising theme also extends to two aspects of further education. It hands the Secretary of State powers of intervention if he does not like what a particular college is teaching, even if the quality of that teaching has been shown to be good. The Secretary of State can dismiss the local leadership team if the college is deemed not to be following the LSIP. Independent training providers will also be cowering at the thought of being targeted by Ministers for the same reason—a warning we heard issued by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard.
That seems draconian, but the Bill also gives Ministers the ability to regulate initial teacher training for further education. Such a system did exist; it was introduced by the Education Act 2002 but abolished by the Deregulation Act 2015. I ask the Minister what has led to the need for change just six years later. It seems the intention is to introduce standards for ITT in further education and to accredit providers to deliver them. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with that, but it sounds like the politicisation of initial teacher training—something that, as my noble friend Lord Knight highlighted, is already happening in ITT for schools, as a result of Ministers’ commitment to a particular educational ideology.
In opening the debate, the Minister referenced the Augar review’s call for parity of esteem, and many noble Lords followed her lead. If one theme has dominated the debate, it is the need to end the division between academic and technical routes, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, rightly said, is a false one. He illustrated that by reminding us that academic courses are offered at FE colleges, while technical subjects can be studied in universities. The divide was characterised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds as a “crazy distinction”. While my noble friend Lord Puttnam stressed that this is not a zero-sum game, my noble friend Lord Liddle called for “collaboration, not polarisation”. I echo these sentiments and very much hope that the Bill will at least begin to bridge that divide.
While we welcome the Bill’s aims, there remain many areas of detail—some not in the Bill, as drafted—that require extensive scrutiny and testing. We look forward to engaging with both Ministers in Committee, with a view to enabling the Bill to achieve a joined-up system of education, including regulation and funding.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions today; I appreciate the expert knowledge that they bring and the many passionate speeches. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said, I hope I have retained some of my rationality during this interesting debate.
I begin by giving a special thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, for her maiden speech. Like my noble friend Lady Morgan, I am the beneficiary of a touch typing course, which has stood me in good stead. I was fascinated to hear of the career of the noble Baroness, Lady Black, in forensic anthropology—but, as one of the more squeamish Members of your Lordships’ House, I do not need to know anything further. I wish her well, and hope that she enjoys her time in this House as much as I do.
I turn now to the points that noble Lords have raised. But given that there have been 50 speakers, as was outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, I am afraid that the department will be writing some letters after I have concluded.
Before I turn to the specific questions, many of your Lordships followed the lead of my noble friend Lord Willetts, including the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my noble friends Lord Baker and Lord Cormack. I am the beneficiary of the wisdom of previous holders of junior and Secretary of State positions in the department, in that my homework has been corrected: there is no artificial distinction between vocational, technical and academic—no sense that one is better than the other. We are trying to achieve a system where they all have parity of esteem, where the institutions that teach these qualifications have parity of esteem and where the quality of all those qualifications is there.
The reforms in the Bill are aimed at bringing the system closer together and the lifelong loan entitlement, for instance, will bring together all the funding support for learners—that is, level 4 to level 6—wherever you might be studying that. One can also look at the system at the moment and see that there is not a conflict or a battle between FE and HE—the Government do not desire that at all. We recognise the collaboration there is. When we look at the recent introduction of institutes of technology, we see that they have been a collaboration; the university technical colleges of my noble friend Lord Baker have also been a collaboration, as have been the recent specialist maths sixth-form colleges, with universities involved in 16 to 19 provision. So the system is not even that twofold—just FE and HE. We will also fund T-levels, A-levels and other high-quality academic and technical qualifications for young people and adults at level 3. This will ensure that, whatever option learners choose, they will have a pathway to success.
A few noble Lords mentioned being disqualified from access to LLE. If you want the funding for level 4 and you are accepted by the institution to study that, it does not matter if you do not have level 3 or level 2. That is how universities have operated for a while: they sometimes have different access routes. Therefore, although obviously we have the funding situation for levels 1 and 2, you will have that entitlement. If you get accepted on a course at level 4, you will be in the lifelong loan entitlement pot. There is no prerequisite that you have to have level 3. However, of course we recognise the value of those qualifications, as many noble Lords have said, and therefore the advanced learner loans will still exist for level 3 courses that are not the 400 courses that we are currently funding if you do not have the full entitlement or if you have the full level 3 entitlement and want to do something different. I hope that clarifies that everyone will have that lifelong loan entitlement between levels 4 and 6.
On the measures in the Bill on local skills improvement plans, I agree with my noble friend Lord Taylor on the importance of localism. The local skills improvement plans are putting employers at the heart of the skills system in a way similar to the apprenticeship situation and the T-levels that we have designed. Many noble Lords talked about that tension: someone has to be in the driving seat here. There cannot be a cast of thousands but there needs to be appropriate consultation. So the Government have decided that these will be employer representative groups. To clarify to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, we did not define them as businesses but as employers. That might be the big local hospital, or a university might be an employer for that purpose rather than just being the provider. They are well placed to have that convening role, including of course the SMEs, in their local area. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds highlighted, their involvement is crucial.
My noble friend Lady Morgan asked what the Government envisage ERBs to be. We consider them to be independent bodies designated by the Secretary of State to develop local skills improvement plans. They are capable of developing that plan in an effective and efficient manner and many noble Lords talked about the future—the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris and Lady Lane-Fox. The plans have to be dynamic and will include not just existing skills but what the future for the local area looks like. I want to reassure the noble Baronesses, Lady Coussins, Lady Janke, Lady Henig, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that in Section 4 the relevant providers are not just FE and HE; they include the schools that are delivering post-16, as well as the independent training providers. So the educators are included, and it is supposed to be a dynamic relationship between the employer representative body and the relevant providers that, as I say, we have outlined.
On a point raised many hours ago by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, the mayoral combined authorities will be engaged in developing the local plans. The White Paper talked about the fact that they will be consulted on this and, as I mentioned, we have these trail-blazers that we have recently procured, so we will know the particular areas where we will be starting there. They will help to shape the local plans.
However, one reason to have local skills improvement plans is the gaps we have at the moment. The noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, referred to this position for parts of Shropshire, in such a dynamic region as the West Midlands. There will be a local skills improvement plan across the country and it is obvious to state, but perhaps I need to say it, that not everyone has a mayoral combined authority. As noble Lords have often said, we do not have a settled, defined geography out there for many things—our police authorities, our local government—so this is where “local” will be defined by the local employers coming forward. Many of the current trailblazers have come with the endorsement of local government or, where relevant, the mayoral combined authority.
The noble Lord, Lord Patel, the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, asked how the local skills improvement plans will interact with national strategies. They will be informed by the national skills priorities, as highlighted by the Skills and Productivity Board; that will remain. The board will undertake expert analysis of the national skills that we need to inform government policy.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, asked what powers the Government have should businesses take a back seat and rest on their laurels. If the ERB does not comply with the set conditions, the Secretary of State may not approve and publish its skills improvement plan and could remove its designation. Obviously, it goes without saying that all the powers of the Secretary of State are subject to criteria for judicial review. These powers must be used in a proportionate manner, et cetera; they are obviously not an absolute power.
The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Sheehan, Lady Young and Lady Bennett, talked about the importance of green jobs and net-zero carbon. We expect the LSIPs, led by the employer-represented bodies with that link to the national strategy, to look at what future green jobs are in the area. An element will be national because of what needs to happen with household boilers, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned, so there will be an interconnection there.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and the noble Lord, Lord Curry, raised questions on local needs. It is about the needs of the learners and the employers in a local geographic area served by the college. The noble Lord, Lord Bradley, questioned the centralisation here, but what we are saying here is that we are allowing “local” to define itself. We have not said that it has to be the local authority area, the MCA area or the LEP area. There is a dynamic here to areas being able to say, “This is the area that we, as employers, need to look at.” The plan will be an important point of reference.
As the noble Lord, Lord Curry, spoke, I mouthed “Newton Rigg”. I am aware that there have been issues in relation to the provision of land-based education in that part of Cumbria. I regularly see questions about it, so I will happily engage with him if I can offer any further assistance.
I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Storey, the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and other noble Lords that the purpose of the section of the Bill dealing with technical educational qualifications, which includes a lot of hospitality within that sector, is to simplify the approach to regulations between the institute and Ofqual. The two bodies already work effectively together. They are effectively collaborating; we are embedding, or perhaps futureproofing, it so that they carry on working in the way that they do at the moment. In the legislation, we are extending the technical qualifications that IfATE can regulate but Ofqual will continue to have independent regulatory oversight of technical qualifications in live delivery. The legislation will bring the treatment of technicals more in line with A-levels and GCSEs, where the content is subject to regulatory scrutiny. Obviously, we have been talking to Ofqual during preparation of the Bill.
Extending the institute’s power will raise the quality bar and ensure that the majority of these qualifications, like apprenticeships and T-levels, are aligned to employers’ standards. This will place the employers’ voice at the heart of the system. We are creating a clear progression pathway for learners and there will be an opportunity for Parliament to consider the details of the regime when the regulations are laid.
It has become clear today that a lot is happening around this legislation; this is the statutory underpinning to the skills White Paper, but we also have the consultation that has just finished on level 3, the call for evidence on level 2 and the consultation on the details of the lifelong loan entitlement. Turning to that, I confirm to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that it is our intention, as outlined in the Explanatory Notes, to bring forward amendments to the lifelong loan entitlement ahead of Committee. I can also confirm to the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, that the LLE will be available to be used from levels 4 to 6. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, also mentioned the funding of level 3. As I have outlined, that is covered by the national skills fund and there are now the boot camps—flexible courses for up to 16 weeks. As I have said, that is in addition to the availability of the ALL and bursary support fund for level 3 qualifications.
Many of your Lordships, including the noble Lords, Lord Bichard and Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lady Wyld, raised questions on the detail of the LLE ahead of the upcoming consultation. We will do that as soon as possible during the passage of the Bill. I am not able to give a clearly defined timeline on this, but the consultation will cover questions on, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, mentioned, maintenance credit transfers; the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and many other noble Lords mentioned the ELQ rules, which will also be within the consultation. I am happy to ask officials to set up briefing sessions with noble Lords once the consultation has been launched.
Many noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Curry, my noble friend Lord Cormack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, asked about the introduction date of the LLE. As well as the consultation, we have got a lot of work to do with the Student Loans Company to co-design a system capable of delivering the required operational changes, and we will introduce secondary legislation to enable the LLE to function. This, as I have outlined, is the whole pot for level 4 to level 5, so there will of course be changes. Once you release the maximum loan amount for the academic year, that has a knock-on implication for that which it already funds—mainly the level 6 undergraduate degree. We have got to get this right operationally and, unfortunately, it is going to take more time than we would ideally like.
The question of part-time study was raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Lane-Fox and Lady Greengross. I have to say, having been to a graduation at Birkbeck university, I was overcome by emotion seeing people getting their degrees, many with their families and children there. The decline in part-time study and adult education is a great shame, and I thank my noble friend Lord Willetts for his humility in accepting that it is something that we are seeking to put right. One of the main purposes of this is to ensure that the loan entitlement enables that modular, part-time learning to begin again. But I accept the questions raised about how adults access loans, as opposed to young people; I am sure there are behavioural scientists looking at how we get people to take these loans up.
In response to my noble friend Lord Willetts and the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, the LLE will be available regardless of where you study—it will be “institution blind”, as I think another noble Lord said. It will be based on the level of qualification you are studying, not which institution you have selected to study in.
On the parts of the Bill that relate to initial teacher training, as I have outlined to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, the powers we are taking are to deal with the small part of the market that is not producing the quality that it should for initial teacher training for FE. Once we have worked in collaboration with the sector, if we still need that power, we will use it, but we want to make sure that the quality is there.
I believe the questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, relate to the current review of the ITT market for school-based training, and so I will ask officials to write to him, as that is outside the scope of this Bill.
On that note, there were other matters, as this Bill sits quite narrowly within a framework of a lot of other interconnected issues. I will deal with a few of those in the time I have left.
I am very grateful again to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds for highlighting the importance of special educational needs and of using the assistive technology to support FE learners with SEND. This is an important part of the Bill. Obviously, the figures for those with SEND show that a higher proportion of them go into technical or vocational qualifications or into FE institutions.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked about alternative student finance. We are considering a student finance project that is compliant with Islamic finance principles in parallel with the post-18 review of education and funding. That review is due to conclude alongside the next multi-year spending review, so we will provide an update then. I know that that is an issue that has been talked about for a number of years.
Of course, many noble Lords raised questions about apprenticeship funding. Again, apprenticeship levy funding is not part of the scope of the Bill, but £2.5 billion is available this year and the funds available to levy-paying employers are available to be transferred down the supply chain. We are working on the apprenticeship levy to ensure that it is meeting those needs. Most employers who pay the levy might not spend all of their funding, and they can fund apprenticeship starts in smaller employers. We will make improvements to support employers offering more apprenticeships and to make them more flexible through accelerated front-loading and flexi-job apprenticeships and making transfers easier. We also have a specific piece of work on the sector that the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, is in—that is the creative industries—where apprenticeships have been difficult because there is not one employer and people are going from project-based work.
The importance of careers advice was mentioned by many noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Patel, Lord Addington and Lord Bichard, the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and my noble friend Lady Morgan. Obviously, that is not within the Bill, as far as I am concerned, because we do not need statutory underpinning for that. However, I recognise that the Bill is sitting in this wider framework of connected issues, and we have given £100 million to the National Careers Service and the Careers & Enterprise Company this year.
On the perennial issue of cross-government working, which was mentioned by many noble Lords—particularly the noble Lords, Lord Puttnam and Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and my noble friend Lady Stroud—and also came up in one of our meetings in advance of today’s Second Reading, we are looking to answer those questions, so I will write to noble Lords about the interconnection of this with the benefits system. It is not straightforward to answer in a Second Reading debate how we can ensure that it connects properly, but I will write to noble Lords.
In relation to the specific question on the Kickstart scheme, I am told here that universal credit claims are eligible if the claimants are aged 16 to 24 and meet the relevant conditions. We are working with DWP to turn those as well into apprenticeships when it is right for the employer and that young person. I hope that answers the specific question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, but if it does not, I will write further to him.
Obviously, I have read the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, in the Times, which I think were more properly addressed to the Treasury in relation to the finances. The issue was also raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and that will also be passed on.
In conclusion, I wholeheartedly agree with the statement by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, about the importance of the Bill. The imperative is the need now for us to follow through, to fund this and to deliver it. I beg to move.
Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
House adjourned at 8.09 pm.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Tuesday 6th July 2021
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-I(a) Amendments for Committee (for Second Marshalled List) - (5 Jul 2021)
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Henig) (Lab)
My Lords, the next business is the first day of Committee on the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. I will call Members to speak in the order listed. During the debate on each group, I invite Members, including Members in the Chamber, to email the clerk if they wish to speak after the Minister. I will call Members to speak in order of request. The groupings are binding. Participants who might wish to press an amendment other than the lead amendment in a group to a Division must give notice in the debate or by emailing the clerk. Leave should be given to withdraw amendments. When putting the Question, I will collect voices in the Chamber only. If a Member taking part remotely wants their voice accounted for if the Question is put, they must make this clear when speaking on the group.
Clause 1: Local skills improvement plans
Amendment 1
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that the interests of students whose needs are not encompassed by local employers are included.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as editor of The Good Schools Guide and a member of City & Guilds Council.
I welcome the local skills improvement plans. A strong link between local business and local skills provision for local people is a very good idea; it will build a set of relationships which will be long-lasting and much valued. However, how exactly do the Government think this process is going to work? I hope that the Minister will be able to give us an outline of how the Government now see the local skills improvement plans actually working. Are they intended to be comprehensive, covering the entire needs of an area, or are they sector-specific, as I understand some of the bids for the pilots are? Are they intended to be inclusive of independent training providers? Will the local FE college be the dominant force or just a part? Is it intended that funds will be channelled through the local skills improvement plans? If they will, at what sort of level and with what sort of scope? How do the Government see this working in terms of local relationships? How exactly will the local skills improvement plans be held to account for their results? Will the decisions they reach be easily open to challenge, and if so, how? What is the interface locally with careers information advice and guidance and the Careers & Enterprise Company? There are a lot of things I would like to understand better about the direction in which the Government are intending to take us.
Whatever those answers, there is one big thing missing from the Bill: the interests of potential students, and that is what my amendment addresses. I want to see a reference to what local people need, from their point of view. The young people in Eastbourne, where I live, are pretty average—they are not in any way lacking compared to the national average. Business in Eastbourne, however, which is a coastal community, is typically very skewed. There are some areas in which we are very strong—hospitality, obviously, building and allied trades, education—but when it comes to cyber-security, IT generally, engineering, writing, creative careers, and management and science-based careers, all of which go on in London, there is really not much around. This is not surprising or unusual, but many of these are the growth areas of the economy. It is absolutely in the best interests of our people here—not only the young people, but career-changers and others—that they have good access to the skills necessary to those parts of the economy, not least because it will encourage such businesses to move down here or, in the new fashion of remote working, employ people here. That way, we as a community will have access to the more prosperous, higher growth, higher wage parts of the economy that we do not currently have.
The interests of individual people, potential students, are not congruent with those of employers and providers. In the interests of our people, we must offer training locally in the main growth areas of the economy. I do not mind whether it is through independent training providers or remote training, but it must be substantially good.
I will not speak at length to the other amendments in this group, many of which I have a lot of sympathy for, except to mention that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on getting people a base level of skills in maths and English. That is absolutely key to raising the level of the economy locally. Somebody locally must have responsibility for that. We need something better than GCSEs here. GCSEs are aimed at the requirements of an academic curriculum; what we need is a test aimed at the base skills needed by employers. Those are two different things. We test English competence extremely well when students come to this country or want to be employed as doctors, for example. We have skills-centred tests aimed at establishing competence. We need something like that for our own people in English and maths, so that everybody has a chance of getting through and we do not continue to suffer the comparable outcomes system, which condemns 40% of our young people to having substandard English and maths qualifications. I beg to move.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the very clear introduction to this group from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Having listened to his explanation, I rather regret not having attached my name to his amendment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, did. He really has nailed the key problem with this Bill and the reason for many of these amendments: the Government’s focus on employers, presumably existing employers, fails to explain how a local skills improvement plan can actually help an area to improve. By focusing on potential students, Amendment 1 really helps us to think about how people might also want to get the skills to be part of communities, to run community groups, to be involved in cultural activities or to be voters or parents. All of these are areas in which people might want to improve their skills. It would also help communities that are subject to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, which are often lacking in social capital. We are talking about skills that pretty well every community is short of. Any community group that any noble Lord has ever known has had to find a treasurer—someone who is prepared to take on doing the books, even if there is not much money in those books. These are skills that every community needs, but they might not actually be a business need.
However, I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 2, which is in my name. It tries to get at another aspect of the Bill addressing the so-called economy by adding in to consult in the skills improvement plans
“potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed.”
Looking at recent figures from the pre-Covid time, there were 5 million self-employed in the UK, up from 3.2 million in 2000. They are a very major part of our workforce and, if they are running a business, what they may need to help them find work, and improve the work that they find, is not necessarily going to be reflected by the employers in a town. I think here of a very old-fashioned term, perhaps—the “company town”.
A few years ago, I visited Barrow-in-Furness where the top employer, by a scale of many thousands, is of course the shipyards. The next two biggest employers, of around 1,000 each, are the largest supermarket and the local hospital. Barrow-in-Furness, as I said when I was there, clearly needs to diversify its economy and develop things such as local food-growing and tourism businesses, through all kinds of objectives. How are those three top employers going to provide advice on the skills needed for that?
At the moment, the Bill feels really half baked. I am in a difficult position in speaking before many of these amendments have been explained, but I support the sentiments behind them all. I shall pick out a couple briefly. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said about the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker—particularly, perhaps, Amendment 81, which has broad support—the focus on the attainment gap is crucial. There are many people whom schooling has failed in the past; they need support with the right kind of courses, the right way to improve and lift their skills, not just for their jobs but for their lives.
I also particularly support Amendments 20 and 21, both of which address, in different ways, distance learning. We are not going to be able to put into every village and town every course that might be of use to everyone. It is crucial that we have, in the Open University, a very successful and important structure; something that people can use to advance their knowledge, as well as their skills, and get into the practice of lifelong learning. That is such a crucial skill that we are going to need for the coming decades. The number of amendments tabled to this clause really shows that the Government need to go away, having listened to today’s debate, and think about how they can improve not just the Bill, but their thinking about how we provide the skills needed for a very different age.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 11 and 81. I also support the first three amendments spoken to, and I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for my amendments. I declare interests as a fellow and former chair of the Working Men’s College, chair of the education department’s stakeholders’ group and other relevant interests as in the register.
The rationale of my amendments is that this potentially most useful Bill will not have the national impact it might, unless more provision is made to get a very large number of young people and others to the starting block. Amendments 11 and 81 are designed to do just that. I am most grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. The reason they are not speaking is entirely due to the complexity of arrangements, which I fervently hope will be simplified in September. They all tried to put their names forward. I also thank the Association of Colleges for its helpful advice.
At Second Reading, I set out the fact that more than one-third of young people in secondary school do not achieve the requisite GCSE grades in English and maths to qualify for entry to the further education and training so enticingly proposed in the Bill. I asked the Minister what provision had been or could be made for this very large number who, for various reasons, among which lack of innate ability has not been cited, could not access the educational opportunities in the Bill. She was not able to give me an answer, nor did one appear in the letter she helpfully sent to Peers after Second Reading, and nor have I had a reply to a request I made to her team for an answer. As this is unusual for the noble Baroness, I conclude that there is no answer and there are no such comprehensive arrangements in place.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 1 and 6, to which I have added my name, and to Amendment 20 in my name and that of my colleague and noble friend Lord Storey. I declare an interest for the whole Bill: I am a vice-president of City & Guilds, an organisation for which I worked for some 20 years.
On Amendments 1 and 6, I have been crossing out what I would have said as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said it far more effectively than I could. I do not believe in repeating what others have said, even if I have not said it myself, so I shall just agree with what he said. It is essential that we take into account potential students—and not just the young people of Eastbourne, I suggest—who should surely be important players in any discussion. If there are no students, there is no point in employers wishing to train them. It is not just the views and interests of students but those of student unions, trade unions, relevant community groups, agencies and local government that need to be taken into account. There should also be constant dialogue with careers advisers.
Funding must be made available for social mobility. An aspiring blacksmith or chef should not be disadvantaged if local needs are engineering-based. Dyslexic students should not be disadvantaged if their skillset is different from local needs. Amendment 20 ensures that providers of distance learning are brought into play. As the Explanatory Notes set out, the role in the local skills ecosystem played by providers without a local bricks and mortar presence in a particular area is taken into account in local skills improvement plans. Of course, it may not be bricks and mortar. It could be any skills area, but distance learning is truly important, as the work of the Open University and other distance providers makes clear. The OU has been a life-changer for many who could not study residentially.
Often, people may wish to study for employment not directly available in their area but for which they can develop skills and earn qualifications which will serve them well in other parts of the country. We should not be depriving them of the wherewithal to do just that. Throughout the Bill we shall seek to ensure that distance learning is taken into account. This amendment will do that and provide opportunities for learning to those without local provision.
I add my support to Amendments 11 and 81, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, a staunch supporter of the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities, but these proposals go much broader, to those who have problems with GCSE English and maths which, for so many skill areas, are not essential. To have an academic qualification in English and maths is not necessary for a whole range of perfectly useful employment opportunities. I also support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Addington, who will be following me to speak for himself. They are important amendments too.
I hope that the Minister will be able to look favourably on the amendments in this group.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is one of those debates when everybody has said and everybody is going to agree with everybody, so let try to do it in as precised a way as possible. Before, I do, I should remind the Committee of my declared interests and let the Committee know that I have become an adviser to Genius Within, which looks at neurodiversity with Birkbeck, University of London.
The basic thrust of this is: what will be put into the plans, how flexible will it be and how will it adjust to the needs of those people who are supposed to be covered by it? We have heard about many subjects. When someone mentions dyslexia in front of me in one of these debates, I give myself a little cheer because, hopefully, the word is getting out.
The most important thing about my Amendment 22, if you throw everything away, is identification. Most people in the neurodiverse sector or with any special educational need have moderate or lower-level needs that, if not addressed or supported, can lead to failure to get academic qualifications giving access to training. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and I might argue about GCSEs and certain points, but the essential thrust of what she said carries through to these groups. Someone who has trouble in that learning environment will always have trouble. If we suddenly get—as I did with the officials who the Minister was kind enough to give me access to, for which I am eternally thankful—“Oh but we have a high-needs strategy”, well, that is great, but what happens to the 18% of the population who are identified as having special educational needs but who are not in the high-needs group? They will become your workforce. They are the people who are underachieving and either do not get jobs or get jobs which they do not fulfil or can access other qualifications with.
Please, when we are doing this, can we build in a capacity to identify people who have already failed in the school system? As adults, they will be presenting differently, with established types of behaviour, which may mean that they are resistant to certain activities because who on earth wants to be told again: “You’ve failed, you can’t do something”? Let us take everybody who is scared of heights and stick them up that ladder and shake it. Let us make sure that it is uncomfortable and that something that you do not like to have gone through again. What will happen about identifying the people in these groups, people with ADHD, people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, with parents with the same problems, who do not have the type of parents that I had behind me?
I appreciate that this is all that you can do here, but what steps will be taken to ensure that everybody gets through and is supported? The idea that you need only a functional grasp of English and maths is a step forward, but we must embrace the fact that there is now technology available that can do most of this for you, at least at a functional level. If you can talk, you can word-process now. Can we ensure that this is taken into account in the plans because the groups who are unskilled, which we are addressing, will be helped?
My Amendment 26 is about looking slightly wider than just at one area. It came from a conversation that I had with someone at the British Dyslexia Association, who said, if someone feels that they would be happier in something that uses hand skills and is slightly out of area, please can they be supported to get there? This is true of virtually all groups but is probably slightly more intense in this situation. If you are living in an area which is just on the boundary, the thing that you may want to train in is probably in the next area. All of us have done this for schools to work. Arguments about constituency boundaries go to an audience where many may have an interest. Can we please take that into account? When the Minister comes to answer, or at a later stage, can he give some idea of how these group plans or areas of concentration will work together? If they do not, we will be excluding large numbers of people from getting the support that they need where that is a local employment opportunity for them. We are still assuming that they will stay in their local areas for jobs for long periods. If we are doing that, then let us at least be realistic about it.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I support these amendments and the thrust of the debate so far, particularly with what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said in moving the amendment, every word of which I agreed with, as I have with most of the other speakers so far, so I will try not to repeat myself.
There is something of a dilemma. It is very difficult to be against a local skills plan, and I am not. It is a really good thing. I believe in this notion of place, which I think we have lost recently in school and skills. It is very important, and I can see that these local skills partnerships adopt that notion of place and that one place is different from others. I am absolutely in favour of that. It is very difficult to argue against employers being involved, and I would not. I have moved, over the course of this debate, from being very much in favour of those two things to having difficulty visualising what it will be like when it is in a good form. The more you talk about it, the most difficulties you see emerging. I hope that this means no more than that there are a lot of details to sort out. I am not trying to be difficult on this, but I wonder whether a number of issues will be resolved by this structure.
I shall raise two concerns reflecting the debate so far, which are around whether an employer-led body is likely to deal with these issues. It is not that they cannot be dealt with, but employers are different organisations, representing different things and have different experiences. It might be that in some circumstances they are not the best to deal with certain issues. My first concern regards Amendment 1 and potential students. Are current employers with current businesses the best people to scope the future economy? I am not saying that they have nothing to offer, because they do, but they have got a lot to protect in the here and now. A successful employer will be successful only if he or she scopes the future, but it is an uneasy thing that we are having to do. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that. How do we keep their eyes to the future if they are leading this plan?
The second is: is an employer-led skills plan going to be the most effective at looking after the groups of people who are often left out, whether it is the Travellers, the underachievers, the marginalised or those who have not got qualifications? The traditional role of employers is often as gatekeepers: they let the successful through to be their employees, but they do not have an ongoing responsibility for the ones they have rejected. They often fall to other organisations, which have or develop the experience to deal with them.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, this Bill is largely a Bill in search of a policy, and indeed a Bill that is a substitute for policy. It does almost nothing that actually requires legislation. As far as I can tell, there is only one aspect that actually requires a change of the law to be accomplished, which is the extension of student loans to further education courses—a reform I support. But all the rest of it is the enshrining in legislation of policy goals—some of which are inherently contradictory —which do not require legislation at all.
I am surrounded by former Ministers on all sides, and we all know that whenever you do not have a policy and cannot quite work out what to do, but want to proclaim a priority, you produce a Bill. The Civil Service loves producing Bills. It has Bill teams. The one thing you can do from Whitehall and that big building on Great Smith Street is produce reams of paper—White Papers, Bills and all that. It does not actually mean you do anything to improve skills levels in the country, but you do produce Bills and White Papers and requirements on other people to produce plans and so on themselves.
In my experience of big change in education, the biggest changes are usually produced by the smallest pieces of legislation that focus in particular on funding—because the one thing the Government control in this is funding. In parenthesis, further education funding is declining; let us not get away from that. No amounts of legislation, no White Papers extending to whatever this latest one is—it is in very large type, but it extends to 73 pages—can make up for the fact that funding is being cut. There is some opportunity for substituting public funding with private funding through the loans scheme, but public funding is being cut.
That is one way you can do it. The second is by great ministerial and Civil Service drive on the ground, which we desperately need in this sector. But this sector has had, by my calculation, one Minister of Further Education each year since 2010. The only one who was any good was sacked and now chairs the Select Committee in the House of Commons—I think because he was actually too committed to making a reality of further education.
The one big reform in this area, which is the apprenticeship levy, has been so badly mishandled that, astonishingly, it has managed to lead to a decline in the number of apprentices, particularly at entry level, which is the area where we have the biggest skills failures. So this is an absolutely farcical piece of legislation. The Minister has my deep commiserations on having to spend hour after hour camped in this House proclaiming mantras and platitudes that will have been written for her by civil servants and will do absolutely zero to improve further education or the skills level.
Producing local skills improvement plans does not require legislation. The Government could today announce —and, with funding, incentivise and require—public authorities to do them. I can assure noble Lords that employers’ bodies, if some money was waved in front of them, would willingly co-operate in the production of local skills improvement plans. So legislation is absolutely not necessary.
But, because one always hopes the Government are actually producing a policy that is well thought out and crafted and has a proper chain of connection between the conception of the policy and the levers, goals and outcomes, I actually read the White Paper. It is always a big mistake to read the actual policy statement that underpins the legislation. The White Paper says on page 14, in one of its many platitudinous statements:
“At the moment, employers do not have enough influence over the skills provision offered in their local area or enough say in how all technical training and qualifications are developed.”
We are then referred to footnote 14, which states:
“See for example England’s Skills Puzzle: Piecing Together Further Education Training & Employment (Policy Connect Learning & Work Institute, 2020.”
Well, I read that report. It is not a survey of employers; it is not even a proper study of employers. It is a report of an ad hoc commission chaired by Conservative MP Sir John Hayes, one of the former Ministers of Further Education. Having done a few dipstick surveys in different parts of the country, it makes five recommendations, none of which is for these local skills improvement plans.
The first of the five recommendations is that there should be national targets, monitored by the new skills and productivity board in the way the Climate Change Commission monitors its targets. I am not up on the creation of the latest quangos, so I am not yet fully familiar with the skills and productivity board. No doubt the Minister will tell us what this new quango is doing. But that does not require this reform. The second recommendation is for further devolution of budgets. That may be a worthwhile thing to do but, since the budgets are declining, that does not inherently help. As King Lear told us:
“Nothing will come of nothing,”
But, in any case, devolving budgets does not require these skills plans; it can be done by fiat from the department tomorrow.
The third recommendation is further funding incentives for collaboration—which, again, can be done without any of these local skills improvement plans. The fourth is a national campaign to recruit teachers to further education. I entirely support that; again, it does not require this reform. The fifth is piloting personal learning accounts. I strongly urge the Government to be cautious about that one; some of us on this side of the House are deeply scarred by things called individual learning accounts, which turned out to be a massive scam for rapidly created local skills organisations to cream off all the money. They certainly should not go there at all; the extension of the student loans reform would be much better. So the statements that underlie this are not rooted in any evidence base.
We then come to the skills plans themselves. I thought that, since this Government are deeply versed in evidence-based policy, they would have piloted these properly so we can see: what these local skills plans are going to look like; what employer bodies are going to produce them; and what the relationships are with the local further education colleges, the mayoral authorities and the other public authorities. I thought we could perhaps read one or two of them. I am very keen to read them because, from my experience of the centre trying to mandate other people to produce plans, it is not the bodies charged with producing the plans that produce the plans; it is consultants employed by the bodies, who are paid a fortune and have no responsibility whatever for delivery of any of the outcomes. Some of us on this side of the House will remember the words “education action zones.” A whole army of consultants grew up to produce the plans for education action zones, which led to precious little further education and no action—except by the people producing the plans for the education action zones, who made tens of millions of pounds. I see this happening again.
But I thought, “Well, maybe it’s being piloted”. So I googled “pilots,” because the White Paper’s pages 15 and 16 refer to pilots of these local skills improvement plans. The pilots have not started. There was an article on 20 April in a magazine called FE Week—which is after my time, a new entrant to the block, and seems to provide a lot of good information on what is going on—and the headline was:
“Hunt begins for ‘employer representative bodies’ to pilot local skills improvement plans.”
There is not long between 20 April and 6 July, but none of these bodies has yet appeared. It turns out that these local skills improvement plans are to be piloted in six to eight “trailblazer” areas. “Trailblazers” is a word the Government always use when they want to proclaim action when absolutely nothing is happening—so we are having six to eight trailblazers that do not exist.
Now, bids for those trailblazers, which are to be backed by £4 million of revenue funding—all of which will go to the consultants charged with writing these plans—were being sought by 25 May. Perhaps the Minister can tell us how many bids had been entered by that date, give us some description of who they are, tell us when they will start and tell us what indication there is that they will be coherent. I do not want to detain the Committee unduly, but all the indications as to who the bodies are reference bodies that do not exist at the moment.
We have a whole box on page 15 headed “Case study: German Chambers of Commerce”. I strongly welcome the Government’s study of Germany and aligning more closely with the European Union; it is something that I have spent my political life seeking to do. If we had taken our membership of the European Union more seriously and done a better job of learning from the Scandinavian countries, Holland and Germany, our skills system would have made a much better start. So it is good that, as we leave Europe, we none the less regard as a model for policy the German Chambers of Commerce. However, there is nothing in these proposals that will lead to anything like the construction of the German Chambers of Commerce. There is no statutory power for the establishment of chambers of commerce. There is no requirement on employers to be members of these bodies and no public duties are imposed on them.
So who are the bodies that will be the skills-based bodies that will produce these local skills improvement plans? I should say “employer bodies” because the Government say that they must be employer bodies. Who are they? I look forward to the Minister telling us so that, by the time we come to Report, we will have been able to test this and perhaps propose a few amendments—perhaps, indeed, to remove this entire provision, save the public tens of millions of pounds and have some real action in terms of further education skills and what they will be.
My further remark is one that causes me real concern. The one area of policy that has at least taken some steps forward in this area over the past 10 years is the development of the mayors. For the first time, we actually have public authorities outside London with some real strength and political credibility. Andy Street is a great guy and is doing a fantastic job in Birmingham and the West Midlands. There is Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. Ben Houchen has created a big name for himself and is perhaps the only major recognisable political figure apart from Tony Blair to have come out of the north-east in recent times. This is very welcome. It is something that, at the political level, England desperately needs.
However, the one body specifically banned from producing these local skills improvement plans—I must get the jargon right—are the mayors. The reason why, it turns out, is that they are not employers. Well, as a definitional thing, obviously they are not employers—they are mayors—but they are the people who have the capacity to generate real activity and engagement by employers and colleges in a serious way. They should be tasked with this mission, but instead they are totally isolated from the process on the grounds that they are not employers and the Government want to be promoting employers.
Instead, in paragraph 8 on page 16 of the White Paper, Mayor Burnham, Mayor Street and Mayor Sadiq Khan—very big political figures whom we want to seize this agenda—are told this:
“Mayoral Combined Authorities will be consulted in the development of these plans.”
That is a fat lot of good, is it not? The most dynamic, potentially active and crucial agents of the state—they are also the people who, as public authorities, are closest to employers—are simply going to be consulted by bodies that do not for the most part exist at the moment. They are going to engage consultants who also do not exist; I suppose at least the consultants can engage with the consultees quite easily because they both have “consult” at the root of their job descriptions. However, the one thing that this is not going to do of its own volition is produce more skills education and training.
My noble friend Lady Whitaker made the point that the fundamental problems with the education system in these areas—I look at the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who wrestled with these problems 40 years ago; we wrestled with them too—is that basic skills are still too low and we have do not have high-quality apprenticeship routes for those who do not go on to university. This is not rocket science. It is simple. If we got this right, employers would be cheering from the rafters and we would not need this whole new panorama of local skills improvement plans, which I suspect will simply lead us to have exactly the same debates with very little progress having been made in 10 years’ time.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and I have argued over so many things over so many years that it is not true but, I must say, that was a bravura performance. He raised some very important issues, particularly in relation to whether we need this legislation or whether legislation is being used as a substitute for strategy. I note in particular his point about the lack of funding for FE and the fact that there is a danger that this legislation will simply be a way of signalling an approach but not helping in practical terms. I thought that he did an excellent job; it was like the emperor’s new clothes being exposed there. However, I want to correct him on one point. We have not left Europe; we have left the EU. As a Brexiteer, I am a great fan and advocate of German vocational education, as a matter of fact.
First, I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading. My IT skills rather failed me; I should probably go on a course. I thought that I had listed myself online, but I had failed to press the right button.
I support the aspirations of this Bill. It is close to my heart because, as a former further education lecturer—a sector that is too often treated as a Cinderella sector—I hope that further education will at last arrive at the ball. However, ironically, aspects of this Bill could limit opportunities, which is one reason why I am particularly sympathetic to Amendments 1, 2 and 6 in this group and the remarks initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.
I want to avoid making a Second Reading speech. However, I want to make a broad point about a distinction that it is important to remember as we go through all the amendments on Report and which represents why I want the Bill to avoid being overly narrow or prescriptive about outcomes, as this can backfire and lead to unintended consequences. While we are focusing on the neglected areas of vocational qualifications, skills and training, one danger is that we assume that certain social groups of young people are just not cut out for academic education. In the skills and training discussion—that is, when we talk about how we can target people and help them with skills and training—it is too often assumed that we are talking about working-class youth. This is dangerously deterministic and has already put pressure on schools in certain social areas to see education as preparation for the labour market, which cuts against the principle of building a society or education based on merit.
To state it baldly, every child has a right to an academic education until the age of 16, in my opinion, and even if they choose not to pursue an academic route after that, they are entitled to be introduced to the best that is thought and known. This allows every young person, whether they end up as a plumber or a philosopher, access through schooling to a working knowledge of cultural capital, history, literature, the scientific method and so on. The trainee hairdressers and car mechanics to whom I taught literature were more than the jobs that they eventually acquired. We should be wary of a narrowly instrumental version of vocationalism, as it can limit opportunities and aspirations.
One concern that I have about the Bill is that it focuses too narrowly on the skills required by local employers; this has already been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I mean no disrespect to them, but local employers can be short-term and short-sighted and do not always see the long view. As these amendments—the ones that I am supporting—emphasise, local employers may not always be best placed to see the bigger picture. In turn, that can narrow the options for students.
For example, take a geographical area traditionally associated with the fishing industry—an area in which I would like to see more investment in terms of apprenticeships and so on. Are we to assume that the locality will only ever need skills related to fishing? Also, there may well be more future-oriented skills that are not needed as yet but could create new industries, such as marine biology.
Of course, it sounds positive when the DfE says that the Bill will meet
“the need of local areas … so people no longer have to leave their home-towns to find great jobs.”
The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, made the point about place; I am very keen on remembering that. I like the soundbite about improving communities rather than just providing a ladder out of them, but it would also be wrong to confine people, or even trap them, into jobs related to the needs of the locality they live in. If you live in a largely agricultural area but aspire to be an engineer in car manufacturing, or to work in construction in the city, will you be able to access skills that allow you to move if we confine the skills available to those that only the local employers decide on? If you are an inner-city youth who dreams of working in farming, will you be able to access skills if local bosses cannot imagine ever needing or training someone to pursue such an agricultural career? Amendments 1 and 6 and their motivation by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, tackle these issues and the potentially limiting anomalies in the Bill.
More generally, one of the ironies of focusing on catering for local needs is that it limits who decides on local priorities just to local employers. It takes power away not only from students locally, as has been mentioned, but from local civic leaders—we have heard about mayors being excluded—and local further education college principals. Tom Bewick, chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, calls this a top-down power grab on qualifications. He says:
“It is regrettable that the provisions in this Bill and the government’s wider qualifications review seeks to stifle investment, innovation and choice in the future by effectively nationalising technical qualifications via a Whitehall-driven, top-down, command and control approach.”
Certainly, as later amendments try to address, the Bill introduces new regulatory layers of approval which are politically controlled from the centre—for example, the need for the Secretary of State to approve the new statutory local skills improvement plans. The Bill claims to be local, but how local is it beyond the local employers?
I am also sympathetic to Amendment 81, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Whitaker and Lady Greengross, and others, which addresses the attainment gap. The Bill is limited in supporting those who have not attained grade 4 or above in English. Simon Parkinson, the chief executive of the Workers’ Educational Association, noted that the Bill is
“quiet on support for any qualifications below Level 3”,
which
“offer many adult learners key progression routes”.
I am sympathetic to thinking about broadening this out.
Many years ago—probably decades now—I launched a return to learning course for women who had no qualifications. They were often young women, and I taught them a broad liberal arts course. I agree with the WEA that it is worrying that the Bill does little to support
“subjects outside a narrow band of technical disciplines”.
For the women who I taught, it was an introduction to literature, history and creative writing; no doubt local employers would think that a complete waste of time. But it actually allowed them to acquire confidence and skills—and ultimately, in some instances, a GCSE in English. It was a stepping stone to them taking training courses and reskilling, and many went on to be, for example, a nurse or a police officer. One did a course in animal husbandry. Another eventually ran a successful beauty business and earned a fortune.
My main takeaway from that is that we cannot be too prescriptive in what we want to achieve when we train people by narrowly saying that the only skills that matter are decided by local bosses. They might say “We’ll decide what skills we’ll need in this area into the future”, but lack any imagination to think beyond that. Sometimes non-training and non-skills education can lead people into the world of training and skills, and we should not neglect that either.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I am not sure I will be able to match the bravura performances that this Committee has already brought forward. I noted with great pleasure the speech of my noble friend Lord Adonis. I tried to make a speech like that at Second Reading. The only trouble is that at Second Reading you have five minutes, but being in Committee gives you much greater opportunity to expand as you wish.
For all the criticisms of the Bill, many of which I agree with, it does contain one major social reform which has the potential for improvement in the decade ahead: the extension of the student loan scheme to people doing training. We should all put on record clearly our welcome for that; it is very important.
I am no great expert in this field but I had a little encounter with it when I was involved, at the latter end of the Labour Government, with the North West Development Agency in my home area of Cumbria and saw the complexities of trying to improve the skills system. If the Committee will allow me, I would like to expand on that a little. It struck me that the problem with skills and further education was that provision was not demand-led but supply-led. It was led by people who wanted to fill the places on courses to get the money from the Skills Funding Agency to meet their costs. For it to be supply-led by the providers—not demand-led by the needs of employers and the country—is clearly not a satisfactory way of doing things, so reform is needed.
However, the Government are saying that they are going to create committees dominated by employers to solve this problem—well, we have had a bit of a history of that. The great selling point of the RDAs that Labour established was that they were private sector led. I actually think that was a great mistake; they should have been locally and democratically led. We then would have had, in my view, a much more solid basis for English devolution. We had the local enterprise partnerships established by the right honourable Sir Vincent Cable, which Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches will doubtless be anxious to applaud in these debates. Again, those partnerships were intended to put employers at the forefront of local economic development. We now have this proposal for local skills improvement plans, led by employers.
However, getting the employer voice in an area is very difficult. In Cumbria there are some very big employers. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned Barrow and British Aerospace, and there is Sellafield on the west coast of the old Cumberland. These very big employers need to have relationships with universities and colleges to provide a ladder of opportunity for their people, from apprenticeships to master’s degrees, in the areas that they need. That is not satisfactorily done but it is a way forward. I am not sure whether skills improvement plans will result in that, but that is what needs to be done with large employers.
Then there are big sectors in which there are small employers and generally unsatisfactory standards: typically, hospitality, in the private sector, and social care, in the quasi-public sector—often privately provided, of course. In those areas we need a national sectoral approach. There are probably several hundred local hotelkeepers in the Lake District; putting a couple of them on the skills improvement board is not going to solve the problem. We need some national sectoral approaches, particularly to the sectors where there are chronic skills shortages.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I very much support the aims of the Bill and of many of the amendments in this group, which seek to ensure that local skills improvement plans embody a partnership approach involving all participants in the education and skills system. The two overriding requirements of a successful education and skills system are that it should meet the national need for skills to deliver UK-wide goals and priorities, and that it should give individuals the attributes and skills to identify and pursue their own career aspirations and personal fulfilment. Reconciling those two aims is the challenge that the Bill seeks to address
I very much agree with Amendment 1, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It is essential that learners have a voice in the development of LSIPs—as I will call them; I hope noble Lords will forgive me—in their own areas, and that LSIPs should take proper account of national strategic priorities. They will need to find a way of balancing actual opportunities in their areas—the jobs that are there now, in health, in care, in retail and in hospitality, in existing businesses—with future needs for green jobs, for STEM, for digital jobs and creative skills. They may also need to be aware of the views of significant national employer groups about their specific current and future skills needs, such as those in the energy and utilities sector, which faces enormous skills challenges.
I hope the Minister will be able to tell us something about how the planned trailblazers or pilots will be used to develop guidance. Ideally, they will blaze a series of trails to respond to varying local conditions and circumstances. Different local areas will rightly have to take different approaches, led by different employer representative bodies. There may be many areas where chambers of commerce do not have the right focus or qualities to lead the local partnership, and others where the plan would ideally be built on existing work by LEPs, skills advisory partnerships and other such groups. What is needed is guidance on general principles for successful LSIPs and ERBs. What is absolutely not needed is any sort of over-prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach to such bodies.
I shall try to follow the excellent example given by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, by not feeling that no point has been properly made until I have made it myself, so I will now move on. I welcome the fact that Amendment 2 in this group, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, would require the needs of potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed to be considered. Of course, those groups include numerous entrepreneurs, who also need special skills. The Future Founders report in 2019 revealed that 51% of British young people aged 14 to 25 had thought about starting, or had already started, a business. We should ensure that the Bill addresses their needs; we should certainly not be focusing only on the skills needs of existing employers. One of the last places to look for the potential unicorn businesses of the future is within the ranks of existing large-scale employers.
One other specific area of need not mentioned in the Bill, about which I feel strongly, having been involved with it for some years, is improved work readiness and practical skills, particularly for young people aged about 14 upwards.
I applaud the recognition in Amendments 20 and 21, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, that much valuable skills training will be provided remotely —as we have learnt during the pandemic. Distance learning providers are an increasingly important category of independent training providers, not least in remote areas and areas less well served by colleges, and local plans should take account of what they can offer.
Finally, I strongly commend Amendment 18 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, to require local skills plans to give due regard to
“coordinating careers information, advice and guidance provision across education providers”
in their area. High-quality careers advice and guidance, available to all who need it, is fundamental to the success of any skills plan so that young people especially have a clear idea of what opportunities, meeting their own abilities and interests, are realistically available to them and what pathways they can follow to pursue those opportunities.
Although considerable progress has been made as a result of the 2017 careers strategy, which ended last year, careers education is still underresourced in terms of funding and of there being enough well-qualified careers guidance professionals to meet the needs of schools, colleges, universities and other training providers. This is one strategic skills shortage that needs to be addressed, preferably by a renewed careers strategy, but its complete absence from the Bill is concerning, so I welcome this and other amendments seeking to ensure that it is appropriately covered.
Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I regret that I did not participate in Second Reading, but perhaps, as somebody has already remarked, there might be a better opportunity here. I declare an interest as a national apprenticeship ambassador.
I felt sorry for the Minister after the performance of my noble friend Lord Adonis, which basically embraced Dante’s advice: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”. I do not agree—this is a good Bill. There are no perfect Bills; those of us who have been involved in education in previous Governments will know that we never get it quite right. It is a good Bill but, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and a number of people have suggested, it could be better, so I support most of the amendments in the group.
I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, who first raised the question of English and maths. The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, gave it even more emphasis. We need to find an alternative. There are certainly many apprenticeship opportunities which do not require GCSE English and maths. I had neither because I was dragged out of school at 15 years old, but I can remember some of the things we were required to do. After simultaneous equations, I am afraid I just could not master quadratic equations or anything else. I do not think that necessarily stopped me in my apprenticeship in telecom.
One thing I hope the Minister will respond to, because it is a constructive suggestion, is that the local skills improvement plans should embrace more than just employers. Perhaps that is the intention, but there are those who said that there is a need not just for students—trade unions have a role to play, as well as others. Trade unions are still doing a good job of getting back into learning people who have not embraced it for many years under the Return to Learn scheme.
There has been a lot of criticism about employers being somehow the wrong people to involve. I do not quite understand that. Where do people think these jobs will come from? There is a fundamentally important need to have employers as part of the local skills improvement plans. My concern is: will employers look ahead? A number of people said that, including my noble friend Lady Morris, while the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, quoted fishing and agriculture as a couple of examples. Even in those industries, it is not just the basic question of going out to sea and catching fish—there are the logistics involved when they return to port. A lot of technology is involved now, even in fishing. The fundamental changes taking place in agriculture require a much greater need for technology. I do not think we should assume that employers will not look ahead, but should we rely on them? No, I think that some of the amendments that have been suggested are right.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to take part in this debate. I will address principally Amendment 81 but also the general points raised by my noble friend Lord Lucas, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden.
The Bill basically focuses on education for 16 to 19 year-olds, but it cannot be looked at just as a separate section; it depends on what has happened between 11 and 16. If you have made a mess of 11 to 16, you cannot compensate for it by this Bill. I believe that, since 2010, we have made a mess of 11 to 16 education. This is really what is behind the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker; she is talking about disadvantaged children. The proportion of disadvantaged children today—you are usually considered to be disadvantaged if you do not get level 4 in English and maths—is between 30% and 35%. That is not a small minority—it is over 2 million students who failed, after 14 years of free state education, to acquire a basic literacy and numeracy qualification. It is a huge indictment of the English education system and what has been imposed upon it since 2010.
In 2010, Michael Gove imposed his curriculum on schools, without any consultation whatever. His curriculum, known as EBacc or Progress 8, consists of eight academic subjects: two English, one maths, three science, one foreign language and either history or geography. That is a grammar school curriculum; it is an academic curriculum. It excludes any sort of technical training, computer training, design training or cultural studies. Since 2010, there has been no fall in the number of disadvantaged children: the number then was roughly the same as it is now, at 30% to 35%. It was the same in 2015, when the Conservatives took control; there has been no significant improvement. I fear that there is absolutely no doubt that the attainment gap between the brightest and the less bright students will have grown substantially during Covid.
The victims of this policy are the disadvantaged and the unemployed. No one has mentioned the level of unemployment. Youth unemployment is now at 14.8%, which is very high—three times the national average—but there has been no mention at all of that. Nor has there been mention, so far, of students in the Bill; they have been left out like the mayors mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—they are not mentioned at all. I see no measure in the Bill that will prove a significant change in dealing with the skills gaps in our country.
The other matter that I am concerned about is that the Bill should have been a wonderful opportunity to create a combination of academic and technical education but, in fact, it makes the division even greater. The Bill is saying that if you stay on at school in the sixth form, that is the best way to get to university. When it is passed, the heads of every secondary school will say to their students, “Don’t go down that technical route, you’ll never get to university. Stay with us.” So all the rest will go down this technical route, and that is a real divide.
In Clause 4, the Bill actually says that schools and 16 to 19 academies will not be allowed to teach technical education. It says it in statute. I never thought that I would see that particular definition in an English law—least of all brought back by a Conservative Government, I may say. That is a complete bifurcation: there is an academic route and a less academic route. This is not really what should happen. The schools that I have established over the last 12 years include both academic and technical education and we have magnificent results, but the Bill really does not have that role in it whatever. It is educational apartheid—I do not use that word lightly, but that is what this is; there are two clear routes in future. Where is the parity of esteem, when the secondary head can say to his children, “Stay with me and you will get to university, because I will do those eight academic subjects, and we will get you through your A-levels as well”?
I am afraid that there is no real advantage in the Bill for the disadvantaged students, and I regret that very much indeed. When we talk about disadvantaged children, just remember that in every child there is a bit of flint. Sometimes you have to dig very deep for it, but that is the purpose of education—to find that bit of flint and create a spark, or, as Shakespeare said:
“The fire i’th’ flint
Shows not till it be struck.”
That flint has to be found long before 16; it has to be found at primary level and at secondary level and this is what we are failing to do as a country.
Lord Storey (LD)
I ought first to declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I looked at these amendments and found myself agreeing with every single one. I looked back and remembered when we had the technical education Bill and, when we were in Committee in the Moses Room, I think there were probably about eight to 10 of us. How wonderful it is now to see how people have realised the importance of technical and vocational education—we have a proper Committee for a further education/vocational education/skills Bill.
I do not have a problem with local skills improvement plans—does anyone? It seems eminently sensible that you look at the needs of each locality in terms of business, job creation and development, and put that plan together. It is not something where you say, “Nationally, we will all do this”; you look at each local area. I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, talk about Cumbria. He will be pleased to know that I spent a week in Keswick and, as we walked around, virtually every single restaurant, hotel and shop had an advert pleading for people to work in the hospitality industry. Clearly, that is a skill that is needed in that area. It is obviously brought about because of Brexit, but that was a problem even when we were in the EU—there were not enough people in the hospitality industry.
I look at my own city of Liverpool, and back in the 1960s and 1970s we were the poorest region in Europe and, as a result, we qualified for what was called Objective 1 money—nearly €1 billion, I think. We got that twice; we got two tranches because our GDP was among the lowest in Europe. Why did we get a second tranche? Because the first time we failed completely to use the money effectively. We did not draw up a plan; we did not say, “What skills do we need? How can we turn the economy around?” We just sort of threw the money about. For example, FE colleges were booming with hairdressing and beauty treatment courses, so we gave them money to develop those courses. Yet there was a shortage at the time of engineers and of people in the construction industry, but there was no plan to say, “This is how we should be doing it.” So the notion of a local skills improvement plan seems eminently sensible.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as in the register. Amendment 17 seeks to ensure that LSIPs cannot place an unreasonable burden on providers. Although we aim to amend the Bill to ensure that LSIPs are produced in partnership with providers, as drafted, the Bill gives ERBs all the power and renders FE colleges passive recipients. The role of employer representative bodies will be very important in shaping local systems, so it is worth while being clear about expectations, accountabilities and oversight in respect of what they are undertaking. There is a risk that some ERBs might represent a narrow group of employer voices, focus too much on current skills needs or be unwilling to take feedback. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked earlier, how will they work?
It is important to ensure that ERBs represent the full breadth of employer voices, focus on future demand—the skills we need for tomorrow—and have appropriate governance. Some employer representative bodies run publicly funded training providers that compete with colleges for apprenticeships and other contracts. We are therefore concerned that they have no ability to challenge plans even when these include unreasonable burdens, and can in fact be penalised if they are deemed to be failing in the plans’ objectives. I will not repeat the powerful rhetoric of my noble friend Lord Adonis, save his strong statement that this is “a Bill in search of a policy”—that is worth repeating, as is his further description that, with appropriate government funding, legislation for LSIPs would not be required.
There are many areas where plans could be unreasonable; for example, a requirement to facilitate a new course in an unworkable timescale or accommodate significant numbers of new students. I hope the Minister will agree to our other amendments and see sense in providers having agency over LSIPs, given their role in their delivery.
Amendment 18 seeks to ensure that LSIPs provide co-ordinated, strategic, all-age careers information, as mentioned by several noble Lords. The advice and guidance are widely supported across the education sector and, as was apparent at Second Reading, in this House. The Government’s White Paper says:
“We need impartial, lifelong careers advice and guidance available to people when they need it, regardless of age, circumstance or background.”
I could not agree more. Education is the key to personal and social mobility. I well remember being a young teacher when the noble Lord, Lord Baker’s 1988 Act was introduced. There must be a joined-up employment, skills and careers system. A range of choices and opportunities should be central to any reform, and changes to the post-16 education system should allow for progression and pathways between technical education, apprenticeships and existing further and higher education qualifications—no dual system, but one continuous pathway. It is disappointing that we are still awaiting the recommendation of Sir John Holman, who has been appointed to advise on this. Can the Minister confirm when these recommendations will be published and how they will sit alongside the Bill?
Amendment 19 seeks to ensure that the development of LSIPs must consider and support people with EHCPs and disabled people without EHCPs; this is supported by Mencap. Every person with a learning disability should have the opportunity to study and work. However, too few people with a learning disability have the opportunities and support that they need, and employment rates for people with a learning disability have remained stubbornly low. The reasons for this are numerous but some of the typical barriers to employment include a lack of support to build skills, misconceptions and a lack of understanding of what people with a learning disability can achieve with the right support, and failure by government programmes to provide the necessary adjustments required by people with a learning disability.
It is crucial that those with a learning disability can benefit from the measures in this Bill, and that support for schemes that help them, especially supported internships, are on the face of the Bill. A focus is needed on making the three “ships”—traineeships, supported internships and apprenticeships—more accessible and widely available; this will open up pathways into long-term employment. It is crucial that the various offers and pathways work in harmony. Indeed, apprenticeships need to be made more flexible and this should be included as part of reforms to the post-16 education offer; it has been a significantly missed opportunity.
Additionally, we want to see more of a commitment to ensuring that people with education, health and care plans, as well as disabled people without EHCPs, are included in the development of local skills improvement plans. Leaving this group out will only further entrench the current barriers.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions. Bearing in mind that questions have been raised about the structure and nature of the Bill, it may be useful to deal with those points first. The Bill will provide a framework. It gives the Secretary of State power to designate an employer representative body. That is not necessarily a group of employers but, as outlined in Bill, a body required to be “reasonably representative” of employers in the local area.
With respect to the framework, as was mentioned by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, there is a balance to be struck between not wanting to dictate centrally and having as much flexibility as possible, so that it is not prescriptive from the centre and the employer representative body can take into account a wide number of stakeholders and gather a wide range of evidence. This will set up a dynamic relationship. Clause 1(4) provides that the relevant providers have a duty to co-operate with the development or review of a local skills improvement plan. As some noble Lords have outlined, that duty places the further education colleges as a central plank in creating the plan for the local area. With respect to Clause 5, the plan is one thing that providers should have regard to when they are looking at local needs more generally.
I believe that noble Lords, at Second Reading and today, have had some concern about the scope of the local skills improvement plan. It is based on technical education—the beginning part of the Bill outlines what technical education is material for the purposes of the plan—but then the duty under Clause 5 for those providers is local needs. So it is much wider than just the technical education part that forms the central plank of the local skills improvement plan.
This will use the powers of the Secretary of State to designate that body and set up that dynamic relationship. Many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, mentioned that relationship with the national priorities. The Skills and Productivity Board, which looks at national skills requirements, will be reporting later this year, so that will be a central coherent national skills outline that every local skills improvement plan will have access to and will be referenced in the guidance. Hopefully, that will produce the dynamic relationship between the national skills plan—so each of the areas will have the same plan for national skills—and the local area. At the local level, you have the employer representative body with a duty on the relevant providers to co-operate in that dynamic relationship.
Noble Lords have made some very powerful points, and maybe we are going to come down to a bit of a House of Lords point about “Do those points belong on the face of a piece of primary legislation or are these important considerations to include in the guidance?” From the nature of this legislation, it is a framework. The challenge that could be made to the Government if we were too prescriptive in the Bill would be that we were trying to Whitehall-lead this—and that cannot be.
On the trailblazer process—for the benefit of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris—the current timetable is that the trailblazers will be announced later this month and end in March 2022. They will be important in fleshing out what should be in the statutory guidance that is mentioned in the legislation, and the national rollout will commence after Royal Assent. I hope that assures noble Lords that we have a timetable for this.
On the challenge about why this legislation is needed, there is a very clear DNA running through the technical education qualifications that one can see with apprenticeships, T-levels and the current review of levels 4 and 5. The majority of technical education qualifications in this country should be connected to an employer standard so that the employers know what that student can now do and the student knows what currency that qualification has. I recall serving with many noble Lords on the one-year Select Committee on Social Mobility; I believe the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, served on it. For young people who do not go to university, the complexity of the qualifications —the uncertainty about what that level 2 or 3 actually meant for you and what it gave you at an interview—was clearly so different from walking into an interview with your GCSE or A-level certificates. That is what, in terms of parity of esteem, all these changes are meant to change. Students should know, “When I get that qualification, it gives me that competency”, and they can walk into an interview and the employer will know that level 3.5 in, say, forklift truck driving on an oil rig has that competency. The currency is standard and gives parity of esteem to these qualifications. That is why, as we will discuss in a later group, the employers are in the lead as the employer representative body. That is the consistent DNA in the technical education system that we are trying to embed to give that parity of esteem, not just through saying this about FE and HE but through the technical qualifications being as easy to understand by students and employers as a GCSE certificate is at the moment.
I have a final point. The Bill does not exclude any particular level of qualification. The definition at the start is about technical education that is material to the skills, capabilities and assessments in that area. It is not limited in that regard. Obviously an LSIP could include the level 1 or 2 kind of qualifications; it is not limited. The limiting is the technical education section of what the providers in a local area would have due regard to when considering the local skills improvement plan.
I hope that provides a useful framework before I deal specifically with some of the amendments that noble Lords have tabled and explain to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that this is not half-baked. There is a reason why this is a framework to ensure local flexibility. We have not defined “local”. When we have done these trailblazers we have allowed the economic area to define itself, so we are really trying to get a balance here in terms of a structure and a framework to enable local areas to take ownership of their local plans.
I note the points made by my noble friend Lord Lucas concerning the LSIPs and the skills, capabilities or expertise required by potential students. I know the whole Committee will agree that post-16 education and training should meet the needs of students effectively, not only to secure meaningful employment but to ensure that they have essential skills for life more broadly.
I point out to noble Lords that Ofsted already considers whether the curriculum considers the needs of learners as part of its inspections of all post-16 FE providers. Many of the core skills and capabilities that students need to succeed in life are already well known and are consistent across the country—for example, literacy, numeracy, ICT and, sometimes, English language skills—so that students can function and integrate effectively into society. However, as I have outlined, the key technical skills that employers need can vary significantly across areas. They continually evolve to respond to new opportunities and challenges, and that is where the local skills improvement plan will make a valuable contribution.
By identifying the skills, capabilities and expertise required by employers in a specified area and, importantly, that may be required in future, which is specifically outlined in Clause 1(6)(b), a designated employer representative body will have clear evidence on the skills, capabilities and expertise that potential students will similarly require to help them secure good skilled jobs in the local area.
I reiterate that Clause 5 introduces a new duty on all institutions within the FE sector—namely, further education and sixth-form colleges and designated institutions—to keep all their provision under review to ensure that it is meeting local needs, including the needs of learners. At this point, to answer the point of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, there is no prescription in the Bill to say that 11 to 16 should not be teaching technical education. We have just said in Clause 4, in relation to the relevant providers being under a duty to co-operate, that at this stage we have not given that burden to schools. It is clear in Clause 4 that by regulation the Secretary of State can change that and make them one of the relevant providers that would then have a duty to co-operate.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
Sorry, no. On Amendment 2 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in relation to potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed, I strongly agree with her on the importance of ensuring that employers’ voices are central to the local skills improvement plan. That is why it is clear in the Bill that, once designated, the employer representative body must draw on the views of employers operating within an area to inform a local skills improvement plan. The definition of “employer” is wide and the employer representative body can take into account any other evidence. That is broad in order to ensure that they have flexibility to include, of course, the needs of the self-employed in the local area.
To effectively fulfil the role of summarising the skills needs of local employers, the designated body will need to convene and draw on the views of employers that are not part of the ERB itself, as well as other relevant employer representative sector bodies and any other evidence. That will ensure that it is as easy as possible for employers, especially small employers, to navigate local skills systems, engage and have their voice heard.
Turning now to Amendments 11 and 81, from the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her expertise and her unstinting efforts to support those who have not yet achieved their grade 4 or above in English and maths. I hope she will be pleased to know that although the coronavirus has slightly delayed the work with MHCLG and DfE, a strategy in relation to Gypsies, Roma and Travellers will be published, we hope, later this year.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)
My Lords, I have received requests to speak after the Minister from the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Knight of Weymouth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. I will call them in turn. I call the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister said that over 40 applications for LSIP trailblazers have been received by the department. Could she make them available for the Committee to see? It would be very helpful if, while we are considering the Bill, we could see what is going on in the real world. Could she also assure us that, when the selection of those trailblazers is made, they will not just go to areas that have Conservative MPs, reflecting the gerrymandering that took place with the towns Bill? There is a very acute concern that the funding that is available under the Bill is just going to places that are favoured with Conservative representation in the House of Commons, which would be par for the course for this Government.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
The successful ones will be announced later on this month. There are no plans—and I clarify that it is not our normal process—to release the applications of those who have not been successful. I will write to the noble Lord if I am wrong about that.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister did a noble job in trying to prevent us wanting to come back to these issues, but I am sure that we will on Report. I was particularly interested in the comment that she made about local areas defining themselves. Looking back at some of the places where I have lived, I am interested in what happens if no one wants you in their area. I was once mayor of Frome, which is right on the edge, and in the east, of Somerset. It is economically more in west Wiltshire: lots of young people might go and study at Trowbridge college, but they might go to Radstock college or Yeovil College. Frome is a wonderful place, but in those areas they might not want it. I used to represent Swanage, which is on the edge of the Bournemouth and Poole conurbation, but it is in Dorset, so it is in the wrong county, just as Frome is in relation to Wiltshire. I am interested in that area.
I am also interested in national colleges. There is a National College for Digital Skills in north London, a national college for the creatives in Purfleet and a National College for Nuclear in Cumbria and Somerset. Will they have to have regard to all of the local skills partnerships’ needs for their particular skills? If so, it is a bit of a nightmare for those colleges to go through all of them.
Finally, I ask the Minister whether she sees a move to a genuine all-age careers service? In particular, would the DWP have to refer people to it if they are coming through jobs schemes? With the National Careers Service and the extra money that the Chancellor agreed for it during the pandemic, we have seen that it is struggling to spend that money because DWP is not really aware that it exists and is not referring people over. On the Government’s thinking around all of this, which is critically important, with all of the deskilling that is going on in our economy, can she give us some assurance that they are properly working through what an effective all-age careers service that everyone will want to use will look like?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I was smiling at the noble Lord because I asked this precise question about a national plan. There is a balance here between not dictating from the centre, drawing a map and chopping things up and allowing economic areas to define themselves in our complex local geography. This has not been an issue with the trailblazers, but that was obviously a small number of areas—but, yes, we will ensure that there are no cracks between the areas and that every area will be covered by a local skills improvement plan.
As far as I am aware, there are no plans to change the National Careers Service and the Careers & Enterprise Company, which have different roles. The noble Lord is correct that we obviously need to make sure that all of this is joined up. Previous noble Lords have asked me about how this will join up with people on universal credit—this is a work in progress, but I was pleased to learn from DWP Ministers that there have been some slight changes to UC to make sure that those people could take up the digital skills boot camps, for instance. So we are aware of the need, with all of this, to make sure that this is one system that is working together.
One of the issues that I spoke of in preparation for this is the need for the job coach to understand which job requires which level to get those competences. Everyone needs to be able to understand this. I am sure that a job coach would understand that to be a translator you need GCSE French—but, to be a crane driver, what do you need? So we get that currency of understanding for employers, learners and job or work coaches sitting in DWP, who can advise people on what qualification to go away and do. That will make sure that you have the competences to walk through the door at that interview, in the same way as you would in relation to GCSE French, as I have said.
I am afraid I do not have a specific answer for the noble Lord. I think he was referring to Ada college in Manchester and north London. I will write to the noble Lord on how national colleges will engage. Obviously, we are hoping that, under the duty in Clause 5, a provider will not just say “Well, I’m in this LSIP area”. If they are on the border, they should be looking dynamically at where their students come and travel from—so they may end up looking at what the provision and the LSIP are for a number of areas.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s response. I will read it carefully in Hansard. I may have missed something, but I think she said that there were no laid down qualification barriers to entry. I would be grateful if she would write to me about where in the Bill this is made clear, and whether the Bill says that there is scope for enabling access through whatever barriers are locally set.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the point I was making was that the Bill does not mention being only at level 3, level 4 or level 2; it does not mention those levels. The only definition in the Bill in terms of the LSIP and relevant providers is around technical education. I will just get the definition; I might as well read from it. It refers to
“post-16 technical education or training that is material”.
For instance, in a sixth-form college, the entirety of its provision might not be relevant under its duty to co-operate with employer representative bodies. That is not linked to saying, “Technical education at level 4, 3, 2 or 1”. The Bill does not talk about that; it is just talking about technical education as defined in Clause 1.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for her encyclopaedic reply to this long debate. In general, I am encouraged, and I did not notice any point I raised that she did not address. I am particularly grateful to her for filling out the picture generally.
I will pick up a few points from the debate. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, had it right when she referred to place. Place is very important. That importance seems to be becoming recognised within various areas of government. I was very pleased, for instance, by the structure of the levelling-up fund and the way it required a place to get together to decide what it wanted the money for, rather than the former system that applied down the coast, where a pier was imposed on Hastings by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and not tied into what the place wanted to do. That developing sense of place needs to find a way to be tied into local skills improvement plans. These organisations want to be talking to each other and moving in the same direction, by and large. I think that is what I mean by accountability. This should not be an organisation which just wanders off on its own and does not feel that it needs to have any relationship with the way that the place it is embedded in wants to go.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, raised the question of towns adding new areas of business. It is really difficult to see how that works in the structure which has been proposed. I will devote some time to thinking that through when I get a chance to read Hansard. I am conscious that in my own home town of Eastbourne, a conurbation of about 130,000 people has 50 places per annum for A-levels. That is ridiculous, but it seems really hard to change, to move and to draw attention to. I suspect that a town which needed to add a new area of business would find it similarly difficult to shift some of the structures that are being proposed here—but, as I say, I will look at that more carefully.
There is a question of how existing businesses realise they need new skills, which is a function that historically has been provided by the good awarding bodies. How that is going to flourish in the new system is going to be worth looking at.
Several noble Lords were looking at the structures of employers that the Government are proposing to work with. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, it is not easy to build good employer groups. That is why I very much support the call of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to include the mayors. They have a convening capability which will mean that the local businesses produce good people to be on the LSIPs. It will not be third-rate or fourth-rate people; it will be people who are at board level taking part in them. That will make an enormous difference to how well they perform.
Perhaps the noble Lord remembers the old sector skills partnerships, many of which did not work well because they were just too low level. The one that I liked, e-skills, which was a top-level one, the Government killed— but there we are. The nice thing about the structures proposed in this Bill is that they are—I hope, by and large—existing employer structures, which will mean that they have a resilience against falling out of favour with the Government and an ability to retain the relationships and ways of working they build up under this structure.
So, as I say, I am grateful to my noble friend for her answers. I will look at them in detail and I am so pleased to have the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, back on home turf and out of the dark world he has been inhabiting for these last few years. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 3. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Amendment 3
Baroness Hayman
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that when considering whether post-16 technical education or training is “material” to a specified area, consideration must also be given as to whether such future skills, capabilities or expertise align with the UK’s net zero target.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 3 and in doing so I declare my interest as co-chair of Peers for the Planet. I also apologise for not being able to be present at the Second Reading of the Bill—but I am delighted that many of the issues with which this group of amendments deal were raised by other noble Lords who will be speaking later today.
In introducing this group of amendments, I will speak to Amendments 3, 9 and 25, which I have tabled. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, who is sadly unavoidably unable to participate this afternoon, the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for adding their names to this amendment. I also support and will speak briefly to other amendments in this group.
Unlike many who are participating in today’s debate, I am no expert in the field of skills and post-16 education—although I have to say that I think the last two and a half hours have given me a little bit of a crash course in some of the issues that will be more familiar to others here. But one does not have to be an expert to understand that the economy of the future—the shift to a green and sustainable industrial model—will require an innovative redesign of the UK’s education and skills framework, both to equip young workers for those jobs and to support a just transition for workers in carbon-intensive industries that will simply not exist in the future.
This was clearly articulated in a report published yesterday by the think tank Onward, Qualifying for the Race to Net Zero, which highlights how unprepared Britain’s labour market is for the challenges and opportunities of net zero. It says:
“This is a challenge of paramount importance. Without the labour supply or the skills base to develop net technologies or deliver the decarbonisation of existing industry or housing stock”
net zero is simply “not deliverable”. The Government’s overarching ambitions regarding climate change and our obligations under the Paris Agreement are threatened by a lack of skills in this area.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that when considering whether post-16 technical education or training is “material” to a specified area, consideration must also be given as to whether such future skills, capabilities and expertise align with biodiversity targets.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is doing such spectacularly fine work personally and through Peers for the Planet, of which I am also a member. I rise to move Amendment 4 and to speak to Amendment 10, and I shall also speak in favour of all the others in this group.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, referred to the important report released yesterday by Onward on green jobs. I have scratched out a lot of what I was going to say about that, as the noble Baroness covered it comprehensively, but it is worth restating the conclusion that she highlighted: net zero, the Government’s legally binding target, is not deliverable without a massive increase in relevant skills.
Speaking second in this very large group, with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, having outlined the detailed structure of her amendments and with others yet to explain theirs, in the interests of time I will speak generally to express support for all these amendments, many of which I have attached my name to. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for their work, which I have stepped behind to support. I note particularly Amendments 3, 9 and 25, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which have attracted broad cross-party and non-party support, including from the government Benches, and to which I would have attached my name had there been space. Then I will get to the detail of Amendments 4 and 10, which appear in my name.
All these amendments, in different ways and in different sections of the Bill, seek to mainstream attention to the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis in the skills agenda in every community. I am using the word “mainstream” because where we are today is reminding me very much of the mid-1990s, when I was working in international development. There was a great debate then, when bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF had discovered the importance of women to societies and even—shock-horror—economies. The great debate was whether to separate women’s programmes or whether women’s issues, concerns and rights should be put into every programme. It feels like, in terms of the environment, we are somewhere in that stage of debate now. We have got to a situation where recent Finance Bills, after lots of hard work in your Lordships’ House, have finally included at least the climate emergency. But I am afraid that the lack in this Bill of that, of biodiversity and of our busting of planetary boundaries in multiple directions is a demonstration that the Government still really do not get it, which is particularly disturbing for the chair of COP 26.
So I was thinking about this group and wondering how I might help the Government to understand, and how to build that understanding into action. I thought about that magic phrase “the economy” and how often we hear from the Government that everything needs to be done for “the economy”. I want to suggest to Ministers and civil servants that, every time they hear themselves saying that phrase or thinking that thought, they put “the environment” in front of it, acknowledging that the economy is a complete subset of the environment and that every single element and every penny is dependent on the air we breathe, the ground we rest on and the soil and water that produce our food. When we are thinking about local economies, we need to be thinking about local environments. To complete the set, we need an understanding that communities—people individually and collectively—and their well-being are the foundation of our economies. This is systems thinking expressed in concrete terms.
When will we know whether we have succeeded? It will be when we no longer have large groups of amendments like this merely introducing climate and other environment goals into Bills. When we move on to strengthening what the Government have proposed, then we will know that some progress has been made.
I have been talking in abstract terms but, thinking briefly about the practicalities of the skills needed, food growing is one obvious and much underconsidered area for climate mitigation and adaptation, looking to the urgent issue of food security. On home energy efficiency, I have referred previously in your Lordships’ House to how the building industry is frantically wondering where it will find the skilled staff that it will need should the Government finally manage to sort out the funding in this crucial area. Engineering, particularly for public transport schemes, is another huge area of shortage.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)
My Lords, before I call the noble Lord, Lord Oates, I must inform the House that three noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord Rooker, Lord Young of Norwood Green and Lord Adonis—have scratched their names from the debate on this group and those on all subsequent groups.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the advisory group of Weber Shandwick UK. I support the objectives of the wide array of amendments in this group—
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I believe there were a couple of additions to the speakers’ list. I believe that the noble Lord is winding for the Liberal Democrats, and we may be due to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, thank you. I was confused, but I am happy to go with the flow.
This group of amendments addresses the green gap in this Bill. A large number of amendments have been tabled in this group, all of which are very worthy and have my support. I single out for special mention that in the names of my noble friends Lord Oates and Lord Storey, signed also by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. However, in the interest of time, I will speak only to the set of amendments to which my name is attached.
I turn first to Amendments 3, 9 and 25, all in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Morgan, the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and myself. In doing so, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for her work in establishing the Peers for the Planet group, which is such a professional asset to this House. Her work and words in introducing these three amendments mean that I can be much more brief. The opening clause in this Bill, which fixes a strategy for the skills that we will need to fill the jobs of the future, is silent on our net-zero biodiversity targets. This seems rather inadequate, for want of a better or stronger word. This is a real weakness in the Bill, not least because it presents a risk that skills or education plans that are incompatible with our green targets—both national and international —might pass without remark and without basis for challenge.
These three amendments are therefore very necessary. They are designed to ensure that consideration of net-zero and biodiversity targets is embedded in the decision-making process around assessing future skills needed in each local area through the local skills improvement plans. Amendment 9 gives the Secretary of State the responsibility for ensuring that any approved LSIP is compliant with net-zero and biodiversity targets. Amendment 25 places a duty on the Secretary of State to report on how approved LSIPs meet the net-zero and biodiversity targets. These amendments will ensure that we have the right jobs in the right place in the future, which will be critical if we want to build back better and greener.
I turn to Amendment 34, in my name with the welcome support of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. Supporting and generating green jobs is a lynchpin of the Government’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution. This amendment will help the Government meet those aims by ensuring that, when designating an employer representative body, the Secretary of State must be satisfied that,
“the body has prepared a climate change and sustainability strategy”.
It would serve to demonstrate that ERBs are making the link between the local and the national skills needed and are taking heed of the opportunities regarding climate change and biodiversity.
Amendment 42, in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, asks that a governing body, in reviewing how well education or training meets local needs, must also consider whether it aligns with the net-zero target. This amendment would consolidate the link between local and national skills needs with respect to the UK’s net-zero target from the perspective of governing bodies of general FE colleges, sixth-form colleges and designated institutions. It would be an important requirement that would open welcome collaborative discourse between institutions, ERBs and the Government, the lack of provision for which is a weakness of the Bill.
In subsection (2) of the new Section 52B inserted by Clause 5, the review is bolstered by guidance that provides an opportunity for the Secretary of State to ensure that there is a joined-up approach to the way institutions are factoring in net zero when considering how well education or training aligns with our net-zero target. Subsection (3) requires the governing body to publish the review on its website, which would allow for transparency and the identification of best practice, along with any barriers, gaps and inconsistencies, including in relation to net zero.
I turn to Amendment 73, in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady Blackstone, and Amendment 75 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. These amendments seek to introduce conditions for inclusion in the list of relevant providers kept by the Secretary of State. Amendment 73 seeks to introduce a condition that relevant providers on the list must have either adopted or be in the process of developing a climate change and sustainability strategy. Amendment 75 seeks to link the provision of funding for relevant providers with either the adoption or development of a climate change and sustainability strategy. Both amendments seek to incentivise progress within the further education sector in embedding climate change and sustainability within their overall strategies, recognising, however, that some providers will be further on in this process than others and that funding and capacity might be an issue for some. Amendment 73 therefore allows for relevant providers to be in the process of developing a strategy.
Taken together, the amendments to which I have spoken reflect a holistic joined-up approach to ensure that all stakeholders working to deliver the right jobs in the right place are conscious of their responsibility in tackling climate change and biodiversity loss. We must not forget that the people who will fill these jobs —especially the younger ones—want jobs that will secure their future, both in terms of longevity of work and in terms of protecting our planet and their physical futures. As it happens, their priorities and needs align with the nation’s priorities and needs, and this Bill must be amended to reflect those.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I remind your Lordships of my interests in the register, particularly my advice to Purpose on climate education, my membership of Peers for the Planet and the advice I give to 01 Founders on skills development. I thank my noble friend Lady Blackstone for adding her name to my Amendment 52.
The effect of my Amendments 52 is that, when the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education is approving or withdrawing qualifications, it must describe how its decisions align with UK climate change and biodiversity targets. Amendments 60 and 61 aim to ensure that any conditions or guidance to initial teacher training for further education must consider whether they incorporate the UK’s climate change and biodiversity goals. I think that these are important, along with the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which I very much support and to which I have added my name. I support the other amendments in this group as well. I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, when she introduced this group and said that she considered herself no great expert in this area of skills. I consider myself no great expert on climate change, so we sort of meet somewhere in the middle.
There is a bit of a problem, in a way that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was referring to, that in education debates, when we start talking about climate change, people glaze over and say, “Well, it is not really our concern; this is not really our business.” Equally, when we have climate change debates and start talking about education, people say, “Why are you talking about education? That is not really anything to do with it.” The reality is, however, that the two are critically important. It is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, shocking that the Government ultimately do not quite get it, in that the policy and the Bill are silent on sustainability and that we need to address that somehow or other in this Bill.
First, at the time of chairing COP 26, if we are going to be credible, we need to show that we are meeting our treaty obligations that we signed up to in 2015 in the Paris Agreement, particularly in Article 12, which says that,
“Parties shall co-operate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change education”
and training.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
I will speak in support of Amendment 25 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman, Lady Sheehan and Lady Morgan of Cotes, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth. It contains a very interesting idea. It proposes that, when a local skills improvement plan has been devised for, say, Plymouth or Newcastle or Doncaster, the Secretary of State should examine it to see whether it accords with the national skills strategy and—this is of particular interest to the noble Baronesses—the UK’s climate change and biodiversity targets; it could include other things where there are clear targets as well, of course. The sadness of this is that the noble Lords talk about the national skills strategy when there ain’t no such thing, I am afraid. I wish that there were, but it simply has not developed. It ought to develop because there is no doubt that there is a substantial deficiency across the country in skills in a whole variety of different industries.
The Government used to publish skills gaps. The body that did it was called the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. It was abolished by the Government in 2016 because a group of advisers said to them that they did not really think much about these skills gaps because they are often speculative guesses. I am afraid that this is a further example of a Government who are not listening because there is certainly a large number of skills gaps in our country.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I are both members of the Select Committee on Youth Unemployment, which now takes evidence twice a week. We are getting a lot of evidence not only from businesses but from students themselves that there are skills gaps. For example, we had evidence from one think thank that had examined 1,000 companies in Britain, large and small, stretching from national audio technology to pubs. Of those 1,000 companies, 76% of the CEOs said that the thing that was holding them back most was the absence of data employees—data analysts in particular—and people who understood artificial intelligence. That was the biggest inhibition on their growth and development. If that is not a skills gap, I do not know what is, quite frankly.
There are skills gaps in a host of other industries. One recent example that I am sure Members of this House have seen is that we have suddenly discovered that there is a skills gap of 10,000 HGV drivers. I would have thought that this might have been anticipated at some stage and we would have realised that we were desperately short of these people. So many of them have gone back to eastern Europe and the Balkans, and they are not being encouraged to come back. The transport ministry should have had some idea of what was likely to happen in this area.
One body, the education think tank the Edge Foundation, of which for a time I was the chairman, tried to fill in the gap. It produced a series of reports. It established large committees for each industry involving industry and academics, estimating what the skills gaps were. The first one was on engineering. The skills gap there was 203,000. That figure was agreed and supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering. There was another one on digital skills. It was well over 100,000 two years ago; I suspect that it is much higher now. There was one on the creative industries, which showed a skills gap of 150,000. Yet, because these were not formal government statements, the Government took very little interest in and paid little regard to them. How can you fashion an education system if you have no idea what your national economy wants in the way of skilled workers? There is a dysfunction between the education system based on academic subjects and the needs of industry. There is absolutely no doubt about that. This is one of the causes of the high level of youth unemployment at the moment.
I suggest that the Government consider asking a department—not the Department for Education because it has very little connection with industry, but perhaps the DWP—to estimate and publish on a regular basis skill gaps for various industries. Without that, how can you shape education and training systems, and indeed an apprenticeship system, without knowing exactly what is needed by the local and national industries in our economy?
Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)
My Lords, we listened with interest to some rather engaging and forceful Second Reading speeches on the first group this afternoon. I noted that my noble friend Lord Adonis took one view that this was a terrible Bill and my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green took a different one that this was actually a good Bill. I find myself somewhere in between, but I want to be more pragmatic than they are. This is Committee. We have some opportunities in Committee to make a Bill better. I hope that that is what we will achieve at least in some respects.
At Second Reading I chose to talk largely about the missed opportunity in the Bill to try to link what we do in the educational system with the huge challenges that climate change and getting to our net-zero target by 2050 pose for us. I hope the Government will take the amendments in this group really seriously, because they at least begin to do just that.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I would very much like to support what the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has just said, and I hope that the Government will find a way of bringing forward amendments that take into account the spirit of all the amendments that have been tabled. This is self-evidently necessary.
We have a great debate going on in part of government about how on earth we are going to replace our gas boilers, and there is a big debate about who is going to bear the cost. Is it going to fall disproportionately on the poor? Well, it is all very well having this theoretical debate, but what I am sure of is that there are not the people available with the skills to do this job within the five-year, 10-year or 15-year timeframe that has been talked about. The Government have to be more joined-up about these things if they are serious about addressing the climate challenge.
But there is a more general point here that exposes another potential weakness in this Bill. The emphasis of the Bill is on local skills improvement plans. This is looking at the present local situation, not at future requirements, and there has to be some means of injecting future requirements into the preparation of these local plans. The noble Baroness talked about the productivity and skills that are going to do this job for us, we hope. I welcome this, because I wholly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, said: it was a great mistake to abolish the UKCES; it was a very good body that produced very good work.
There are things such as skills gaps, and the fact is that, particularly with Brexit, with leaving the European Union, you would have thought that a Government determined to make a success of us having left the European Union would be looking at the skills consequences of our exit for the future. But what evidence is there that this is being done? We need to have a serious think not just about new skills required by climate change but about new skills that are necessary in our economy as a result of the changes we have imposed on ourselves.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak briefly on this group to express my support in particular for Amendment 25, in the names of my noble friend Lady Hayman and others, about the requirement for approved LSIPs to take account of “any national skills strategy”. I think the clue is in the “any”. I fully support that idea, and I am wondering how it could actually be met. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, pointed out some of the challenges in the absence of such a plan. I wonder whether the Minister can tell us anything about what sort of national or central co-ordination there will be and how that might work in terms of alignment with LSIPs. What sort of processes or feedback mechanisms will there be to ensure that there is that alignment, and indeed that it is clear what the LSIPs are seeking to align with? My noble friend described it as “joining the dots” with national strategy. What is the flow of communication in reporting and monitoring between LSIPs and the centre?
My noble friend Lady Hayman also talked about a cross-cutting, long-term, aspirational skills strategy, which would be splendid. The word that struck me there was “aspirational”, because the main challenge when I used to work with young Londoners on employability skills was their lack of aspiration and lack of knowledge of what to aspire to—which is why I was so passionate about careers education. Yet it is aspiration that has driven most successful education strategies in the past and created forward movement. This Bill is essentially an aspirational Bill, and that is why I welcome it quite strongly. So I suppose the question—which I am not sure whether I am asking the Minister or myself—is: how will it actually raise aspirations? And how can it build on young people’s enthusiasm, which the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, mentioned, for issues relating to climate change and biodiversity to create momentum that will feed in, hopefully, and perhaps through the LSIPs, to drive the objectives of the Bill?
The only other point I wanted to make is that I am rather less enamoured of Amendments 73 and 75 in this group, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and others, which would require independent training providers to have a climate change and sustainability strategy and a delivery plan. Many of those independent training providers are SMEs: they can be very small; they tend to specialise in certain areas; they are often operating with limited resources on extremely narrow margins. I am already concerned about some of the other conditions being suggested for them to be on the list, and this seems potentially disproportionate. I would certainly encourage them to have such a plan as far as it is relevant to them, but putting it on the face of the Bill would seem to be overkill.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, as a member of Peers for the Planet, I rise to support all the amendments in this group, for the reasons so eloquently given by the movers and to simply emphasise two points. First, as many other noble Lords have said, students themselves want to take part in reaching our zero-carbon targets. Arguably, they are more committed to this than the generations with power, like ours. These amendments would increase their motivation for further education and training, and their confidence in politics and democratic participation.
Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, following the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, may I say that this potentially most useful Bill seems to have been drafted in ignorance of the most long-lasting world crisis of our time: the climate emergency? Surely, all government departments must play what part they can in avoiding climate-borne disaster and in adapting to climate change. There is scant evidence that the targets set out by the Government have been taken on board by all departments and integrated into all their policies. These amendments would go far to assist the education department in fulfilling this aim.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, if there was an outbreak of consensus across the Committee on the previous amendments, I am afraid I am going to ruin the party in this group. If the aim of the Bill is to expand opportunities and horizons in terms of training and skills acquisition that will allow wider access to jobs, I think we need to be wary of any attempts at narrowing what is on offer, especially if it is being driven by satisfying political hobby-horses. Surely that is what this series of amendments does, in a way, in trying to limit post-16 technical education and training by aligning them with net-zero, climate change and biodiversity targets. I am opposed to them all.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I apologise for my confusion when I was mistakenly called earlier, and mistakenly responded. I declare my interests as chair of the advisory board of Weber Shandwick UK.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, I was unable to be here for Second Reading—although had I known that people can make Second Reading speeches in Committee, I could perhaps have done that today. But I will not. Also like the noble Baroness, I am no expert on education. However, because climate change covers so many areas, I am finding out that in this context we have to try to learn quickly. I am particularly nervous about making a foray into the field of education and skills in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who was Education Secretary when I was at school, so I do this with some trepidation.
I support the objectives of all the amendments in this group, including those in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, to whom I pay tribute for her exemplary work as co-chair of Peers for the Planet, and those in the name of my noble friend Lady Sheehan and others. Amendment 7, in my name and in those of my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, seeks, as do other amendments in this group, to rectify the lack of any focus in the Bill on the wide range of skills that will be required if we are to have any hope of tackling the climate and ecological emergency. It does so in the specific context of the skills capability and expertise required in particular areas, to contribute towards national and regional decarbonisation strategies.
We need to recognise that the local needs for skills to tackle our climate and biodiversity challenges will differ between areas. Different expertise will be needed in different areas, so we must ensure that the skills required to achieve net zero are reflected in local skills plans, and are locally appropriate.
The local dimension is often missing from thinking on net zero, so local input will be critical, and it is important that there is joined-up thinking from all the parties involved and that the important role of local authorities in this regard is fully recognised. I was interested to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, had to say. She will not be surprised or distressed, I imagine, to hear that I disagree with her. Climate change is a little bit more than a political hobbyhorse. It is a very alarming fact of life that we are facing and hoping to deal with.
The recent debacle of the green homes grant illustrates the problems that we have with skills. Half a million homes were to receive energy efficiency upgrades under the programme. In fact, a tiny fraction of them were delivered before the scheme was closed. However, in the short time of its operation, the one thing that was clear as day was the desperate shortage of skills to deliver the massive programme that is required. Something like 28 million homes will need to be upgraded, and we have not got much time. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, also highlighted that whatever decisions the Government may eventually make on decarbonising our home heating, at the moment we simply do not have the skills to deliver it.
My attempt to take advantage of the green homes grant scheme and get a contractor to provide exterior wall insulation for my house was entirely unsuccessful. All the contractors capable and approved were not taking on any more work because they lacked staff with the skills to deliver to the demand that had been stimulated by the Government’s policy initiative. Across the country, that absence of skills was obvious, but by closing the scheme in the peremptory way that they did, the Government compounded that skills crisis by undermining any faith that contractors might have had that it was worth them investing and engaging in the skills training process. If we are to get ourselves out of the climate and ecological crisis that we face and that we have created for our planet, we must start by providing skills for young people in our workforce, and we must start at local level by identifying and addressing the needs and requirements of local areas and harnessing partnerships between local authorities, national government and education and skills providers, as these amendments seek to do.
Above all, we must provide the policy stability that will give private sector employers the confidence to invest in skills training. As the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, rightly said, beyond the needs of employers and the economy, we must also take account of the desire of young people to have these issues addressed in their education. I do not think that it is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said, some opportunist comment from us in the House of Lords. If you go into schools and FE colleges and talk to young people, they are desperate about the situation that climate change is causing because they will have to deal with it much more severely than we are, and they want those issues to be addressed. We must react to that.
As this debate has underlined, it is, in the word used by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, extraordinary that in the year when we host COP 26, the year when the Government have published their 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution and the year when the Government have committed to a 68% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and a 78% reduction by 2035, they have brought forward a skills Bill that has no reference whatever to climate change or to the need for green skills for the future. It is no wonder that we had a despairing report from the Climate Change Committee last month that the Government are woefully short of the measures required to come anywhere meeting their targets.
What is going on in the Department for Education? Is it not aware of the climate and ecological emergency that we face? Was it not apprised of the Prime Minister’s promise of a green industrial revolution, or does it think that it can be delivered without skills? Whatever the reason, it is certainly extraordinary that the Government appear so unjoined-up.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I have listened carefully to the many excellent contributions in this debate. Much has been said so I will self-edit as I speak, in much the same way as I used to five minutes before the bell rang at the end of the school day.
It is extremely disappointing that the Bill fails to link the Government’s goals on decarbonisation in energy, transport and buildings, sustainable land management and carbon sequestration. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, noted in her persuasive opening speech, there should be a cross-cutting skills strategy. It is worth repeating that there is currently not a single reference to climate considerations in the Bill. The needs of the education sector and industry are liable to change the skills of tomorrow, as mentioned in the previous debate, and cannot be put aside. Monumental changes are needed to include net zero and biodiversity at every level, and targets should be embedded in the LSIPs to provide sustainable jobs in future.
Our Amendment 36, which will come up in the next group, sets out conditions for ERBs, including the requirement to have regard to national strategies, including the decarbonisation strategy. Not only will those entering the labour force for the first time need to be prepared for green jobs—green jobs already exist, and they will exist much more in future—but many who currently work in fossil fuel sectors will need retraining. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, said, everything needs to be done for the economy and the environment is a subset of the economy. Her point, among many others, regarding the need for repair skills was particularly apposite. My noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth’s amendments regarding education policy are extremely important in affirming our future behaviours.
Does the Minister agree that there should be a requirement for skills improvement plans to refer to national objectives on the green economy, including the net-zero targets, or associated sector-specific strategies, such as the industrial decarbonisation strategy, the transport decarbonisation strategy, the energy White Paper, the nature strategy and the heating and buildings strategy? I hope the Minister has taken note of the cross-party consensus on this issue and that she will be sympathetic to the thrust of the amendments and include references to climate considerations, net zero and biodiversity in the Bill.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I think there is a theme here, with the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, asking about putting this in the Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, was incredibly gracious when she referred to the nature of the Bill and the fact that it is, as I outlined, a framework to enable the flexibility that the employer representative body would need to make the local skills improvement plan.
As the Minister for COP 26 and for sustainability in the Department for Education, overseeing the department’s capital budget and with over 60,000 blocks within our school estate, I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Oates, that it is a serious matter. On 10 June I had the pleasure of meeting the Climate Change Committee to talk through the department’s proposed strategy in relation to the net-zero target. I have also had the pleasure of meeting incredibly articulate young people from Mock COP, who made very clear to me their passion about what we should be doing at COP 26 and to reduce our emissions.
I assure the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Sheehan, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that there will not be a green gap in the guidance. I think that we are back to an agreement that this is an incredibly important priority. We have passed the legislation embedding this, but it is a case of whether it is placed in the Bill or is something that is for the guidance.
Before I address the specific amendments, I just want to outline for the noble Lords, Lord Oates and Lord Liddle, and my noble friend Lord Baker that the Skills and Productivity Board, which is the national specialist on our skills, will publish three analyses this year about three questions that were posed by the Secretary of State. The first considers the most significant skills shortages in England, and the board will consider net-zero skills shortages as part of that. Obviously, it is an independent board, so I do not know what the outcomes and recommendations will be, but we are looking specifically at what the skills gaps are.
In June 2019, the UK became the first major country to legislate for this net-zero target for carbon emissions by 2050, making it clear that a systems approach was needed to drive behaviour across all areas of the economy to guide decisions by citizens, businesses and investors. I think that we are back to that interesting legal question: once you have put it in that piece of legislation, what then flows in terms of legislation we are passing? But as I say, on the basis of this, the guidance will be very clear in relation to the net-zero target.
The Green Jobs Taskforce, which was launched in November 2020, is working in partnership with businesses, skills providers and unions to help the Government develop plans for new, long-term and good-quality green jobs by 2030, and advises what support is needed for the transitioning industries mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox.
I turn to the amendments, seven of which are closely related to Clause 1, concerning the local skills improvement plans, supporting the transition to a net-zero economy and biodiversity. These are from the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman, Lady Bennett and Lady Sheehan. Reference was made to the fact that there is now that biodiversity target which will also be in legislation, mirroring the net-zero target. The noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, asked whether the Secretary of State would approve an LSIP that was not compatible with net zero or biodiversity, and I will answer her straight on. The Secretary of State will want to be satisfied that the statutory guidance has been followed in the process of developing a plan to approve and publish it and, in developing LSIPs, statutory guidance will require ERBs—employer representative bodies—to have regard to skills needs relating to national priorities such as net zero and green jobs. I hope that I have answered directly that putting it in the guidance will not diminish the requirements there will be on the ERBs.
I can assure noble Lords that net zero, green technology and decarbonisation were common themes in the proposals that we received from the employer representative bodies seeking to lead our local skills improvement panel trailblazers. Again, we will be ensuring through the guidance that this remains the case for longer-term implementation. We are not seeing any lack of consideration of this in the initial pilots, but in developing the local skills improvement plan, the statutory guidance will require the ERBs to have regard to skills needs relating to these national priorities. The expectation is that the guidance issued by the Secretary of State under Clause 1 will reflect zero-carbon goals as businesses and employers respond to climate change and the biodiversity agenda. As I have outlined, the process for approval by the Secretary of State will very much be based on what has been taken into consideration and whether the statutory guidance has been followed. The presence of these targets within that is key.
Amendment 42, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, seeks to introduce the requirement for colleges to include considerations on reaching the UK’s net-zero target as part of the regular review. In regularly reviewing their provision in relation to local needs, colleges will play an active part in strengthening the alignment of their curriculum offer with skills needed and the job market in their local area. Over time, we expect the environment agenda to become an increasingly integral part of the curriculum offer, reflecting wider changes across the economy and society, including the changing skills needed by employers.
I turn to Amendment 52 in name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about our ambitious technical qualification reforms. He mentioned the commitment of the Institute for Apprenticeship and Technical Education—IfATE—to the UK’s biodiversity and climate change targets. That is why it has already embedded environmental and sustainability aims within its processes for developing and updating employer-led occupational standards. These are the standards on which apprenticeships, T-levels and higher technical qualifications are based, and on which a broad range of technical qualifications will be based in the future. Along with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the institute has identified the need for integrating sustainability across technical education to support us in achieving our commitments.
The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, also referred to the sustainability framework developed by the institute, which sets out the key themes for employers across all sectors to consider when developing the occupational standards. It acts as a guide for those involved in the development of standards and ensures that when considering the knowledge, skills and behaviours required for any occupation, they have considered sustainability, net-zero carbon and the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals, which include a goal on climate action. I reassure noble Lords that this really has been embedded and is perhaps another example of where primary legislation might not be the correct place.
I turn to the amendments in relation to initial teacher training. I assure noble Lords that specific steps are already being undertaken to ensure that teacher training programmes cover appropriate content, including specifically around sustainability. Our reform of FE teacher training is founded on new occupational standards for FE teaching, which we expect to be available for use in the next academic year. It has been developed with a group of employers across the sector, including colleges and other training providers. Again, we expect the standard to include a requirement for teachers to integrate sustainability into their teaching, including through modelling sustainable practices and promoting sustainable development principles in their subject specialism. Again, I hope that it will not be necessary to put that on the face of a piece of legislation when it is actually happening.
There was some disagreement among noble Lords in relation to Amendments 73 and 75 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, commented on the issue here. We would be putting a requirement on SMEs that is not placed on businesses in many other contexts. Perhaps more pertinently, the purpose of the list of registered providers —independent training providers, not those in FE—will be to protect learners and reduce the disruption to provision if a business fails. This was a matter for discussion in Your Lordships’ House during the passage of the Technical and Further Education Bill four years ago. I am pleased that we are now looking at this, but the singular purpose of the clause is to protect learners in the event of provider failure. It would not be appropriate to extend it to achieve a very different policy objective, which would not be consistent with the requirements for businesses in other contexts. As I set out earlier, however, we will continue to work with the sector to support its move towards embedding sustainability.
In conclusion, the Government recognise—of course we do—the important and vital issue of climate change and biodiversity, and we continue to work towards our target of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The reforms set out in our Skills for Jobs White Paper and supported by this Bill will, I believe, help towards achieving that agenda. I hope I have answered many of the questions posed by noble Lords and that they are reassured. I therefore hope the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, will feel comfortable withdrawing her amendment, and that other noble Lords will not feel the need to call theirs when we reach them in the list.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, I have received no requests to speak after the Minister, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, to conclude the discussion of Amendment 4.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part in this very long and extremely important debate. I will carefully look at what the Minister said about this being covered in other ways and not needed in the Bill, but I think the passion and desire, along with the understanding in the House of the need for systems thinking, is clear. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment now, but this is certainly something we will come back to.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. I am glad we gave the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, the opportunity to have her fix of controversialism for the day—although I was rather surprised to hear what I innocently thought was a reasonable set of probing amendments, on an issue of globally recognised seriousness and urgency, described as some sort of Stalinist implementation of a political hobbyhorse.
However, be that as it may, I am also extremely grateful to the Minister for her comprehensive response. I am glad to know that we have, within the department with responsibility for COP 26, a Minister who is taking this Bill through the House. I have absolutely no doubt about her seriousness and good faith in wanting to ensure that the issues which so many people from so many sides of the House have raised today are taken seriously; that we equip our economy to respond to the direction of travel in future; and that our young people, and those whose working lives are changed, have the ability to go forward in other new jobs in the future.
I suspect the Minister will not be surprised if I say I am not totally satisfied with the argument that we do not need anything in the Bill. I am slightly emboldened by my experience so far on this issue—in fact, I feel like a cracked record in taking this forward. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, spoke about the work we did on a cross-party basis on the Financial Services Bill, where we had exactly the same sorts of debate with the Government reassuring us of their good faith and their ability to do things external to the Bill. Eventually, through discussion, we managed to find a way forward to put something into the Bill. We did the same thing on the Pension Schemes Bill, where we had exactly the same arguments that it was not necessary to do this. I am delighted to say that now, if I ever I go to a meeting or listen to anything about pensions, I hear Ministers proudly proclaiming how, in the year of COP 26, we are the first country in the world to include climate considerations and net-zero in legislation on pensions.
I am encouraged that we may be able to take this further. I hope that we can do so on a consensual basis and that, perhaps, between Committee and Report, we will be able to have discussions with the Minister about whether that is possible. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, we now move to the group beginning with Amendment 5. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 5
Lord Storey
“(3) The employer representative body and relevant providers in a specified area must co-operate to develop a skills improvement plan for submission to the Secretary of State for approval and publication.(4) The employer representative body and relevant providers in a specified area must co-operate to—(a) keep the plan under review, and(b) where appropriate, develop a replacement plan for submission to the Secretary of State for approval and publication.(4A) The relevant provider must have regard to the plan so far as it is relevant to any decision that the relevant provider is making in relation to the provision of post-16 technical education or training that may be relevant to the skills, capabilities or expertise that are, or may in the future be, required in that area.(4B) In developing a new or replacement plan, the employer representative body and relevant providers must consult with such persons as they consider appropriate in the specified area, including—(a) local authorities,(b) mayoral combined authorities,(c) trade unions, and(d) students’ unions.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that establishment of the LSIPs involves colleges as joint partners and involves the input of the wider community.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, it is important for the development of these local skills improvement plans that the partners involved are working together. The notion of divorcing, if you like, the employers from those providing the education seems to me to be wrong. The two key players to make a success of this are obviously the employers, who know their needs and can identify the skills that are short, and the colleges that provide the training and education. I do not like the notion that we should separate those two or that, as the Minister’s letter said, we might consider what they say. My Amendment 5 seeks to understand whether the colleges will be joint partners in this venture and make that point.
I say that for other reasons as well, not just in terms of developing the local skills improvement plans but because it helps the colleges themselves. It helps them to work with the employers in their locality at a really close level. It will improve the ethos and standing of colleges in the community, making employers realise what colleges are about and what happens in them: they will be properly engaged with them on a regular basis, not think of them as “some sort of building over there”. That dialogue and, dare I say it, teamwork will bring about genuine and effective plans. This is not an attempt to create more bureaucracy or paperwork; it is about saying that—I reiterate—these two key players must be locked together to make this happen.
My other amendment in this group, Amendment 38, is again about
“effective partnership working between employer representative bodies and local authorities and Mayoral Combined Authorities”.
We now have nine different mayoral authorities in England, and these nine city regions account for 41% of the country’s population and 43% of our economic output. The notion that they are sort of over there and may just be consulted seems wrong; they should be clearly involved in not just the final decisions but the day-to-day decision-making on these plans.
They already have emerging powers in relation to adult education and funding for FE, skills training and learners above the age of 19, so they are already important players in this area of work. In fact, as I said earlier, Liverpool was given a £41.1 million grant of local growth money to support skills and capital investment, and is currently working on a budget of £18 million for this year to make it available. I notice that other noble Lords also have amendments in this group. In particular the noble Lord, Lord Watson, is equally calling for working bodies to work closely together on this.
At the beginning of my contribution, I used the term “teamwork”. We only have to see how this has produced the successful run so far of the England team, which is not about separating a manager from players, and whatever else, but working together as a team. I hope that this amendment will be considered and that the Minister will ensure that there are not just considered but effective working arrangements.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, I must inform the Committee that if Amendment 5 is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendment 6 by reason of pre-emption.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 35 under my name. The amendment is designed to have a body that will be representative of employers in a specified area. The Secretary of State must consult local education, business and enterprise groups, with the aim of ensuring that local employers are represented on the body. So it is a wide-ranging, all-inclusive probing amendment to ensure that there is a range of employers of different sizes, as well as local education groups. In that respect, I support Amendment 5 from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which includes educational organisations. They should all be represented on employer representative bodies, which will be tasked with pulling together the local skills improvement plans. There are a number of amendments, already tabled, highlighting the need to expand the types of groups feeding into these plans to ensure that they truly represent the local situation and will be able to address any local skills challenges that there might be.
The concern that I believe all of these amendments share is that the Bill, as it stands, potentially gives too much power to a small group of employers in a local area that are not necessarily representative of the wider business community. The Bill currently also risks limiting the choices of young people as well as adults who want or need to retrain in terms of courses and training opportunities. There may be skills that we need nationally—to achieve, for instance, net-zero—which will not currently be required in the particular locality. As a result, no training opportunities may be available for young people who are keen to move into such careers.
I believe that the Bill should enable a truly collaborative approach to local skills planning, with a range of stakeholders to co-create local skills improvement plans. Taking that approach and making sure that the local policy ambitions link up with the national strategies and vice versa might be the right approach and put us in a good position to ensure that we have the workforce, the scientists and the engineers of the future to make the UK an economic success. With 6 million SMEs, some of them quite small and with very niche skills requirements, it might be appropriate that even their voices are heard.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I very much support the comments just made by the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Patel, and the thrust of the argument. It is right that we get as much knowledge and experience and skills before making any of these decisions. I suggest to the Minister that this is going to be a recurring theme throughout our consideration of the Bill: what is the nature of the partnership which she says is at the core of the proposed legislation before us?
There are two issues. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, just used a phrase about people knowing where the power lies. That is part of the problem. In words it looks as though the employers, the people leading the partnership, have got to, by law, consult with people. The Minister may sense that there is not absolute confidence in noble Lords who have spoken today that that will happen to the degree necessary. I share that concern. Once you say so many times that it is employer-led, that it is those people who matter, and that they will be making the decisions, you have created a very unbalanced relationship between the employers and the people they are meant to consult. So I would be looking for something in the Bill, whether it is these amendments or others, to boost the standing and the contribution of the other partners.
I have not heard anybody say that the other partners—employers, education institutions, students, trade unions—are not important and have not got a role to play. But what is missing from the Bill, given our previous experience of such legislation, is any assurance that they will be listened to and will have the ability to influence what is going on, and some powers to put a brake on something if they do not like it. If they are just going to be written to, asked for their view and then ignored, it will not work, and the Bill could allow for that. That is my worry with that part of the Bill. The Bill as written could allow for that.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is next on the list, has withdrawn from the debate. Sadly, I am not able to call the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, because she was not here for the speech moving the amendment. The noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Adonis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, have also withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is a little sooner than I expected. I put my name down to speak on this because, as the Government have said, this is a framework Bill. Governments like framework Bills because they give them a chance to develop and change as they are going along, with a little bit of freedom and a hint of Henry VII and a half. It is there and they like that. The price they pay is the fact that we want to know exactly what they are aiming at initially.
When this amendment was tabled and it was said which groups were going to be talked to, I saw that we already had employers down there. There is the danger of a dominant employer in here—a dominant employer who may not be the most foreseeing employer. Surely they should be talking to other people as well. Those with local power—that is, the mayoral authorities and local government—are surely dead certs to be involved in that conversation. These are people with budgets which will affect the local marketplace. We have already had a discussion about the green agenda, how that is implemented and the certain skills that are required there. These will be people who will be talking to you as you go through.
The amendments also mention students’ unions and trade unions. Why not? But I do not think that is the really important bit; that is the idea of what the influence will be, and which group will be having the conversation about what you should be doing and what your plan for training is. If we can get an answer to that from the Minister, at least on what the thinking is, we will all be slightly better informed and able to hone our arguments for the next stage of the Bill.
If we do not, we will be going round in a circle here. We will have to impose something on the Government to get them to come back and give us an answer. If the Government can give us an idea of what they actually require on this occasion, life becomes that little bit more straightforward. I hope that when the Minister comes to answer this, she will be able to provide at least the basis of the Government’s thinking about what goes on, because employers are great, but they occasionally get it wrong. I would just point out that many firms that were there 20 years ago are not here today. Surely that means that their boards—however well intentioned—got something wrong.
Lord Bradley (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to speak to this group of amendments, particularly Amendments 13 and 14. I commend the contribution of my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley. I declare my interests in the register, especially my role as chair of council at the University of Salford.
While I fully support the principle of employers playing a more active role in driving certain aspects of the skills system, as well as the more specialist role for further education colleges in delivering high-level technical skills, this should be taking place within the context of a holistic and objective overview of the whole education, skills and employment support system, to guard against introducing further complexity and fragmentation. One of the best ways to achieve this is to have a formal role for the mayoral combined authorities, where they exist, in the development of local skills improvement plans, reflecting MCAs’ unique position in this area of policy.
As drafted, there is no provision or requirement in the Bill for the Secretary of State or the designated established employer representative bodies to engage with mayoral combined authorities, local authorities or other key stakeholders such as universities in relation to—among other things—the designation or removal of designation of an appropriate ERB to lead activities, the geographical footprint of the local skills improvement plan, and the context and strategic priorities of the area. This omission overlooks the vital roles that MCAs and local authorities play in skills and economic regeneration, as well as MCAs’ devolved functions across adult education and, in the case of Greater Manchester, significant elements of employment support.
Further, the DfE has indicated that while an MCA’s agreement to the proposed local skills improvement plan would assist the Secretary of State’s approval, it is not a prerequisite, so proposals that fail to secure the support of mayoral combined authorities might still receive government approval. Therefore—I agree with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and am grateful for its extensive briefing on this matter—the Bill should make provision for consultation by the Secretary of State and the consent of MCAs in the designation of employer representative bodies and the approval of local skills improvement plans. Without such a provision, there could be a number of potential issues and risks to their success—and success is what we all want.
First, the Bill focuses primarily on higher-level skills and technical specialisms, which I agree have been neglected in policy and funding terms for far too long. However, there is a vital talent pipeline, starting with community-based engagement and entry-level essential skills, that is barely recognised in the Bill. It is unclear to me how this vital progressive pathway will be protected in the face of employer-led plans that will have a legal status not afforded to strategies for other aspects of the system. This could undermine existing partnerships and collaborative approaches to the local labour market.
Secondly, it is unclear how ERBs will be accountable in relation to strategic oversight, long-term vision and resource and capacity issues to ensure co-ordinated and impactful delivery in partnership with all relevant stakeholders. In particular, checks and balances will be required where designated ERBs are membership organisations and/or where they hold contracts as providers in order to ensure that local skills improvement plans are truly reflective of employers’ needs and interests across a locality, rather than solely for those ERB members.
Thirdly, the Government have not specified what constitutes a local area in terms of the geographical footprint of the new local skills improvement plans. Instead, employer representative bodies are being invited to define their own localities for the purpose of skills planning. So, for example, despite Greater Manchester being a well-recognised functional economic area with a long history of collaboration, there is no guarantee that the new local skills improvement plan proposals will follow existing geopolitical and functional economic footprints. This could undermine the alignment of skills and employment support in places such as Greater Manchester, which has used complementary devolved functions, pilots and other resources to support the creation of jobs and the skills to match them.
To address these issues and others, I believe the role of the mayoral combined authority and the local authorities should be properly recognised in the Bill to ensure the successful development of the local skills improvement plan and that all stakeholders feel they are part of the success going forward. I am pleased to support these amendments.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
The noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, has withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I was very sorry not to be able to speak at Second Reading, but I was present for some of the debate and was struck by the contributions made by my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach, on the need for localism and the example of horticulture, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley—who is in her place—on local skills improvement plans, which are the subject of this group. I also agree with my noble friend Lord Baker that the strength of the school system is incredibly important and that we need parity of esteem for technical and vocational education in our schools. Indeed, whenever I talk at a school, I always talk about apprenticeships.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
I hope that the Minister will not, in her reply, dismiss this amendment out of hand and say it is totally unacceptable, because I suspect that, as the procedures develop for local skills plans, extra help will be needed. I speak as someone who, for the last 12 years, has had to involve local companies actively in the running of the schools that I have been promoting: university technical colleges. I can assure noble Lords it takes a long time to persuade companies to do this. It takes many meetings, and many companies look on it as a burden and an expense. So there is not a huge number of companies lining up to become members of the employment body.
I hope the Minister is listening to what I am saying and not reading her notes, because I think she would benefit from what I am saying. I suspect that the Government are going to have to change their policy in this respect. She expects the chambers of commerce, where the chambers of commerce exist, to be the employer representative bodies. Could I take her through the complexity of that? First, chambers of commerce will look on it as an extra expense, which it is going to be. They have to balance the interests of their own members as to whether they should listen to the big or small companies, the ones which are expanding or declining, and the ones which are loquacious or silent. The proposals they may make may offend several of their members. So it will involve a series of meetings, and probably visits to the companies. That is my experience from the last 12 years.
I ask the Minister: where there is not a chamber of commerce, who is going to institute the examination to determine the numbers on the local employer representative body? Who is going to do it? Have the Government yet thought this through? Who is physically going to do it? Who is going to then make a list of all the companies? Who is going to know about the companies? Who is going to visit the companies and persuade them to take an interest? Because it is a continuing interest: they will have to appoint somebody to serve on the body, and that is an expense to the company. Are the companies going to get a benefit from this? I have gone through this for the last 12 years, and I do not think the Government have an answer to that.
The Government may find that they need the assistance of local authorities, which know a lot of companies. They may also need the assistance of the LEPs. The LEPs do not appear in this Bill at all, but the LEPs have a statutory duty for vocational skills, and some of them have policies on vocational skills, and they know about the companies in their area, and they know about the companies in several towns in their area. In the Select Committee of which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I are members, we took evidence from the North East LEP. A lady called Michelle Rainbow turned up, and she obviously had taken a big interest in education. The North East LEP had a big scheme involving 70 primary schools. The LEPs might have all sorts of schemes the Government do not really follow, or that the Department for Education does not follow or know about, and in secondary education as well. They have this knowledge. Therefore, I hope that the Minister appreciates that there will have to be assistances in the whole procedure of establishing local skills plans. Certainly, the Government should listen to the LEPs in addition to the local mayors and the mayoral authorities as well.
One other voice that has not been heard in any clause in the Bill is that of the unemployed. I suspect that no one who has drafted the Bill in the Department for Education has talked to groups of unemployed young people and nor have many Ministers. The committee that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I sit on has now held meetings in Bolton and Nottingham, and this morning in London, talking to unemployed young people. The group that I talked to were six black young men and women, all of whom were unemployed, or trying to get employment, and their voices were remarkable. They answer a lot of the questions raised by this Bill. We asked them all why they were unemployed, and they explained that they had never been given information about employability at their ordinary schools. These are not people who have been to FE colleges and things of that sort. They left their ordinary secondary schools with no understanding of how industry and commerce work and with no employability skills because they had just been doing academic subjects. They were very passionate this morning. They said, “We left with no employer skills, no data skills.” I asked whether any of them had learned about computing in their schools, and they said, “No, we didn’t have lessons on computing at all.” Many of them left with no communication skills, but they certainly developed them in applying for jobs. They have no experience of working in teams, but they are often asked by employers whether they have worked in teams.
These voices should be listened to. If you are replanning the whole basis of technical education in our country, then listen to people like this. They have a voice, they are concerned, and they are the victims of our failure to educate them adequately to get jobs. I hope that the department will perhaps take some knowledge of that. I urge the Government not to dismiss this amendment too lightly because what it proposes is likely to be needed.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, today’s debate has not progressed very fast in terms of groups, but we have covered a great deal of ground and, through the debate, have almost developed a shadow Bill, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, suggested. I agree with much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said, as I often do. It is clear that the structure of the Bill needs to be rethought. One crucial area is the place for local authorities and regional and city mayors in making skills plans, which a large number of amendments in this group address.
Although the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about the economic strategy of the region, I would rather talk about a transformation strategy for a region. Levelling up is about much more than just the economy. It is not even about just the environment and the economy; it is about the well-being and social capital of the region contributing to every aspect of life, the community and family. You might even call it a public health approach to skills and post-16 education. If we are thinking about public health on that broad scale, this is something that clearly needs to be democratically decided. Elected people should be leading the development of skills development plans, or perhaps, as an alternative suggestion, we might want to think about drawing up a people’s assembly approach, something to put on the table at least, and something that the Minister might like to talk about to her colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, because I know that she has had very good experience with such direct, deliberative democracy.
The term “employer representative body” reminds me, very uncomfortably, of local enterprise partnerships. Some noble Lords have spoken of them with great approval and, in some places, undoubtedly some good work has been done, but they are not in any way representative of the people or the community. They are, by definition, the status quo in an area. They are invested in the way things are, in our current, unequal, poverty-stricken, planet-destroying system.
Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]
My Lords, I was unable to speak at Second Reading, so I must now declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly that I am chair of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, which provides me with a particular and, I believe, helpful perspective on the Bill. Having heard the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, while I recognise some aspects of what she said, it bears no relationship to the work that is going on in Cumbria.
My remarks around this group of amendments are probing, so I trust that the Minister can straightforwardly and candidly clarify my concerns. While my comments are mine alone, they echo many of my LEP and mayoral combined authorities colleagues’ concerns. We welcome the key principles underlying the ambitions of the Bill and the desire to bring business closer to the process of curriculum development and delivery. Like the noble Lord, Lord Baker, I suggest that this is exactly what LEPs have been doing for some considerable time: ensuring that the needs of the economy and businesses inform the skills system locally, particularly to ensure that these real needs can be met in a useful and constructive way. LEPs command respect, and I know that they are impartial, so businesses and providers equally trust them. To lose this would be a backward step.
The draft legislation which we are considering proposes that employer representative bodies are reasonably representative of employers operating within the specified area, and I do not think that anybody could reasonably object to that, but it excludes local enterprise partnerships. Therefore, I seriously question and thereby challenge the exclusion of LEPs. How can LEPs not be employer-representative bodies, given that each LEP is created specifically to be the voice of business and consistently to represent, not least at the Government’s specific request, hundreds of businesses in our local areas, including on skills-related issues?
Importantly, LEPs do this for all businesses across all sectors and geographies, not just for those who are part of a membership organisation. This is important. We do not do this just for particular constituencies. We have no further specific axe to grind in the matter. Unfortunately, the White Paper and the Bill appear to ignore this excellent long-term business engagement which has been in place for some considerable time. From my perspective, the absence of any role for LEPs in this legislation strikes me as lacking any rationale based on the evidence and the scale of the work that has been done in the past. It is not a matter of reinventing the wheel, but of the Government disinventing the wheel.
The skills advisory panels, funded by the DfE and led by LEPs, have been assured that there is a deep, evidence-based understanding of the needs of their local economy, their sectors, their businesses and, importantly, the skills required in their locality. In my own LEP in Cumbria, we have a comprehensive governance structure, specifically endorsed by the Government, that ensures that the skills system is demand-led, with our business-led sector panels articulating what is needed and our people, employment and skills strategy group bringing together the skills systems to respond to this. That is the skills advisory panel in action. It matches the claims of that well-known brand of beer that reaches the parts others cannot get to.
The current lack of clarity on the future role of the skills advisory panels is accelerating uncertainty, making it extremely difficult to make any medium- to long-term plans. This has left many members—a number of them volunteers—questioning whether there is any future role for them. We therefore risk losing both momentum and expertise at precisely the point when it is most needed, as the nation recovers from Covid-19 and grapples with the now known challenges posed by moving away from the EU.
As we debate the Bill, LEPs are working in their localities to address the immediate needs of businesses as they come out of the pandemic and respond to the significant changes in the labour market. For example, in Cumbria, we are seeing chronic labour shortages—as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, pointed out in an earlier group—which are not merely inhibiting business but actually stalling recovery; we are working directly with our businesses to help address these.
Simultaneously, we continue to make sure that we focus on the medium- and longer-term skills needs to ensure that we have a pipeline for the future, and we are focusing on supporting the priorities identified by the business community itself. It is in this context that the focus on the pipeline is in the forefront of our thinking and where our work with the careers and advisory company comes in to ensure that all our young people understand the economy and the career opportunities available. We are committed to this in Cumbria, and we and other LEPs provide matched funding to underpin the role of enterprise co-ordinators.
In conclusion, I ask the Minister to respond directly to my points and to a number of other powerful points raised in this group to clarify how the Government see matters in these regards so that, based on her remarks, the House will be able to know whether and, if so, in what way this matter will need further consideration on Report.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB) [V]
My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, whose experience of chairing a LEP is extremely valuable; I believe that he has a lot to offer to the consideration of the Bill.
I will comment briefly on Amendments 13, 16, 32 and 35 in this grouping. Much has been said already during this debate that overlaps with other amendments, so I want to reinforce some of the messages that have already been made very strongly by other Peers. To reinforce what I said at Second Reading, I still think that there is a risk of confusion between the various bodies involved and a potential overlap between the agencies. Clarity is essential, and I hope that the Minister will take that on board.
I have two overriding concerns, one of which has been stressed a number of times already this afternoon; that is, in devolving responsibility at a local level to local groups, there is consistency with the national skills strategy and regional priorities. It seems obvious that there should be a very strong conduit between the regional bodies, the LEPs, the combined authorities and the mayoral authorities. I hope that the Minister has recognised the strength of feeling there is on this now. As reinforced by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, to leave out the mayoral authorities and not work with the LEPs, with the experience they have and the networks they have established—to throw that away and not build on it—would seem foolish. So I hope that the Government will take those messages into account.
I am also slightly concerned that if this does not happen, we will see a patchwork of disconnected skills groups paddling their own independent canoes. Co-ordination is vital for skills providers to develop appropriate courses to meet regional and local demand. The Minister was reassuring on that point earlier this afternoon, so I hope that is the case.
The critical balance is to achieve local ownership within a framework of national and regional priorities. I restate that regional involvement is essential. My second concern with this grouping is highlighted in Amendment 32, and in Amendment 35 from the noble Lord, Lord Patel. Too often, SMEs and, in particular, rural interests are ignored in designing skills strategies. The SME sector has a weak voice.
Large industrial employers have the resources to engage in consultation exercises. They can devote personnel to sit on boards and, in doing so, influence outcomes. It is a good thing that they do. However, SMEs have difficulty in devoting the time to engage in what, to them, seems like numerous consultations and time-consuming exercises. They do not have the time to sit on boards but their voice is essential. Too often, one has a willing volunteer within an area or region; they get overloaded and do not necessarily represent the SME sector. I am really concerned about the influence of the SME sector in helping to design policies that will work for all.
I conclude by highlighting the importance of the rural sector, which has been mentioned once or twice. There is clear evidence that economic success in rural areas has been hampered, held back and constrained by skills gaps. This will be perpetuated if it is not addressed. The gap between rural and urban will continue to grow. Skills provision is critical, if levelling up is to be achieved even in a modest way, to reduce this rural/urban divide. Too often, government policy has been focused on cities. The large industrial areas are the ones that influence skills strategies. The SME sector, and particularly the rural sector, are the ones that get neglected. As was said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the Government are going to have to work really hard to engage with this sector and make sure that the local skills bodies embrace this challenge, and do not once more neglect the rural sector.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, my name was initially omitted from the list for this group. My reaction when I found I had been reinserted at number 17 was, “be careful what you wish for”. I am not sure I have a lot to add to what has been said. I very much welcome the amendments that seek to ensure that the voices of independent training providers, SMEs and the self-employed are heard in the LSIP process. I particularly await the Minister’s response to Amendment 40 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which would require the Secretary of State to report annually
“on the performance of employer representative bodies.”
This seems to raise important questions of the accountability of ERBs, and indeed LSIPs. I hope the Minister might tell us what sort of reporting will be required for LSIPs and how their performance will be measured—against what criteria and by whom. What will happen if they are seen not to deliver the results expected? Much more fundamentally, I strongly echo the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about how the system will actually work in the real world, as described by both those noble Lords.
I also notice that the Bill includes quite a few duties and requirements for colleges and other education providers to meet—there are all sorts of things that they have to do—but these seem somewhat less prominent when it comes to LSIPs and employer representative bodies. I also welcome the paragraph (b) proposed in the Amendment 36 of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which goes a little way to redressing the balance by enabling colleges and other providers to challenge LSIPs if they are not happy with them.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I shall aim to be brief, which may be welcome at this stage of the evening. I have added my name to Amendment 31, of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which leaves out “reasonably”—why not just have “representative”, which is a term that is vague enough not to need qualification? Legislation should be clear. This “reasonably” puts doubts into the worth of the employer representative body. However, I am slightly concerned to see that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has inserted “reasonably” in Amendment 17, which seems to be slightly contradictory.
This group has thrown up many other issues. There are concerns about the creeping potential for the Secretary of State to make overall interventions in matters that were set up to operate with some independence from government—Amendment 36 addresses this. There is obviously a tension between local and national, and we have seen this in a number of recent Bills, where the Government are intent on taking powers that would be much better used by those closer to the issues.
After his impassioned tirade, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has obviously exhausted himself and left, but there are many amendments in this group to do with the importance of local authorities and mayoral combined authorities. They must not be constantly subjected to national government oversight. Further education providers are also expert in these fields and must not be overlooked. As my noble friend Lord Storey set out, much is expected of our further education colleges, but they are overlooked far too often. They are well used to collaborating with other local bodies, and their knowledge and contacts must not be ignored. They are also very good at teamwork.
The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, also makes clear the importance of SMEs, the self-employed and public and voluntary sector employers—so consultation must be as wide-ranging as possible, with national government taking a back seat, if it takes a seat at all. Colleges should have the power to challenge the local skills improvement plans where, from their local experience, they can see that all is not well.
I support the misgivings of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about employers. I remember well that, when we were developing national vocational qualifications—which were employer led—at City & Guilds, it was incredibly difficult to get the employers to decide which skills they actually wanted. In the end, it was left to the colleges and the awarding bodies, which barely get a mention in the Bill, to get these employer-led qualifications into action. This is a great lack—the Government ignore the colleges and awarding bodies when they are discussing anything to do with skills, but they are the people who really make it happen.
These amendments call for monitoring and reporting. The crucial element is to give authority to those who are closer to the issues and have the expertise to make judgments. The Government must learn to take a back seat where they do not know best. My noble friend Lord Storey mentioned the effect on Liverpool when it was allowed to thrive when local people took control.
In Amendment 28, the noble Lord, Lord Watson, mentions plans about “trailblazer areas”. I do not think we know very much about these—perhaps the Minister can enlighten us about them. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, spoke about the LEPs and their work, which has once again been overlooked.
So I trust that the Minister will see that it is in the local and national interest for national government not to intervene at every step and to learn from people who do know what is going on. I hope that she will be able to accept some, if not all, of the amendments in this group.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, despite several noble Lords listed to speak falling by the wayside, I commend those noble Lords who have stuck it out for their contributions to the debate on this group, and I appreciate their support for the amendments standing in my name.
As many noble Lords have already said today, this is a pretty thin Bill. In her response to group 1, the Minister called it a “framework”, and one might say that that is actually generous. However, the cornerstone is the development of local skills improvement plans, with the role of employer representative bodies being crucial in that process. The manner in which the Bill proposes that ERBs—I will use that shortened terminology—should be designated is flawed, to the extent that it would, we believe, make the Bill unworkable.
There needs to be a much more clearly defined and significant role for local and mayoral combined authorities, as well as colleges and other training providers. The skills needed in Greater Manchester will be significantly different from the skills needed in Cornwall or Cumbria. There has to be an appreciation of differing labour markets, and the way they have developed and are likely to develop. Surely that is best understood at local and regional levels. It is impossible to prescribe the skills needs for the whole of England from an office in the DfE HQ in Great Smith Street, yet that is what the centralising measures in the Bill propose. In relation to the skills agenda, as my colleague in another place, the shadow apprenticeships Minister, Toby Perkins MP, memorably said,
“I have never heard anybody suggest that a more hands-on role for Gavin Williamson was needed”.
That centralisation is very much part of a pattern that we have seen from this Government. They seem to be rowing back significantly on English devolution, and last week the Welsh First Minister’s frustration was plain to see as he accused the Prime Minister of what he called “aggressively ignoring” Wales’s Parliament.
In this Bill, local authorities, including mayoral combined authorities, are to be marginalised, ignoring the fact that they have been democratically elected. Although we fully support the principle of employers playing a more active role in driving certain aspects of the skills system, as well as a more specialised role for FE colleges in delivering higher-level technical skills, that must take place within the context of a holistic and objective overview of the whole education, skills and employment support system, to guard against introducing further complexity. That is what our Amendment 13 seeks to achieve.
We believe that the best way to bring that about is to have a formal role for mayoral combined authorities, where they exist, and other local authorities, in the development of LSIPs, reflecting their unique understanding of their communities and, as I said earlier, their job markets. As my noble friend Lord Bradley said, there is currently no provision or requirement within the Bill for the Secretary of State or the designated ERB to engage with mayoral combined authorities or local authorities—or, indeed, with any other stakeholder —in relation to the designation of an appropriate ERB to lead this activity. The same applies to the boundaries of the LSIPs.
On the subject of mayoral combined authorities, my noble friend Lord Adonis, in a bravura performance earlier, said that the reason he had been given for excluding MCAs was that they were not employers. That might come as news to Sadiq Khan, Tracy Brabin, Andy Burnham, Andy Street and others, who must be superhuman if they do all that work on their own. They have considerable staffs at their disposal: MCAs are indeed employers. I do not have the figures to hand, but I suspect that all of them have several hundred employees. That would be like a small or medium-sized enterprise—and those, as I shall say in a few moments, should very much be part of the consideration when putting together the employer representative bodies.
We agree with the amendment in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and of my noble friend Lord Rooker, saying that ERBs must develop local skills improvement plans as joint partners with colleges and have input from the wider community. Our Amendments 14 and 16 emphasise the fact that local skills improvement plans should draw on the views of local authorities and training providers in the area. I have to ask the Minister: why would the Government not want that sort of input, if they want the best possible response to local training and employment needs? Those people should also be involved in the ERB itself. The aim is to ensure that LSIPs are more collaborative, with local further and adult education providers closely aligning with existing strategies. Why not build on the existing skills advisory approach and develop a more inclusive way of providing advice on employers’ needs?
The existing landscape includes, of course, local enterprise partnerships, which do not merit a mention in the Bill. The noble Lords, Lord Inglewood and Lord Curry, both made a strong case for LEPs to have a continued role in the delivery of the skills agenda. I asked the Minister on Second Reading what plans the Government had for LEPs, and perhaps she will enlighten us on that matter on this occasion.
Amendments 28 and 29 seek to ensure that there is appropriate consultation of MCAs and local authorities prior to the publication of the local skills improvement plans, and for those elected bodies to give their consent to the designation of ERBs. Amendment 37 seeks to ensure that, once designated, the ERB ensures effective partnership, working with providers, local authorities and mayoral combined authorities to support integration of the skills and employment system in each locality. Again, why would the Government have a problem with these sensible improvements to the operation of employer representative bodies?
As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, it is about teamwork. That said, I trust that he will forgive me for being somewhat less enthusiastic about his analogy with the England football team, although, for the record, I do wish them well tomorrow. Our Amendments 31 and 32 seek to gain an understanding of the Government’s intentions in Clause 2. The role of employer representative bodies will be important in shaping local systems, and there is a risk that some ERBs might represent a narrow group of employer voices, focus too much on current skills needs, or be unwilling to take advice from other sources. It is important to ensure that they represent the full breadth of employer voices, focus on future demand and, of course, have appropriate governance.
My noble friend Lady Morris said that she is not sure that the Bill has the power structure right, or the right lead provider; I very much agree with her. Another question is: what will be the role of the chambers of commerce? They are not necessarily representative bodies and vary greatly from one part of the country to another. It is an open secret that they are distinctly cool about being directly involved in the formation of the LSIPs and I understand that this is even the case for some of the largest ones, such as Greater Manchester.
Most employers and employers’ organisations do not really want to run the system; they just want a system that works. They have no more interest in running further education than in running a school or a university. They want to concentrate on their core businesses and do not have a great deal of time to spare in developing local structures or devising plans beyond their own personal needs. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, employers are primarily focused on the now. That is generally understandable, but it is important that ERBs really are representative of the area for which they will have responsibility, so I look forward to hearing from the Minister why the Government have no greater ambition than to make a reasonable attempt at making them representative.
As the eagle-eyed noble Baroness, Lady Garden, pointed out, our Amendment 17—which is not being discussed today—also inserts the word “reasonable”. In my defence, I can say only that that refers to relevant providers, whereas the point I am making here applies to the employer representative bodies. It is surely not too much to expect that the ERBs include a wider range of local employer interests, including small and medium-sized enterprises, the self-employed, and public and third-sector employers. This would ensure that a range of employers of different sizes is represented in the ERB, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, seeks in his Amendment 35.
There is also a need to clarify the role and accountabilities of employer representative bodies in developing their LSIPs, including describing the role of the ERBs, their accountabilities and the process for responding to instances where they do not deliver this effectively. Amendment 36 seeks to ensure accountability and oversight of ERBs, about which my noble friend Lord Bradley spoke compellingly, specifically in relation to the Greater Manchester MCA. This includes preparing and publishing a conflict of interest policy, which could be important where major employers such as universities or local authorities are also providers of training, or where employer representative bodies run publicly funded training providers—as some do—which compete with colleges for apprenticeships and other contracts.
The requirement also to have regard to national strategies is important, not least in the run-up to COP 26, because in March the Government published their industrial decarbonisation strategy. What will they have to say to ERBs about, for example, the content of their local skills improvement plans with regard to chapter 6 of the decarbonisation strategy, which is entitled “Accelerating Innovation of Low Carbon Technologies”? That could be one example of a situation where colleges and other providers feel the need to challenge local skills improvement plans and put forward revisions where they feel the plans fall short.
If the aim of the Bill really is to deepen the strategic relationship with, and service to, employers, then delivering this must involve a genuine partnership of colleges and other providers empowered to stimulate and challenge articulated demand rather than acting as passive policy recipients. It is important that they have the means of doing so; if the Minister is unable to support Amendment 36, perhaps she will tell the Committee what recourse will be available to providers in such circumstances.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for their contributions. I am optimistic about persuading the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, once again of the merit of the employer representative bodies being in charge of the local skills improvement plans.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Baker for his challenge, which was an important one. I can confirm to him that, particularly in my role as Minister for Women, I have heard from many unemployed women. I think I am not alone in your Lordships’ House in this: through such a thing as a pandemic, many of us do not just listen to the voices of unemployed people but in fact know unemployed people who are claiming universal credit. My noble friend raises an important challenge for us always to keep in mind.
I shall deal with one or two themes before I deal with the detail of the amendment, particularly the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. It is an interesting position to be in to be putting forward legislation for the Secretary of State to designate the power for an employer representative body to produce the local skills improvement plan. Clause 1(6) outlines that an LSIP
“draws on the views of employers operating within the specified area, and any other evidence, to summarise the skills, capabilities or expertise that are, or may in the future be, required in the specified area”.
That is the language that we have seen in technical education and occupational requirements for apprenticeships. The local skills improvement plans will set out the key changes needed for post-16 technical education training, as I have emphasised, and make it more responsive to employers’ needs, but this is not a complete economic plan nor a complete local strategy. In some ways it is a compliment that noble Lords have viewed this as more expansive than it actually is, but it merely sets out what the employer needs are in relation to technical education and, as I say, puts the duty of co-operation on relevant providers so that there is a dynamic relationship on the ground.
Relationships are the theme of employers and employer engagement. It is true that in the recent changes much has been asked of employers in relation to apprenticeships, and then we introduced T-levels; we had engagement from 250 employers on T-levels, and we should not underestimate that. I have to tweak the language of the noble Lord, Lord Watson: they are not always looking to their own needs. That is why we have gone for an employer representative body rather than, say, simply asking BAE Systems to do it for the local area around Barrow. There has to be a representative function, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, referred to. It is important that these are representative bodies of employers, not just collaborations.
My noble friend Lord Baker does down his own work. On my visit to Ron Dearing UTC, I thought I was passing a shopping centre because the employers that pay to be part of that UTC are advertised around the side of the building. I met the CEOs of the businesses involved and they were solving their skills needs by getting directly involved in the UTC.
Obviously, we have heard from many employers about productivity and about the skills gaps that we have. There is good evidence on which we can base the fact that employer representative bodies—it will not always be a chamber of commerce, but that might be one of the bodies that puts itself forward—do want to solve these skills needs, and there is significant good will in relation to their involvement.
The noble Lord, Lord Bradley, and my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, raised the question of what the local area is. There is no agreed defined local government geography. I mean by that that there is no agreed defined standard across our country, and there is no single functional economic area—so we have allowed areas to define themselves. Having lived in Greater Manchester, I know that sometimes a whole area will want to define itself, but the freedom has been given. The areas for the trailblazers have not been dictated from the centre. We will publish their plans when they produce them, and they are informing the guidance. Another noble Lord asked that question. There is that freedom from the centre that says, “Tell us what your functional economic area is for the employer representative body and the local skills improvement plans”. As I outlined, most of the applications came with a letter—so we have not encountered the resistance from the mayoral combined authorities or local authorities in relation to the trailblazers that we have embarked on.
On the point about providers made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I would say that providers often have different perspectives, from FE colleges to higher education institutions to the ITPs. That is why we want all providers of post-16 training to be involved, but I fear, from some of the comments that noble Lords have made, that we will be back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned at Second Reading: having a cast of thousands.
On Amendments 5, 13, 14, 16, 23, 28, 29, 37 and 38, the relevant providers will play an important role, working with the employer representative bodies to develop these plans. We have not taken them out of the picture; the duty is there to co-operate. To answer the point from the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, we made it clear in the Skills for Jobs White Paper that mayoral combined authorities will be engaged in the development of local skills plans where they have a presence in the area. We expect employer representative bodies to engage with and build on the good skills-related work that local authorities and mayoral combined authorities are currently doing, including skills advisory panels. We will build on that work, but ERBs will be independent of government. If I am correct in the definition of LEPs, that is not their role—but there is currently a review and we will make clear the plans for that.
I emphasise again the limit of the LSIP—hence it is complemented in the Bill by the duty under Clause 5 for providers to look at their entire provision for local needs. I do not want to underplay it completely, but it has rather been taken to a level that it will not actually have in the Bill. It is to ensure that the skills are closely aligned to local labour markets, and employers are best placed to know that. Noble Lords will be encouraged to hear that this is not an amendment on which I will say that everything will be in the guidance and should not be in the Bill. We have a point of principle here that is the DNA running through our technical education changes about employers being the body that can assess needs. They will play a leading role and there will be duties on providers to engage with them. The premium we place on the ongoing direct and dynamic engagement between providers and employers is what we are trying to set up in this legislation.
Additionally, to discharge this new role effectively, the designated employer representative will need and want to work closely with MCAs and individual local authorities. There is a question of practicality as there will be a large number of providers and stakeholders, and indeed a number of local authorities, in any given local area with different perspectives on the key priorities. Giving them all a statutory role in developing the LSIP is much less practical than having a single designated employer representative body that can engage with all the relevant providers in a way that minimises burdens and brokers a plan.
This set of amendments includes placing a new duty on the designated ERBs to co-operate with relevant providers. However, that is not necessary since a designated body cannot discharge its role, as already set out in the legislation, without the co-operation of those providers.
Looking beyond the providers and employers, I think there is broad agreement that the views and priorities of key local stakeholders should be considered in developing these plans. That is why we want employer representative bodies to engage meaningfully with key local stakeholders, and we have made this clear with the trailblazers we are running this year. However, a rigid process—as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe mentioned—with a fixed set of local stakeholders could make it difficult to effectively plan, keep under review and keep up-to-date in an agile way within a timescale that is reasonably responsive to employers’ skills needs. Therefore, at this point we will use statutory guidance to set out the clear expectations on key stakeholders that employer representative bodies will need to engage. As I have said to noble Lords before, this will be informed by the trailblazers. If the designated employer representative body does not have regard to the guidance, the Secretary of State could decide not to approve and publish the plan and actually has a power to remove the designation.
On Amendment 31, the noble Lord, Lord Watson, challenged how representative the ERBs are. Again, they will be informed by a range of employer views. That is clear on the face of the Bill. The Secretary of State can designate a representative body only when satisfied that it is reasonably representative of employers operating within a specified area. I know there has been some interchange about reasonableness between the two Front Benches opposite, but that is obviously an objective criterion that is assessable on evidence. The Bill requires designated employer representative bodies to draw on the views of employers in the area and other evidence, so it is a very wide scope. To do this, they would need to talk to employers outside the body itself and other bodies present in the area, and we would put that in the guidance. A balanced judgment of what constitutes a “reasonably representative” employer representative body will be informed by suitable evidence, including, for instance, the extent to which characteristics of an employer representative body’s membership compares to the overall population of employers in the local area.
On the concerns of the noble Lords, Lord Watson, Lord Patel and Lord Curry, about SMEs, public sector employers and voluntary sector employers, of course MCAs are an employer, but they are not an employer representative body. They may also be a member of the chamber of commerce, like the local hospital might be. That is the distinction we have made. The term “employer” in Clause 4 is defined particularly widely as any
“person that engages, or intends to engage, an individual under … a contract of service or apprenticeship, or … a contract for services … for the purposes of a business, trade or profession”.
Therefore, it includes employers of all sizes, and public authorities and charitable institutions are also specifically mentioned. Of course, when the Secretary of State is designating the ERB, he is bound by the normal principles of public law to act rationally and fairly, and he will need to take into account a range of relevant, reliable and accurate information.
Amendment 36, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, would require LSIPs to have due regard to national and regional strategies, particularly in respect of decarbonisation. I think I have outlined a number of times to noble Lords that these will be expected to take into account various national strategies, particularly around the net-zero target, and that this will be within the guidance. Obviously, it is important to have regard to that in terms of the green workforce that we need in the future. But they should also draw on other evidence, and we expect that to include regional strategies.
To deal with the points raised by the noble Lords, Lord Curry and Lord Patel, the Skills for Jobs White Paper has already made clear that we expect the local skills improvement plans to be informed by, and in turn inform, national skills priorities as highlighted by the Skills and Productivity Board. Specific strategies and associated priorities are likely to change and evolve over time, so we believe that describing them in guidance that can be regularly updated, rather than legislation, is the best way of future-proofing the Bill.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
I have received one request to speak after the Minister. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I thank my noble friend for taking so much trouble to answer our questions. It is refreshing even if we do not like every answer. She said something very interesting: that the economic area could even be Greater Manchester. Could the proposed area be one that is supported by the combined mayoral authority in the Greater Manchester area or some other combined mayoral authority? Secondly, I do not think she answered my question. Could I see a specimen local skills improvement plan before we move to Report? That would be very helpful in feeling assured that the system was really going to work as intended.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
Yes, as I have said, in the process of bidding for the trailblazers, we have allowed local geographic areas to define themselves as the economic area. So, it could be the mayoral combined authority for Greater Manchester, or it might be that parts of the north of that area decide that they are going to be in an area with somewhere else. We have not prescribed that. We have allowed that local decision-making, and we are not dictating from the centre. We would be criticised if we were to do that. It is up to that geography to define itself. I will have to come back to my noble friend on a model plan. We will be publishing the trailblazer plans during that pilot, but I will write to my noble friend about any other model plan.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I thank all Members for their wise contributions and the Minister for her very detailed replies. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, really put her finger on it when she said, “I am not confident we’ve got the relationships right.” This is not—and I look directly at the Minister—about those pesky politicians or those pushy colleges wanting to get their hands on the levers of provision. This is about making sure this works. We support the Bill, we want the Bill to be successful, and we want these plans to work. All the contributions that noble Lords have made indicate that we have reservations about the way these plans are going to be drawn up. I was taken with my noble friend Lady Garden’s comment about when she was at City and Guilds. It was trying to get employers to come forward and was asking, “What skills do you want?” They did not have a clue. If you think “We will just give a sop to consultation”, people will feel that they are not properly involved. At the beginning, we heard the noble Lord, Lord Patel, say it gives too much power to a small group. That feeling will be there, and people will not feel engaged and will not want this to be success. So, I hope that in Committee and on Report, the Minister will consider the wise words of Members and we can have a system—if that is the right phrase—that will deliver what we all want. That is really important, as is, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, said, that we have those proper checks and balances.
To finish, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, will be pleased that business and politicians can work together. Liverpool gave the freedom of the city to Terry Leahy. There you go: an arch-capitalist being lauded by the Lib Dem council at the time. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Thursday 15th July 2021
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-III(Rev) Revised Third marshalled list for Committee - (15 Jul 2021)
“(5A) All other post-16 education and training providers, including universities, school sixth forms, sixth form colleges, and adult and community learning providers, must also have due regard to the local skills improvement plan, as it relates to their provision.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment sets out the complementary roles of schools, colleges and universities.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I move this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie. This amendment sets out the complementary roles of schools, colleges and universities by joining up the wider education and skills system so that it better meets society’s needs and gives people the skills they need. Delivering this means ensuring that we develop the right balance of autonomy, authority and accountabilities that will enable schools, colleges and universities to focus on the complementary roles they can play together and with other partners over the long term. This must involve a genuine partnership, with providers empowered to stimulate and challenge articulated demand, rather than act as passive policy recipients. It means ensuring that this is meaningfully accessible to all and involves an effectively joined-up wider education and skills system. Colleges do not work in isolation to meet the education and training needs of their communities. Schools and universities are important parts of the system, so they should be part of the planning process. Amendment 8—in the names of my noble friends Lord Rooker and Lord Bradley, as well—therefore sets out the complementary roles of schools, colleges and universities in delivering on LSIPs.
Currently, there is a lack of a comprehensive, long-term education and skills plan that brings together all parts of the system towards the same vision. Different parts of the system have different policy priorities and initiatives. The current reform agenda is not sufficiently addressing this. It deals with only one part of the system—colleges—without exploring the need for complementary alignment with universities, schools and other providers. At the same time, this means that the role of education and skills in addressing wider policy priorities and strategies is not always recognised—for example, the role of colleges in welfare, health and net-zero policies.
There is a lack of any system to co-ordinate the 16 to 18 offer at the local and subregional level between schools and colleges. This leads to insufficient provision and limits student choice of programme—for example, when multiple competing providers concentrate on a narrow offer at the expense of less popular or minority provision.
At the university level, there is contested ground over the higher technical level 4 to level 5 provision and who is best placed to offer this, leading to unproductive competition between colleges and universities. If a whole education system approach is not taken to local skills planning, there will be a disjointed system that is not efficient or effective in its use of public money and does not best meet the needs of students and employers.
There should also be an exploration of a national 10-year education and skills strategy sitting across government, to deliver on wider policy agendas and to give stability to all parts of the system, creating a duty on schools and universities to collaborate with colleges and employers in the development of skills plans, so that the training on offer efficiently meets the need of local areas. I therefore beg to move.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
I rise to support this amendment. This is such an important issue, but I can see that is difficult as well.
When I started teaching, which was many years ago, in Coventry, it was very clear which provider offered which course. The advantage was that it was very straightforward for children and schools to know where to go for catering, engineering, electronics or whatever. The disadvantage was that it squeezed out competition, which can raise standards and creativity. It is somehow getting that balance that we are looking for. I would welcome the Minister explaining how far the Government are prepared to go to make sure that there is some sort of co-ordinated provision within each skills partnership. It makes sense to allow providers to play to their strengths and it is also essential that courses that might not be economically viable but are important for the local or indeed the national economy are supported to stay open and be made available. So it is a tricky issue and I cannot recall so far in the debate on this amendment hearing the Minister outline the Government’s views on this.
To bring universities in, my noble friend Lady Wilcox made a very strong point. In the old days, it was just further education courses that were co-ordinated, but now we have a growth in private providers and universities in these contested levels as well. So in the name of clarity for students and users, and for the needs of the economy, we need some guidance from the Government about a co-ordinated approach, making sure all areas are covered. Basically, what happens is that all providers want to provide the cheap courses, and the machinery-heavy courses do not get offered. Schools are happy to go into vocational work, as long as it is classroom-based and they do not need specialist teachers. That very often leaves the college with the courses that need highly specialised tutors and heavy equipment. I would welcome the Minister somehow making sense of all that in her comments.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
I support what my noble friends Lady Wilcox and Lady Morris have said. I strongly support the case for more co-ordination. It is not clear to me, in the Bill, how this is going to work, and I would like to hear an explanation from the Minister of how she thinks co-ordination will be made to work at a local level. The idea that a Secretary of State sitting in London can get into the question of which school should offer which course and how we deal with the problem that my noble friend Lady Morris described is not going to work.
There is the Education and Skills Funding Agency. In the period when I briefly had something to do with it—when I was advising my noble friend Lord Mandelson, when he was Business Secretary in charge of skills—I did not get the impression that that body had the capacity to do this job of co-ordination. It was basically responsible for making sure that public money was handled in an accountable way. What I would love to hear from the noble Baroness is an explanation of how central government intends to approach this question of co-ordination at local level. In my view—and here there is a big lacuna in the Bill—this is most effectively done by councils and mayoral authorities. It should be a devolved matter; it is an opportunity, in my view, to strengthen devolution within England. I do not sense that the noble Baroness shares that view. Perhaps she will explain to us, if she does not share that view, how she thinks this task of co-ordination will be carried out.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I intended to support Amendment 40A. I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Baker, intends to move it. Has it dropped out of the system? I was not informed.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has dropped out; Amendment 40A has not dropped out.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Barker) (LD)
If the noble Baroness wishes to speak to Amendment 40A, she is entitled to do so.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
I am delighted to have the opportunity to support Amendment 40A—and I hope it will be moved. It is crucial that this information goes to pre-16 year-olds, because it is at that stage they are making choices about their future. It is important that, before the vocational 16-plus stage is reached, doors are opened and aspiration is fostered and nourished. There is considerable poverty of aspiration in the years between 14 and 16. If we are to enable those young people to move into useful and rewarding further education, we shall be helping not only them but our economy.
Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]
My Lords, I am in favour of both Amendment 8, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and Amendment 40A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. These amendments require schools, sixth-form colleges, adult community learning providers and universities to have due regard for local skills improvement plans. This sort of co-ordination between education providers and the community is absolutely essential if we are to ensure that people are armed with the skills they need to succeed in the modern workforce.
There is one omission from these two amendments, and it is one that is all too often forgotten: the contribution of independent training providers. Many of these organisations provide high-quality courses that fill skills shortages in their communities. Unlike other providers, they are not given equal access to funding—for example, in the north-east of England they are, in many cases, filling gaps in skills training but do not have the same access to public funding contracts as non-private education providers. These training providers, where—and only where—they meet the appropriate quality standards, should be included in local skills improvement plans, along with any other providers listed in these two amendments. Further, these local plans should incorporate both public and private education providers if we are to give our communities the best possible chance of meeting their specific skills gaps.
We live in a society that is rapidly changing and we need an education system that can meet the needs of this changing world. Sadly, to date in this country, and in much of the English-speaking world, university degree qualifications have always been viewed as superior and the other, more technical skills and qualifications have been looked down on. They have been the victim of a particular form of snobbery, in my view. It is quite clear that many of the areas where we face skills gaps are in these technical areas, and we must address this by improving the status of education providers that teach these skills, including those that are independent.
We need to change our understanding of education to something that people should participate in at all stages of life. With the changes in our economy, many jobs that people do today will not exist in a few years. Local plans should be considering not only where there are skills gaps but where there will likely be jobs that are going to disappear, and how people working in them can be retrained. Therefore, it will not just be school leavers or younger people who need training but people who may have worked in their current professions for many decades and who are now having to learn new skills if they are to remain employable.
Another factor to consider is how we promote training opportunities in new and imaginative ways to encourage people to take part. Many people, as we know, have not had a very positive experience of the education system and may resist the prospect of having to return to do further study, even if it will benefit them. For others, it may be the first time that they have taken part in any formal education for a very long time, so they may also be apprehensive about taking part. Local skills improvement plans must be cognisant of this as a significant barrier when trying to encourage people to retrain in areas where we currently have severe skills shortages. Once again, this is where including all providers—including those who are independent—is crucial, as their ideas and experience may help to ensure successful skills training delivery.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest as a non-executive director of the Careers & Enterprise Company. I was sorry not to be able to speak last week on the first day of Committee, particularly in support of Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and on the broader debate about the relationship between local skills improvement plans and national skills needs. I sense that this debate on Amendments 8 and 40A is a continuation of that and I think that the Committee is quite rightly looking for clarification about the relationship between all forms of education and training providers and employers, and identifying skills needs and the careers inspiration that is needed. I hope that on the next day in Committee we will get on to debating Amendment 82 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and related amendments about the vital role that schools will play in shaping the careers aspirations of their pupils and the work of careers hubs.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, I wanted to comment on Amendment 40A. It appears to be drafted relating just to schools providing sixth-form education. However, evidence shows—and it is certainly the aspiration of the Careers & Enterprise Company—that pupils of all ages, even from primary school upwards, benefit from receiving careers interactions and inspiration and hearing about the different careers and jobs that are available. I would not confine the involvement of schools in the work and the shaping of local skills improvement plans just to those with sixth forms.
I hope that the Minister will take from this debate and from what Members are saying that we would welcome further details from Ministers about the way in which the whole careers and skills ecosystem, if I can call it that, will work. That is why the results from the local skills improvement plan pilots will be so important. I do not think that anyone can doubt the critical involvement not only of education providers of all kinds in knowing the need for local skills and national skills—we particularly talked about green jobs and careers in digital, technology and artificial intelligence on the first day in Committee—but also of employers through these employer representative bodies and the local enterprise partnerships too. The sooner Ministers are able to share the results of the local skills improvement plan pilots with Members, the better, as I think that that will help to explain how this whole ecosystem will operate.
My final comment relates to these two amendments. We have to be wary of overloading schools in all ways. As everybody knows, schools are busy places; there are many demands on their time, particularly in light of the challenges from the last 16 months related to Covid and teaching through a pandemic. While schools of course have a vital role to play in facilitating careers inspiration and careers education, it cannot be done without the involvement of employers and businesses from outside. That is the model behind the Careers & Enterprise Company and other local careers initiatives. I hope that Ministers will want to balance that as they continue drafting policies and evaluating these pilots going forward.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I aim to speak succinctly in my contribution and hope that other noble Lords will follow suit. I do not look forward to going on until midnight for the next three days of Committee. My last Tube goes at half past midnight and I might have a sense of humour failure if I miss it.
Amendment 8 brings together schools, colleges, universities and adult and community learning providers to ensure that all those involved with skills learning are working in collaboration. We do not need competition where different providers, including independent ones, cater for different members of the community when they all have the aim of improving skills and employability. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, says, we support the aim of complementary roles and look for a whole-education collaboration style.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, it is often left to the further education providers to provide the resource-intensive programmes. As we all know, further education is poorly served in funding, teachers and so on, so we look to the Government to do much more to support the further education sector, which is vital in any of the skills programmes.
I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, was not here to speak to his Amendment 40A but, like the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, I will talk to it, because it is vital that sixth-form educators are aware of the full range of skills and employment opportunities. Far too often they are focused solely on academic achievement, which leaves out a whole load of young people whose skills are more practically based. We must take every step possible to ensure that young people are fully informed of all the work-based practical options which the country needs and which may play to their strengths in ways that A-levels do not. I absolutely support what the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said; we will come later to amendments to ensure that primary schools are included in careers guidance. Of course, some of the skills in the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, are the very ones that university technical colleges do so much to promote. I hope that we shall get a positive response from the Minister on these two amendments.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for the engagement that we have had since the first day of Committee. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, that this legislation is part of the FE sector having its moment and being rescued from often being described as the Cinderella of the sector.
I re-emphasise that the local skills improvement plans will not be master plans that specify in minute detail all the provision that is to be provided by every provider to every learner in the area. They are a vehicle to give employers a more central role in local skills systems by articulating a clear, evidence-based assessment of priority skills needs and working with providers to shape technical education to better meet those skills needs, which many noble Lords have outlined. They are about employers working hand in hand with providers and key local stakeholders, such as local and combined authorities and Jobcentre Plus, and they are about agreeing a limited number of priority changes that, if enacted, will make post-16 technical education and training more responsive to employers’ skills needs.
I would also like to take this moment to update the House that we have announced the local skills improvement plan trailblazers, literally within the last hour, and I will now outline them to noble Lords. In the north of England, we have Cumbria Chamber of Commerce covering Cumbria, Doncaster Chamber will cover Sheffield City Region, the North East England Chamber of Commerce will cover Tees Valley, and North & Western Lancashire Chamber of Commerce will cover Lancashire. In the Midlands, East Midlands Chamber will cover Leicester and Leicestershire. In the south of England, GWE Business West will cover the west of England, Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce will cover Kent and Medway, and Sussex Chamber of Commerce will cover Sussex. In relation to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and others, if you look also at the strategic development pilots alongside those areas, you will see a multiplicity of providers, including FE colleges, institutes of technology and universities. By the very nature of those bids, we can see that there has been a great deal of co-ordination in these areas, with the support, where relevant, of the mayoral combined authority.
The next update to noble Lords deals with the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, made about how we prevent providers from just going for the easiest, lowest-cost qualifications. We have today announced the consultation on new funding and accountability arrangements to simplify the system and focus on outcomes rather than processes and to avoid this descent to the bottom. It will include proposals for how local skills improvement plans fit into the wider funding and accountability landscape. That is also part of the development. The trailblazers will, of course, start work very soon and I look forward to being able to share with noble Lords details of their early progress ahead of Report.
Amendment 8, which was moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, relates to broadening the duty on who should have regard to these plans; the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, also mentioned this. Clause 1 already provides for the duty to apply to the universities and sixth-form colleges mentioned in the amendment, and the large majority of post-16 technical education and training providers will be captured.
The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, raised a specific point about independent training providers; they are specifically outlined as a relevant provider within Clause 4, so they are covered. The Secretary of State will be able to lay regulations before Parliament to add local authority providers, 16-to-19 academies and schools to those already identified and subject to the duty.
Amendment 40A would require local authorities to distribute these local skills improvement plans to all schools that provide sixth-form education. The plans will be published by the Secretary of State and publicised to relevant bodies through appropriate communication channels. Obviously, designated employer representative bodies will have worked closely on the ground with the relevant providers, who should be aware of that. I have to say that, of the many criticisms the department has faced over the last 18 months, publicising guidance to the relevant people has not been one of them.
I hope that my remarks provide assurance to noble Lords on the approach we are taking to local skills improvement plans and access to them. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, will feel comfortable in withdrawing this amendment, and that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, will not feel the need to move his when it is reached.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
I agree with my noble friend Lord Liddle that local authorities and devolved Administrations are best placed to deal with local skills planning. I reiterate to the Minister that, if a whole education system approach is not taken to local skills planning, the system will be disjointed and will not be efficient or the best use of public money. I welcome the Minister’s announcement of the trailblazers pilot; I look forward to reading the reports of the projects and, indeed, the early progress reports. Therefore, although the Minister has outlined an amount of detail, I remain somewhat unconvinced. I will wait to see whether that joined-up progress takes place. However, with the approval of the House, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)
I cannot call Amendment 10, as it is an amendment to Amendment 9.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 12. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Amendment 12
“(5A) Guidance issued by the Secretary of State under subsection (5) is to be made by statutory instrument subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires guidance to be laid before Parliament as a negative instrument.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, it gives me pleasure to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, to the Dispatch Box for the first time in a Bill Committee. May I say how well she is looking? If we do indeed sit until midnight on two evenings next week, as has been suggested, that will be useful practice for her because, in a few weeks’ time, she will discover that you take sleep where and when you can get it.
I will speak to Amendments 12 and 24 in my name; my noble friend Lord Rooker added his name to Amendment 12. The former would simply ensure that the Government’s local skills improvement plan guidance could be scrutinised by Parliament in the lowest form of scrutiny we have: the negative procedure. This guidance, which relates to co-operation with an employer representative body and, crucially, the matters to which the Secretary of State might have regard in deciding whether to approve and publish a plan, would take immediate effect but would allow the House to debate it if it were so minded. That is especially important because, as many noble Lords have said, this is a skeleton Bill so the detail of much of what we are debating at this point is vague or subject to ongoing or forthcoming consultations. I understand that that is why Ministers are unable to circulate a draft of the guidance, which would have been very helpful for all of us. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure your Lordships that the draft will appear well in advance of Report and that those directly impacted will be able to develop and shape it. However, in the meantime, I suggest that this amendment is entirely reasonable and appropriate given that there has been no opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)
The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is not in the Chamber so I call the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I support this amendment. However, I would just like to say, with great respect to the noble Baroness, that she did not answer the question I asked her on the first amendment. Nor was it a great reassurance to me to be told that Cumbria has been chosen as one of the pilot areas and responsibility placed in the hands of the chamber of commerce. I will explain that in a moment because it is relevant to this amendment.
If you are to have an effective local body that represents private sector and public sector employer interests, first, it has to have a clarity of focus on a particular labour market and, secondly, it has to be broadly representative of the businesses in the area. The chamber of commerce in Cumbria, taking this as an example, does a lot of good work with SMEs. It does a lot of training. It basically finances itself through doing local training courses for junior and middle managers, I would say. However, it has absolutely no connection with our major employers in the county: Vickers in Barrow, or the nuclear industry in west Cumbria—that is 20,000 workers to start with. In the area that I represent in Cumbria, there is a firm called Innovia, although its ownership has changed, that makes plastic films and employs about 1,000 people in a small town, but again it has very little connection with the chamber of commerce. The same would be true of the big firms in Carlisle such as Pirelli, which manufactures tyres, and Carr’s, which is now part of a wider biscuit group. I do this little bit of local storytelling because I do not think that putting skills planning in the hands of a chamber of commerce will prove to be a satisfactory solution. I want to see an employer-led approach—I agree with that—but we need to think about how we make this work more deeply than it seems to me the Government have. The areas do have to be relevant.
That is all I have to say, although I could add one point. In 2010, the coalition Government abolished the regional development agencies on the basis that they were not sufficiently employer led and that they were too bureaucratic and covered too big an area. They replaced them with something called local enterprise partnerships. These were intended to be employer led. Initially, in Cumbria everybody said, “Good idea: let’s have the chamber of commerce being the main private sector representative.” Eventually—and this is not a party-political thing at all—it was recognised all round that this body did not actually represent the proper mix of big and small employers. We have a reasonably effective local enterprise partnership running, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood—one of the great figures of Cumbria who was a Member of the European Parliament on two separate occasions for the north-west area. He has tremendous local credibility and does a very good job. The LEP has looked at skills and done a lot of work on skills. I hear no mention of what the Government intend to do with local enterprise partnerships. They seem to be too scared to say, or too unwilling to say. I do not know quite what is going on there. I have no confidence that the Government have a grip on this. On the principle that there should be a strong, employer-led presence in determining skills policy, I totally accept that. But I just do not think the Government have thought it through.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)
I call the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. The noble Lord is not online, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
May I say to whoever’s job it is, it would be useful to have list of people who have withdrawn from speaking; it is really difficult to know when we are about to be called, but that is a different matter. I rise to support the amendments, particularly Amendment 24, and to agree with my noble friends Lord Watson and Lord Liddle.
I understand completely why the Minister and the Government want local voices to have a say in what the nature of the partnership should be. That absolutely makes sense. Our country is very rich in diversity, with urban areas, rural areas, clusters of villages and small towns. I can see that see that the same model for everyone might not work. If the starting point is trying to let local people feel that they have ownership of this, I can see that and I share that starting point. What I think is a recipe for disaster is not to offer any guidance and to explore with everybody exactly what the criteria might be to determine what the local partnerships are.
I am not sure whose job it is to propose what “local” means. Does it have to be negotiated locally? That could take some time. Anybody who has been to a constituency Boundary Commission review will know how tempers can rise when talking about anything that has a boundary. I am not sure who it is who comes up with the idea in the first place of what the local area is. I am not sure what the criteria are that they have been advised they should make their decision against. I am not quite sure of the process by which somebody somewhere says, “Yes, that local partnership is local and covering the right areas.” I am not sure what happens to any geographical area that no one wants and has not managed to get a place in any partnership. There are, very often, left-out areas. There will be some areas that are really popular, and everyone will want them in their area; there will be some that are really tough and challenging, and no one will want them. I am not sure how all that is to be sorted out.
What I would be looking for is to keep that idea of not forcing the same on everybody, but within a much stronger framework of guidance than we have at the moment and a clear idea of process. It puts me in mind of when, some years ago, the Government—I think it was the coalition Government actually—set out regional schools commissioners. They decided to have no regard to any existing boundaries. So, instead of following the local authority boundary or a government office boundary, they made it up as they went along. It was an utter disaster, and there were some poor people having to negotiate with more than one regional commissioner at any one time. All that happened was that bureaucracy flourished. With the number of hours that were spent by one local authority that had schools within two regional schools commissioner boundaries, it just was not a model to follow. The Government, very sensibly, got rid of it and, I think, made sure—I may be wrong about this—that it followed the government office regional boundaries. I may be wrong about that, but it certainly makes sense now, and I know we are not spending as much time trying to chase appropriate regional school commissioners.
Therefore, I cannot see any example of where this decide-it-yourself, let-us-see-what-happens, get-on-with-it model actually works. It might not be something people like but—to be honest—let us get on with the job. Let us not set up a system where we will spend hours fighting about the nature of the structure that delivers it, rather than using our resources, energy and effort on what should be delivered.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, has rather pre-empted some of what I intended to say in support of Amendment 24. I very much welcome the announcement of the first group of trailblazers. It is, of course, the intention that all areas of the country should, in due course, be covered by a local skills improvement plan. I very much agree with some of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, have said about how we make sure the whole system works.
Now that the first employer representative bodies have been designated, and the local areas for which they are responsible defined, it will surely still be necessary for the Government to provide and update guidance on the criteria against which further bids will be evaluated, as required by this amendment and as we learn about the experience of that first group. There needs to be a broad package of guidance addressing all the issues that we have discussed so far in our debates. That is not just on how local areas should be organised to ensure there are no not-spots, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but also on who should be involved in LSIPs, what their role should be, what resources are available to them, what reporting and monitoring is required and so on.
It remains rather difficult, at least for me, to assess the merits of LSIPs in the abstract. I was very taken by the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, last week that the Government might share one or two model LSIPs with us to help us in our scrutiny of the Bill. Will the Minister clarify as much as she can, in her response, what plans there are for guidance to be provided, not least in time for the next stage of our own debate?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, as already discussed, local skills improvement plans will be developed by employer representative bodies working closely with employers, providers and key stakeholders. Guidance to support the publication of the plans will not expand the scope of the legislation but will provide further detail on the process and best practice to support the development and delivery of LSIPs. That guidance will be developed in discussion with key stakeholders and informed by evaluation evidence from the trailblazers announced today and running into next year.
In response to Amendment 12, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, relating to whether guidance on LSIPs should be laid before Parliament and subject to the negative resolution procedure, it is common for this level of detail to be placed in guidance rather than in statutory instruments, so that it can be updated rapidly in response to emerging best practice and changing circumstances. I can also confirm that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee did not raise any concerns about this approach to guidance.
The noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Aberdare, and other noble Lords asked whether the draft guidance would be made available before Report. Because that guidance will be informed by the trailblazers, as announced today, which will run until 2022, I am afraid that guidance will not be available in advance of Report on the Bill. However, the point about the guidance being informed by the trailblazers brings us to the second amendment, on what is defined as local. We want to use those trailblazers—to learn from how they are working, to inform our approach to LSIPs and to address a number of the detailed questions that noble Lords asked.
Amendment 24 relates to publication of guidance setting out the criteria used to determine a specified area. The geography for local skills improvement plans will be based on functional economic areas and informed by evidence from the trailblazers. The specified area for a local skills improvement plan will be defined in the notice published by the Secretary of State on designation. In the trailblazers, we have allowed a certain amount of self-definition of “local area”. One of the things that we want to test and learn from in the process of the trailblazers is the best geography for plans, so we will be giving some flexibility in this area.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, asked about the role of local enterprise partnerships. The Government are working with LEPs to refine the role of business engagement in the local economic strategy, including skills, and to ensure that these structures are fit for purpose for the future, including looking at the right geographies. We will consider this work alongside evidence from the trailblazers, where flexibility has been given on geography, before making final decisions about the specified areas that local skills improvement plans will cover. I reassure noble Lords that, as they have already heard from the Minister, every area will be covered by an LSIP and no area will be left out.
I hope the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has received sufficient reassurance to allow him to withdraw his amendment and not to move his second amendment when it is reached.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response. I was very taken by the comment by my noble friend Lady Morris about the ways in which local areas will be defined. She made an important point, which I confess I had not considered, about what will happen to areas she described as “tough and challenging”, which are perhaps not particularly in demand by the employer representative bodies. I hope that the Government will insist that employer representative bodies are properly representative not just of employers’ organisations but of their communities as well, to ensure that the potential problems that my noble friend Lady Morris mentioned will be headed off before they properly develop.
The noble Baroness, Lady Penn, said guidance will not expand the scope but will provide more detail, and I understand that. It is important that it can be updated, so I take the point. I have to say that she might have given a hostage to fortune by saying that the Government are not going to support the idea of a statutory footing because the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee did not recommend it. I am pleased to see that the Government will in future be abiding by the recommendations of that committee, and no doubt we will be coming back to them on other issues in the days and months ahead.
I would like to raise another point. Both noble Baronesses mentioned trailblazers. If I caught the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, correctly, she said that they had been announced today. Since she said that, I have tried to find out about that, and the best we can do is that they have been announced this afternoon. We are in debate this afternoon. Why were they not announced at the very least this morning—or yesterday or the day before? This is becoming a pattern. Yesterday we got some of the lifelong loan entitlement amendments from the Government, just a few days before they are due to be discussed in Committee next week. I have to say that the impression being created is that the Government are not on top of all this. Certainly, if the trail-blazers are going to have the influence that the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, said—I think the trailblazers are interesting and I want them to be successful—we should have had sight of them, so that all noble Lords could perhaps have referred to them in the debate to inform the points that we all wanted to make.
So I cannot say I am pleased with the Minister’s response—I am not surprised, either—but the Government need to bear in mind the points that I and other noble Lords have made. Some of them will certainly arise in future days in Committee and perhaps even on Report. But, for the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 15. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in the debate. I must announce that we will move in this group from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.
Amendment 15
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that the employer representative body is required to have an understanding of skills that are required nationally, and that may be required by local potential students but may not yet be required by local businesses.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 33 and 85. All three amendments in this group address the same question of providing access for the local skills improvement organisation to clear and consistent information on skills that are required nationally. I am very grateful to my noble friend for announcing the trailblazers today and am delighted to see that I find myself living in one of them—which is three hours wide, and that is on a good day. It is really quite hard to see how an organisation will hold together a coherent view across the many businesses composed in a spread that wide. It is also hard to see, given the current make-up of the chamber, how it will have access to a deep skills base in areas where Sussex is not currently strong.
There are a lot of skills required in the City of London which are not well represented in Sussex, which is not one of the great centres of the IT industry. There are a lot of areas where it does extremely well, but it is hard to see how you can take an organisation such as the Sussex chamber of commerce, which does very well in trying to knit together the varied economic landscape across this very hard-to-travel region and turn it into something that knows everything about skills in the local area, let alone something that has a real grip on skills nationally, unless we are providing it with a strong source of information on the national picture that it can build into the foundations of what it is trying to achieve locally.
When we last met, my noble friend the Minister referred to the skills and productivity board, which was announced last September and launched in November, with a letter from the Secretary of State saying that within the next 12 months he hoped to have information from the board on what the national skills needs were, how that would change over the next 10 years and how we should be focusing on productivity growth. As of today, as far as I can find, the organisation has no website; it has not reached out to people to discuss these affairs, and the only activity that I can discover is a contract it put out for a scoping study to help it develop a functional skills taxonomy by the end of June. This does not feel like a body that is moving with pace. It certainly does not feel like it is going to get anywhere effective by the end of November.
Perhaps my noble friend can fill us in a bit more than the skills and productivity board has felt willing to do on where it has got to and why a body that is largely composed of professors will be able to fulfil the remit it has been given. It is crucial that the Government get this right, and I am not at all clear that they have.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I support these amendments. This Bill is full of good intentions and starts with a lot of good will—people want it to succeed and the nation needs it to succeed—but it is becoming increasingly clear that the backbone, the foundations on which we can build other things, is just not there. It is missing.
I understand it is difficult to know what to put in legislation and what to develop as you go along. I understand that that balance is always difficult, but I think the Government are erring on the wrong side. Like almost all the amendments we have been considering today, this is another one asking for clarification of the Government’s role in setting a national skills strategy, and in particular—the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has rightly brought up on previous occasions—their role in almost future-proofing the skills needs of the nation.
Local people might know what needs to be done to provide a skilled workforce for the present economy, but I am not sure they have got time to speculate on the what the economic and skills needs might be in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. That needs a broader discussion and I am left wondering again what the role of the Government will be in their relationship with the local skills plan. Surely the Government are not going to say, “Get on with it, regardless of what we have decided at national level”. The national skills strategy should be what our experts say the skills needs in the next couple of decades might be.
The Bill lacks a clear vision of what the structure is, and as long as that is the case, we will not make progress. I would sooner the Government gave us something that we can amend and debate and move forward with, but they are not giving us anything. The guidance is delayed; it is not there in the Bill. There is hardly anything to debate—it is like whistling in the wind and guessing what the Government might intend. On this amendment, I am not sure how all these different locally determined, local skills plans are meant to fit in to the national skills strategy.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
I wholly support what my noble friend Lady Morris has said. There is an emphasis on local skills plans, but even if they are working well with good representation from across the board of employers, we are not certain in the Government’s plans how that will happen. So the first problem is whether these bodies will be representative. The second problem is whether they will have the capacity. My fear—which was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—is that even if they are good at it, they will focus on present needs rather than future ones. In a rapidly evolving economy, with artificial intelligence changing everything in the next 10 or 20 years, our education and skills system has to have some leadership from the centre to indicate how education and skills needs are going to change.
There is nothing terribly socialist about this kind of idea. When it comes to government investment in research and innovation, we have elaborate national structures that look at what the key technologies are going to be and invest in what they decide are likely to be the key innovations of the future. If you are doing that with technology and science, do you not also have to think in those terms for education and skills? I find no evidence in this Bill that the Department for Education—I am not going to criticise Ministers—has that long-term vision.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 85 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Blackstone, to which I have added my name. Before doing so, I should say that I support Amendments 15 and 33 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and my noble friend Lady Garden of Frognal. I agree with all the remarks that have been made to date in this group.
I do not often quote a former Conservative Education Secretary so I will take this opportunity to do so, not least because I am in complete agreement with what he says. In the debate last Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, asked:
“How can you fashion an education system if you have no idea what your national economy wants in the way of skilled workers?”—[Official Report, 6/7/21; col. 1236.]
I suppose it is a rhetorical question but it one against which there can be very little argument, particularly given the turmoil of the previous 16 months when the workplace has been turned on its head and changes to working practices that had appeared decades away happened, quite literally, overnight.
There is in addition the urgency of the transformative overhaul that we now know to be necessary to align all sectors of the economy to net-zero targets for carbon and our biodiversity goals. The green jobs task force, which was set up under the 10-point plan, published a report just yesterday—one of a raft of relevant government reports—which says:
“The conclusion reached by this assessment of the evidence is that, if the UK is to grasp the opportunities afforded by a green industrial revolution, we must develop a comprehensive and holistic view of the green jobs and skills challenge.”
A few paragraphs later the report recommends:
“A UK-wide body, including representation from national government and industry, should therefore be established to maintain momentum and coherence in the workforce transition, supported by action from local bodies.”
To me, that reads like a call for a national strategic skills audit, with a focus on aligning with our climate change and biodiversity targets. I think that Amendment 85 would meet that recommendation rather neatly. The purpose of the amendment is to create a structure for an expert panel to provide strategic, evidence-based advice on the skills that employers need now and in future, through a skills audit. It would allow the expert panel to assess economic, social and technical levers, and to disseminate high-quality information to key stakeholders. That in turn would allow all stakeholders, including learners and workers, to make well-informed decisions to support a robust green economic recovery, and would ensure that future skills and qualifications are aligned with the net-zero and nature-positive economy. Lastly, a three-yearly review would keep it up to date and relevant.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. Like her, I will speak briefly in support of Amendments 15 and 33 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal. I agree with the comment on those by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, that the Bill still very much lacks a clear vision of the structure that we are trying to create.
I will speak mainly in favour of Amendment 85 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman, Lady Blackstone and Lady Sheehan, noting that it has full cross-party and non-party support. Indeed, I would have added my name had there been space available to do so.
It is interesting that the last national skills audit was more than a decade ago but, even then, conservation and environmental protection officers were at the top of the list of a growing area of demand. Town planners were also high on the list. Since then, of course, austerity has hit local government extremely hard and, as we were discussing yesterday on the Environment Bill, they are not currently funded adequately to meet their existing responsibilities, let alone their upcoming responsibilities under the Bill, which has undoubtedly had an impact on the demand for jobs.
I note that this debate is particularly timely, given that it comes the day after the release of the Green Jobs Taskforce report, which does at least some of the job that the amendment proposes. Although it focuses purely on the climate emergency, not the biodiversity crisis or the way in which a systems approach shows how these problems link to many of the other issues in our society, it is also very much a report that reflects a business-as-usual-with-added-technology approach, failing to acknowledge the need for economic and social innovation and the skills that go with those. It talks about engineers and construction workers for offshore wind farms and nuclear plants, retrofitters for homes to make them energy-efficient and comfortable and car mechanics servicing electric vehicles and vans. There are many other jobs that we clearly need that are not covered by that.
With this Bill, I find myself thinking yet again that the narrow focus on jobs is a dangerous mistake. The amendment talks about a strategic audit, but what does the country actually need? Thinking of some examples off the top of my head, we need far more gardening skills for growing food and managing the home gardens that will be so crucial to our biodiversity and the survival and thriving of so many of our species. We need community-building skills for resilience and climate adaptation. I think of the city of Lancaster where, a few years ago, I chaired for the Green House think tank a session examining the experience of the disastrous floods there in 2015 and the community response. A training session based on what Lancaster learned the hard way for every community in this land would be a very good idea. For the kind of resilience that the future is going to demand of us—I point noble Lords to the tragic events happening in Germany as we speak—we clearly need community-building skills. The divisions in our society and the social issues that have come to the fore in recent weeks are real barriers to tackling the climate emergency and the nature crisis. Something else very practical that comes to mind is first aid. These are skills that we need for every community and just about every person in this land.
I am not sure that even this amendment is as broad as it needs to be, but it is a good start as an acknowledgment that we need our skills for jobs, at least, in many different areas and we need to think much more broadly in a systematic, comprehensive kind of way.
Baroness Hayman (CB) [V]
My Lords, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in support of Amendment 85 in particular, to which I have added my name.
We had a long debate on the first day of Committee about issues relating to the economy of the future, the new industrial landscape and the overwhelming need to ensure that workers have the skills necessary for the jobs of the future, and that workers who will have to transition from their current employment are given the opportunity to reskill in order to do so. In her response, the Minister was very helpful in assuring us of the Government’s recognition of those priorities, the important role that they will play in future and how they will need to form part of the background—if I can put it that way—to local skills improvement plans.
However, as many others have said already, we do not yet join up the dots in this Bill. We do not respond to the recommendations of the Green Jobs Taskforce, which were just highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, nor those of the Climate Change Committee, which in its recent progress report to Parliament recommended that the Government
“develop a strategy for a Net Zero workforce that ensures a just transition for workers transitioning from high-carbon to … climate-resilient jobs”
and
“integrates relevant skills into the UK’s education framework”.
We do not see the way in which that will be done; nor, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, do we see how we can ensure that local skills improvement plans look to the future, not just the present. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, we do not see how they fit in or how to ensure that national priorities are understood and integrated into those plans in locally relevant ways.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, spoke about the ecosystem for skills and post-16 education and training. I do not think that we can get the ecosystem right unless we ensure that the national priorities—they are accepted by the Government in the 10-point plan, in all their documentation and in the words of Ministers all the time—have a proper way of filtering down, not by framing it as “a man in Whitehall knows best” and dictating what happens at local level but by providing a coherent national framework in which the essentially local work that takes account of place, as we spoke about last week, can be undertaken.
I very much hope that the Minister will understand our need for mechanisms in the Bill to ensure that this national framework is clearly in place, and that it will support and underpin the work that is done at the local level.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I support these three amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and others. It is particularly important that the views and aspirations of individual learners should be taken account of by LSIPs, not least those who find that their ambitions cannot be met by existing employers or employment opportunities within their current environment or circumstances, and those who wish to start their own businesses. LSIPs need to be aware of opportunities relevant to wider national skills needs, as Amendment 33 requires.
I was very struck by the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, last week on the views he had heard from unemployed young people. They may need specific personalised help and support to prepare themselves for work and get into the skills system at all after long periods of unemployment or, perhaps, no previous employment. This is most likely to be provided by independent training providers, often within the frame- work of schemes such as Kickstart, but it is not clear to me whether the Bill makes provision for funding such extra support; perhaps the Minister could say how she expects that need to be met.
I also share the view expressed by many noble Lords of the need for a national skills strategy to provide a clear and coherent framework for the education and skills system. The national strategic skills audit proposed by Amendment 85 would be an important part of developing such a strategy, and I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that the Government are planning something along those lines to underpin the new system which they intend to create and for which the Bill provides a framework.
I imagine that this may well be another part of the remit of the skills and productivity board, which the Minister has mentioned from time to time, so I found the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on his attempts to find out more about the board somewhat disturbing. I hope the Minister may be able to tell us more about that.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, as last week, I have added my name to Amendments 15 and 33 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and I support his Amendment 85. He set out very clearly why those amendments are needed and, on the principle that I do not repeat things just because I have not yet said them, I will not go into detail on that. We have already explained why potential students should be taken into account.
Amendment 33 would add a clause to ensure that the employer representative body is required to be aware of skills in demand nationally which may not be in demand in the local area. If young people or adults are enthusiastic to learn skills which may not be available locally but are in demand elsewhere, it is really important that national demand should be recognised and skills training made available, even if the skills are not, or not yet, required locally. If a young person or adult is desperate to become a farrier or an aeronautical engineer but there is nothing in their locality, they should be enabled to follow their talents and interests. We must have a national picture of skills training and, if need be, there should be help with travel for those who want to pursue their skills out of area.
The amendments make it clear that skills needs and shortages must be seen in a national context, even if that means that those training need to move to find work. Again, let us never forget distance learning, which can be valuable in such times and has no barriers.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, made the valid point that we must do some blue skies thinking about what will be needed in future, and Amendment 85 mentions medium and long-term national skills. Who would have thought two years ago that we would all have needed to become proficient in Teams and Zoom? It is quite a wonderful advance really, but I do not think anyone predicted it, and we must always respond to unpredictable events in future.
My noble friend Lady Sheehan has given our support to Amendment 85 in this group, because a national strategic skills audit would be an invaluable tool to assess how our skills shortages are being addressed, alongside the invaluable task of working towards net-zero future jobs. This need not be an excessively cumbersome or costly exercise, but having a body with an overview of skills is surely effective for jobs and training. I know that the Government are always reluctant to set up new bodies, but this one would have a co-ordinating role which could prove invaluable in generating skills in the right places. I hope that the Minister will see that this group of amendments is well worthy of government support.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, we welcome the amendments and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, on reminding us of the bigger picture in skills development. Effectively, these amendments relate to the national skills strategy and seek to ensure that employers, colleges and universities adopt a far-sighted approach by planning to develop the skills and apprenticeships for the jobs of the future and, in doing so, help to shape a more secure and sustainable economy for the country. An employer representative body that did not follow that path should not last for long.
It is crucial that we maximise the power of the economy by delivering on genuine lifelong learning so that people can grasp the opportunity to reskill or upskill when they need it and as often as they need it. Equipping the workforce with new skills for the jobs of the future will help build job security, which in turn will bring sustainability and resilience back to the economy and public services, at the same time helping our high streets to reinvent themselves and, hopefully, begin to thrive again.
From green jobs in manufacturing electric vehicles and offshore wind turbines to fintech, digital media and film, there is a pressing need to grow modern industries to build a long-term economy that provides good-quality and well-paid jobs and is thus fit for the future I am sure that the Minister will be keen to tell noble Lords how the industrial decarbonisation strategy, launched earlier this year, would fit in to this future-proofing approach, which will be enhanced if the Government are willing to accept these modest but, I would say, important amendments. They are complemented by Amendment 85, which would require the Secretary of State to establish a panel to undertake a national strategic skills audit to be updated every three years. The Government's industrial decarbonisation strategy cannot exist in a vacuum. It must interact with the industrial strategy which, noble Lords may remember, was published in 2017, but seems to have been hidden in plain sight ever since, the green jobs task force, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, referred and the broader skills agenda into which the Bill will play.
In fairness to the Government—not something I am characterised by—the industrial strategy was indeed dusted down and updated as recently as January, setting out what are termed “grand challenges”, designed to put the UK at the forefront of the industries of the future and improving the country’s productivity.
That is all good, stirring stuff, and absolutely necessary because, as my noble friend Lord Knight highlighted last week, on our first day in Committee, we currently have a reactive skills system that is too often tortuously slow in responding to new demands, never mind anticipating them. A strategy formulated with an understanding of the need to embrace net-zero future jobs and skills would address that issue and, over time, could open up many more employment markets. I genuinely hope that that is a role that the industrial strategy will adopt, with a national skills strategy a key part of it.
My noble friend Lord Liddle rightly pointed to the lack of evidence that the Department for Education has a long-term vision. If there were one and it were cross-cutting in nature, a national skills strategy could benefit from a comprehensive assessment of our medium and long-term skills needs, with the goal of creating not simply secure employment but, in doing so, achieving the country’s climate change and biodiversity targets. I say to the Minister on these amendments: what is not to like?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for tabling these amendments. We completely agree with him and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, that designated employer representative bodies should take into account evidence of future skills needs and national priorities as they develop their local skills improvement plan. Of course, much will be included in guidance, but each employer representative body will be expected to co-ordinate and collaborate with its neighbouring employer representative bodies in writing the local skills plan, and with others across England.
In relation to Amendment 15 and potential student needs, I draw noble Lords’ attention to Clause 1(6)(b), which many noble Lords mentioned. It states that a local skills improvement plan
“draws on the views of employers”.
I hope that that answers some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, on what is expected of the Cumbria Chamber of Commerce in reaching out to the big employers that he mentioned. The clause also talks about
“skills, capabilities or expertise that are, or may in the future be, required”.
Although the approval process for the Secretary of State is about whether the relevant people have been consulted, as I outlined to noble Lords, the Bill states that the plan must look at the future. I obviously cannot comment on whether individual plans will pass or fail the Secretary of State’s test, but it is here in the Bill that a plan must look to the future. The future outlined is obviously the “potential students” that are mentioned in Amendment 15. They were the subject of much discussion on the first day of Committee. I remain of the view that, by being focused on the needs of employers, the LSIPs will also, by virtue of this, include the needs of potential students in relation to jobs in their areas. The vision that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to is found within the White Paper that we launched earlier this year.
The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, I think, referred to other employment—it might relate to a skill that is needed for a neighbouring area. There is obviously the wider local needs duty under Clause 5. We are expecting that the trailblazer programmes will not only help to inform the guidance but help us to see how they engage with one another and the national skills priorities. The advice on national skills needs will clearly be part of the guidance. We have also previously discussed, both in this House and outside it, the role of the national Skills and Productivity Board, which will report later this year. This will enable each employer representative body to have access to its high-quality advice. The statutory guidance will highlight the types of evidence that they should have regard to.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, made reference to the flexibility that people need nowadays in terms of skilling and reskilling. Of course, that will be part of what we discuss later in Committee in relation to the lifelong loan entitlement. A lot of the additional support for young people that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, mentioned is provided through Jobcentre Plus. People can sometimes be a bit sniffy about that, but what the work coaches are doing to make young people aware of the opportunities such as Kickstart is amazing. We have also given additional funding for apprenticeship starts in that group in particular and there has been an expansion of the traineeships. However, the National Careers Service and the Careers & Enterprise Company obviously depend on the age of the person. We will also make those young people aware of that. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, mentioned the Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy, which, again, will be one of the national strategies that a good local skills improvement plan will look to.
Amendment 85 looks to set up a national strategic skills panel, particularly in relation to our targets on net zero and biodiversity. As mentioned, we have been busy in the department—we have launched the Green Jobs Taskforce, which I hope gives some reassurance to the noble Baronesses, Lady Sheehan and Lady Bennett, that we are looking at those recommendations now. The recommendations in relation to the response to the need for net zero and biodiversity were not just for government but also for business and the skills sector, as we extensively debated on day 1 of Committee.
On the points made by many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, there is a balance between a framework within a piece of legislation and having so much detail within it that the accusation can then be made, potentially rightly, that Whitehall is trying to fix all. There is a framework to try to set up the appropriate situation so that providers work with the employer representative bodies and that each local area works with the others and the national picture. I do not think that we should be more prescriptive than that. There is strategic development funding to deal with the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, on the capacity for these areas.
I hope that I have reassured noble Lords and that my noble friend Lord Lucas will feel comfortable to withdraw his amendment and not press the others when they are reached.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her extensive reply and to other noble Lords for their supportive words on these amendments. I am afraid that I remain entirely unconvinced that the Government have a firm platform on which to go forward in this area. I hope that it may be possible to talk to the Minister and officials between now and Report. In the absence of some further clarification, I think that this is an area where we ought seriously to try to improve the Bill.
Listening to my noble friend, I think that there still seems to be an idea that the interests of local employers and local potential students are automatically aligned. This is a fundamental misconception: within a particular area, there are many skills where employment is not available in the quantities that might be required. Students require a much broader view of what their capacity and prospects are. People follow my noble friend Lord Tebbit’s advice and get on their bike and get around the country, particularly when they are young, and their view should not be restricted to what is available locally.
I am also not convinced by the picture that my noble friend paints of a whole collection of local skills improvement partnerships talking to each other. We are getting into the now-familiar territory of exponential growth, this time in emails and confusion, as these organisations try, in a collection of people that is far too large and diverse, to evolve some view on what the national skills need is, armed with a collection of reports of variable quality from different bits of government and other people. This needs drawing together to make it something that informs not only the local skills improvement partnership but government as a whole. We need a view on where our skills requirements are. That way, we can make an effort to do something about it.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, pointed out, these things change quickly. This is not intended to be a plan that we expect to be worked through but one that we expect to live with, but, unless you are looking a few years ahead, it is impossible to put in the provision that you will need. Unless we are looking nationally, we will find national shortages emerging, because large parts of the country, where these industries are not present, turn out not to contribute to the provision of employees in areas where we need them. I will of course withdraw the amendment, but I very much hope that, between now and Report, we can get to a rather better place.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 27. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in the group to a Division must make that clear in the debate. Before I call the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, I inform the House that the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Adonis, have withdrawn from speaking on this group. I ask those after them to be prepared for when they are called, please.
Amendment 27
Lord Aberdare
“(8) The Secretary of State must publish a response to the local skills improvement plans published by the local designated bodies across England.(9) The response must include—(a) a national skills map based on the skills needs identified in the local skills improvement plans, and(b) an action plan outlining how the Secretary of State will support local areas to address the skills needs in their area.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment aims to ensure that there is not only a feeding in of national policy into local skills improvement plans, but also that local information and information about skills gaps is fed back into national policy making. This is to ensure that government can identify national skills shortages more easily and more quickly, and act accordingly.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I am pleased to move Amendment 27, originally in the name of my noble friend Lord Patel, who is unable to be here this afternoon. He has kindly shared with me the points that he wished to make and I will make full use of them. I will also speak briefly to Amendment 30.
Amendment 27 aims to ensure that, in addition to national policy feeding into local skills improvement plans, local information about skills gaps and local skills challenges is also fed back into national policy-making. Real-time labour market data, as well as insights into what is happening locally around education and skills options for young people and those wanting to retrain, is vitally important to ensure that the Secretary of State and his department have the insights and evidence needed to make strategic national decisions about education and skills policy.
I hope the Minister can give us some more clarity about how the LSIPs proposed in the Bill will feed into the work of the DfE and BEIS to develop a strategic approach to addressing the skills gaps on a national level. How will information within LSIPs help shape and inform national industrial policy? How will the Government use the reforms in the Bill to identify and respond to regional skills needs important to the overall strategic goals of the UK, such as specialised engineering skills?
Several proposed amendments to this Bill aim to ensure that LSIPs will take account of national strategies and policy—as they should—but what is missing is a feedback loop from the local to the national, which is what this amendment seeks to achieve. Local skills improvement plans have the potential to provide rich insights into what is going on locally around the skills businesses need and the difficulties they may or may not have in accessing them locally. They should, one hopes, provide insights into how local areas will address any skills shortages and how effective these measures prove to be in the long run.
Local skills improvement plans will provide detail and data that should enable the Government to get a much better picture of the skills situation in this country and allow them to map out where there are potential issues. This will foster an understanding of whether particular skills gaps are localised, and therefore need to be addressed locally, or whether there is a pattern across the country that may require national policy interventions in addition to local action.
This amendment is asking the Government to provide a response to the LSIPs as a whole, including a skills map and an action plan. This is surely a reasonable proposal that can only help to further the Government’s ambitions around productivity and joined-up thinking. Ensuring that there is a functioning feedback loop from national to local and from local to national will enable government, both local and national, to identify and address skills shortages more easily and quicker.
Turning to Amendment 30, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which I also support, I am rather surprised that it should be needed at all and that the publication of LSIPs is not already in the Bill. Every LSIP needs to be available, not only to all interested parties in the education and skills system within the area it covers, as specified in the amendment—particularly providers of careers guidance—but also more widely, both so that others can learn from different approaches being taken and as input to national skills policy-making.
Apart from the essential publication of the LSIPs, as in the amendment, there needs to be a process for regular progress and performance reporting, not least to promote the sharing of experience and good practice, as well as for monitoring and accountability purposes. This is yet another element of the framework that is not clear. It is not clear if that feedback loop is going to be there, what sort of performance monitoring is going to be in place, and what happens if LSIPs do not reach the standard one might hope from them. I beg to move.
Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I find myself in a difficult situation with these amendments. I listened carefully to the Minister responding to the last group of amendments, and I feel that she was right: a lot of what noble Lords are rightly concerned about ought to appear in the guidance. I do not want the Bill to be overly complicated, with every prescriptive concern, but I do want an assurance from the Minister that the guidance will address some of the valid points made by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and others.
While I have the Floor, I am concerned about the view that, somehow, employers will not be looking ahead. That is not my experience of dealing with employers. They are concerned; they have had to look ahead. Like hanging, the pandemic has concentrated their minds wonderfully, but it was also happening beforehand. Look at all the work in establishing new standards, where employers are involved; they are taking into account their future skills needs and that new green skills will be required.
The Minister was right to remind us about the vitally important work that jobcentre coaches are doing. I would not say that I am absolutely satisfied they have got all of that right, but they are on the right track to ensuring that young people are aware of the skills that they will need in a job market that is changing significantly. We know what some of these are already; we know they need a reasonable standard of maths, English and digital skills—they are absolutely essential. Some of them are fully equipped, certainly on the digital skills front, while others will need some extra assistance and training. The Minister referred to lifelong learning, and we also have traineeships and Kickstart, so there are a number of things the Government are providing. Is everything working absolutely right? No, there are things that I believe—as I have said in a previous debate —need reform, and the apprenticeship levy is one.
I urge the House to be wary of trying to load up the Bill with every single detail. The Minister was right when she said that there is a role for guidance. If there needs to be a reference within the Bill to the fact that some of these points will be covered in the guidance, that is all well and good. I attach a lot of importance to the guidance.
I do not share the pessimism of some that this is a badly framed Bill that will not involve local people as it should. Of course we are going to go through a learning curve, as the participants in creating the local skills improvement plans develop the technique of doing this. What the Government should do on a national level is encourage best practice, looking at examples of where it has been done really well and passing that kind of information on. I suspect I may be in the minority here, but it is no bad thing to have a range of views. I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will take into account the points I have made—she has also made them before—about the balance of what is in guidance and what needs to be in the Bill.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, we should all take notice of what my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green says on these matters. He has vast experience in this area, as a trade union official and as a Minister in the field in the last Labour Government, so I would not dismiss a word of what he says. However, I think he is being a little overgenerous about this Bill, which seems very vague in some of its key points.
We support—certainly I do, and I think my Front Bench does—the principle of a lifelong learning entitlement and reform to our qualifications structure to allow modules. That is a very important reform. We support a stronger role for employers in determining skills. All of that is fine at the level of high principle. The question is how this is going to work in practice. I still have very severe doubts about that. Here we are talking about the role of the Secretary of State in relation to the plans that are produced locally. Can the Minister tell us precisely what that role is going to be, because it relates to these amendments?
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I support Amendment 27 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Aberdare, and Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie. These amendments stress the need for local and national co-ordination and place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that local and national skills needs are both involved in national policy planning, which is surely only common sense if the country is to address skills shortages, of which we know there are many, and provide a functioning feedback loop, as the noble Lord said. It is also important that this information should be readily available to all the educational bodies involved in skills training. Like the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, I find it surprising that this is not already in place.
I wholly support the information being available to schools from the age of 11. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, touched on this in an earlier amendment. But, as we know, 11 is really too late to start careers advice, which needs to begin at primary level, where young people, particularly those whose skills are more practical than academic, can begin to see pathways for progression and to have some confidence in their future. I can understand why the provision in this amendment may not extend to primary schools, but we must never overlook the very young in these discussions.
The local skills improvement plans should be given to all those who work with the education and training of the future workforce. They should certainly be on websites, but steps should also be taken to ensure that these providers actually access them and that everyone within their organisation is aware of them. There is little point in assembling all the information if learners are blissfully aware that it exists. So, for the moment, the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, is definitely a step forward.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
Amendment 30 requires that the Secretary of State must publish LSIPs and distribute them to schools and all post-16 education providers. However, there is little point in having a plan if no one is aware of its contents. Yet, despite the requirements for providers to have regard to LSIPs, the Bill is silent on how LSIPs will be published or disseminated. I know that the Minister responded that a model LSIP can be provided, but this amendment seeks a much wider and co-ordinated task. Does the Minister intend, as the amendment suggests, for the DfE to take responsibility for this? Does she agree that publishing all local skills improvement plans will allow for areas to draw on each other’s strategies? That would be particularly helpful for a complementary regional approach and would promote best practice. Or does she envisage that such responsibility will fall to ERBs? If so, can she advise whether they will have the resources and a dedicated budget for such a responsibility?
Perhaps the Government believe that the onus should be on providers themselves to track down where LSIPs have been published. If so, where should they look—to the chamber of commerce, or local authority websites? How does that fit with the lack of role of local authorities and mayoral combined authorities in the process? I hope that she can assure the House that there is indeed a plan for publication and distribution, and I further reiterate my noble friend Lord Liddle’s probing question around the role of the Secretary of State in relation to local plans.
I also speak in support of Amendment 27 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, which requires the Secretary of State to publish a response to each LSIP, including an action plan for how they will support areas to address their skills need. I agree with the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, about where the strategies approach will be developed, using LSIPs to feed into national strategies and creating the feedback loop that is so essential. It is very important, given that LSIPs will need to be responsive to national level strategies, and given the Secretary of State’s powers to intervene if they believe that providers are failing to adhere to LSIPs or not meeting local needs, as seen through the lens of local employers.
I further understand that the notion and definition of “local” has been much discussed during the passage of this Bill already—but I respectfully point out that it continues to be raised by noble Lords because of the still undefined nature of the link between local and national priorities. When I entered local government almost 20 years ago, I was reminded that all politics is local, and I came to recognise that most assuredly throughout my tenure. I would further add that local knowledge and experience is invaluable in feeding into the national strategic overview.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to be able to speak to this group of amendments relating to publication and response to local skills improvement plans. We expect them to be an important resource to inform decision-making by local providers, stakeholders and national policymakers.
On publication, in Clause 1(7) it is clear that a local skills improvement plan means one that has been
“approved and published by the Secretary of State”.
I presume that that will be on GOV.UK. I cannot prescribe that, but I do not think that we need to go into any further detail in relation to that, or to put such matters in the Bill. I am grateful for the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Young, about what we do and do not put in a Bill and what goes into statutory instruments—and then, of course, what is published in guidance.
Amendment 27 talks about how local skills improvement plans can inform national policy on skills. As outlined previously, we expect the plans to be informed by, and in turn inform, national skills priorities highlighted by the Skills and Productivity Board. This is envisaged to be a two-way relationship. In relation to the collaboration between employer representative bodies and the co-ordination point, which has been quite a theme throughout a number of amendments, the Secretary of State can set terms and conditions for the employer representative body and, should it be necessary, they can be used to mandate in the approval that they collaborate—but, obviously, one would hope that that will not be necessary.
On the point from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I hope that the trailblazers will reveal whether his doubts will materialise about whether the appropriate national skills priorities are taken into account.
On the approval process by the Secretary of State, it is not about the Secretary of State second-guessing the priorities and actions agreed by local areas but about ensuring that a robust process has been followed. In Clause 3, there are provisions that enable the Secretary of State to remove the designation if he sees fit: if terms and conditions have been broken, if the body is no longer impartial or reasonably representative or if it does not have regard to the guidance. Of course, when one talks about process, one normally thinks about judicial review—but, if a plan says that we are going to invest in coal mining in an area, for example, there might be a case for such a priority that is way outside. But it is a process that he will be looking at; he will not be second-guessing the choices and priorities decided by the employer representative body.
As I have said, we expect the LSIPs to complement the funding system reforms outlined in the Skills for Jobs White Paper. The consultation that I mentioned was launched today, aiming to give providers more autonomy to use government funding to meet the skills needs of local employers, including those articulated in LSIPs. We expect these plans to be a relevant factor for the Secretary of State to consider when making decisions about funding and support for local areas. Again, implicit in that is a co-ordination point as well.
Turning to Amendment 30, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, concerning the publication and distribution of LSIPs, I have mentioned Clause 1(7). The ERBs will lead the development of the plans, and the Secretary of State will approve and publish them. Obviously, if they are defective, there is the remedy I outlined for the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. They will be published on a website to ensure that relevant bodies across England can easily find and access them, and this will be publicised through appropriate communication channels. The department has good relationships with stakeholders, as I say.
I hope that my remarks in relation to these amendments have provided some reassurance to noble Lords. One noble Lord who requested a meeting—it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—in relation to these matters. Of course, I am happy to engage with any noble Lord to give further detail outside of Committee. I hope to be able to report to the House on the progress of the trailblazers, but they are not due to conclude until March 2022. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment and that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, will not feel the need to move his when it is reached.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken and the Minister for her response. This is a Bill whose aims I strongly support. It is absolutely focused in the right direction, and it has lots of great ideas in it. My occasional frustration is that I do not quite see how it is going to work in various aspects that have been raised by a number of noble Lords. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, that it may well make sense to answer a lot of these points in the guidance rather than in the Bill itself, but we do not have the guidance and we do not know what is going to be in it so all we can do is say “We want this to be dealt with somewhere” and keep asking how it is all going to work in practice. Having said all that, I live in considerable hope and expectation, and I am happy to withdraw my noble friend’s amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 39. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in debate. As I did in the last group, I point out that the noble Lords, Lord Adonis, Lord Baker of Dorking and Lord Liddle, have all withdrawn from this group. I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
Amendment 39
Lord Addington
“Review of apprenticeship levy
The Secretary of State may request a review of the apprenticeship levy in respect of eligible costs definitions, in order to ensure that the funding required for the delivery of local skills improvement plans is optimised and reflects employers’ needs.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to create flexibility in the eligible use of employers’ apprenticeship levy funds.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, in speaking on this bit of the Bill and this amendment, I feel like the reserve coming in to fill in for somebody else as my noble friend Lord Storey initially had his name down. When I see that the other co-signatories are here, I am reasonably sure that the team will do the job.
The apprenticeship levy sounds right. It is the idea that if you have a turnover of, I believe, more than £3 million, you will pay into a training levy—apprenticeships through a training levy might have been better in the first place—then you will get something out of it. However, it has never really taken off. We do not really know what it is for or what it is getting in. Of late, we have had a decline in the number of apprenticeships, yet you are still having to pay in. There have been lots of other issues here, such as— although the loophole has been filled—the fact that MBAs have been studied on the money from the apprenticeship levy. Can we have a look at what this is really for? Does it need redefining? Does it need a new level of focus? That is what is behind this amendment. How can we make sure that it is functional and does what we think it was supposed to do? If we actually know that, we will get more encouragement for it and will keep it going forward.
Before I go any further, I want to point out that the Treasury gets money that is not spent at the time. If it is training money, we should make sure that it goes somewhere that trains. Hopefully we will examine questions here, such as would level 1 and 2 activity be taken on here? Should it be for the under-25s if it is supposed to be about youth training? Can we get these things out? Can the Minister, in her reply, let us know exactly what the Government think the future of this institution is? At the moment, it is danger of becoming something faintly ridiculous that is not quite achieving what we think it should. The people are having to look for a way to get the best out of it and get a focus. We could actually use this money to support colleges and institutions in delivering the right type of structure, especially locally, under the course of this Bill.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
I call the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. No? I call the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, it is an unexpected pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington, with his straight talking. I rise to support the noble Lord, Lord Storey, in introducing a greater degree of flexibility in the use of employers apprenticeship levy funds.
I am particularly glad to see the involvement of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, who brings practical experience of what works from running a training business and of the red tape—my words, not his—of complying with regulatory conditions, which I fear this Bill increases too much. The backdrop to all this is a dramatic fall in apprenticeship numbers in recent years—exactly the opposite of what we wanted and promised to achieve. A great deal of effort has been put into improving the quality and level of apprenticeships but I fear that, perversely, this has excluded many who would have benefited from the discipline and recognition of a successful apprenticeship, for example in my old industry of retail. However, my noble friend the Minister may have a better explanation for the decline and be able to reassure us that the fall has come to an end.
I was at the birth of the apprenticeship levy as the Minister who took the legislation, the child of Nick Boles, through our House. As noble Lords may have sensed earlier, I am passionate about apprenticeships, which were beginning to be a lost art, but I did have some carefully disguised doubts about the design of the arrangements for administering the levy. The system is a bureaucratic one and was led by education, rather than employers, so bigger employers paid a substantial levy. This often came off their existing training budgets; they were then unable to fix their training into the mould laid down by the Civil Service, so the levy ended up as a tax.
Perhaps my noble friend the Minister can explain why things are better now. In particular, where a company has surplus levy credits, can these be allocated to their supply chain or pledged to other companies without the levy payer having to become responsible in any way for the training in that other firm? That requirement was a real barrier to good practice and spreading the levy into the supply chain. What is the current cap on the new arrangements in percentage or other terms? Has the inevitable move to digital made the system more efficient, with fewer requirements to keep unnecessary records for inspection and more trust in employers to lead and train their apprentices? Or have more requirements been laid down in the digital world because, in theory, it is so very easy?
Amendment 39 seems to suggest that the levy funds could be diverted in other ways, which I might be more concerned about if it led to pressure for a rise in the levy. Companies can ill afford a levy increase at present, especially those whose training budgets have been hit hard by Covid. Before we reach Report, I would like to understand better what is planned for apprenticeships. Apprenticeships provide a passport to mobility from one job to a better one. They provide a route to advancement to people who do not need or want to go to university and incur debt doing so. If we could massively increase their numbers and their status on the German model, that would contribute to happiness and to growth.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I suspect that her knowledge of apprenticeships is far greater than mine and I appreciate her remarks. I also strongly agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said at the beginning of this debate.
I have added my name to this important amendment because apprenticeships need to be an integral part of the new skills and education system which the Government are rightly seeking to create. They are employer-led and job-focused, and they cover all levels, from GCSEs up to degree level. Through the levy, they provide a mechanism whereby employers contribute to the cost of skills training—where, at times, they have been less than forthcoming.
However, as we have heard, there is a widespread recognition that the levy is not working as well as it should. Relatively few employers are able to use more than a small proportion of their levy funds. Even for major employers in the energy and utilities sector, it is only just over 50%. So, to maximise the funding they can recoup, they tend to use a high proportion of the funds for apprenticeships that are about upskilling or reskilling existing employees, rather than taking on or training new, young apprentices. This is perfectly understandable and, of course, reskilling and upskilling are good things to do—but the result is that the number of 16 to 25 year-old apprentices has not grown nearly as much as the number of over-25s. Although there are mechanisms for employers to transfer up to 25% of their levy funds to other employers who can use them, the process seems overcomplicated and take-up has been pretty low.
At the same time as levy payers are unable to use all their levy funds—with much of the unused funding going back to the Treasury—there appears to be a shortage of apprenticeship funding for non-levy payers. So the impact of the levy on the total funding available for skills training has been rather less than might have been hoped. It is not even clear whether the total amount of funding going into apprenticeships is significantly greater than before the levy was introduced.
The word that crops up most often in discussions with employers about the levy is “inflexible”. As I have said, apprenticeships will surely be a significant element of LSIPs and they need to be properly integrated. I have felt for some time that it would make sense to recast the apprenticeship levy as a wider skills levy—perhaps with a lower payment threshold to bring more employers into the net of contributing towards training. But, at least, if employers in an LSIP area are not able to use all their levy funds, why should it not be possible for those funds to be used for other, defined LSIP training priorities? In any case, what is needed is a review of the apprenticeship levy system in the light of experience to date. It must be clear how it relates to the wider post-16 education and skills system, as set out in the White Paper and now in this Bill.
Amendment 39 does no more than encourage the Secretary of State to conduct such a review. In my view, that is the answer to the argument that it does not belong in this Bill. Well, it does belong in this Bill—it is fundamental to it—and the review is to ensure that levy funds are used in a way that is integrated with the priorities of local skills plans and properly reflects employers’ needs. Of course, such a review must not reduce the amount of funding available for the apprenticeships that are so badly needed. It should seek to maximise the funding available from the levy and to optimise its use in pursuing local and national skills priorities. I look forward to the Minister telling us how this will be achieved—but the review proposed by the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, would be a very good place to start.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
We will go back to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, to see whether he wishes to participate.
Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]
Thank you, my Lords. I apologise that, on the previous occasion, I committed the offence of forgetting to unmute.
I am aware—as are many other noble Lords—of the deficiencies of the apprenticeship levy. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, almost said, we should be careful before we throw the baby out with the bathwater. It has done a lot of good. It has focused employers’ minds on the importance of apprenticeships. We have an Institute for Apprenticeships which is involving employers in creating new standards. I agree with the noble Baroness who said that there was a need for reform. But a consultative process is going on. I ought to have declared my interest as a national apprenticeship ambassador.
Employers already have the ability to use apprenticeship levy money to support not just supply chain companies but other companies outside their supply chain, and there has been a better take-up of that. Indeed, the Government have made more of the apprenticeship levy available. My concern at the moment is that, if we are really looking for growth in apprenticeships, this needs to be in the area of small and medium enterprises, especially in small and micro companies. Those companies frequently complain that the administration is too complicated, and that they find it a burden. We should bear in mind that many are saying, “Look, I’m struggling just to keep my business afloat and now you want me to take on an apprentice”. My response is to be understanding We need to work on helping them to remove some of that administrative and basic training burden. I also say to them, “Look, having a young person whose digital skills might be a lot more advanced than yours can often be of benefit to your company”.
I agree that some of the apprenticeship levy money has been spent in the wrong place. My concern is the 16 to 18 group, where the levels of youth unemployment are exceedingly high. I have already acknowledged the work of the job coaches, but more needs to be done on that front. So I am in favour of reform of the apprenticeship levy. I do not think that we should call it something else. We are just beginning to see a much better understanding by both parents and potential apprentices of the value of apprenticeships. I was interested in a recent development. UCAS, which used to be the clearing house just for those interested in going to university, has now opened another portal where people will be made aware of apprenticeship routes and vacancies. So reform is needed, but I still think that the basic concept is right. There are always areas where things could be improved, perhaps including the role of the Institute for Apprentices.
The apprenticeship levy is a bit like the curate’s egg—good in parts. I think the Government are aware of that, which is why there is a consultative process. I welcome the opportunity for the Committee to have this debate.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, this seems to be our only opportunity, in considering the Bill, to mention the words “apprenticeship” and “levy” in the same sentence. We should utter these words sotto voce because, at Second Reading, the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, made it very clear that the levy was beyond the scope of the Bill. That is not the fault of the noble Baroness, of course, but speeches by several noble Lords at Second Reading, which have been reinforced today, demonstrated that I am not alone in finding it rather perplexing that the levy does not merit a mention in the Bill. This is despite the fact that the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education—which develops and approves apprenticeships and technical qualifications with employers—is quite prominent in clauses that we shall consider in later debates on the Bill.
Apprenticeships are key to ensuring that Britain is equipped with a well-skilled workforce in the years ahead. The levy scheme—which we have supported in principle—has yet to produce anything like the effects hoped for and required. So, while I am happy to support the intent of this amendment—and understand the reasoning behind it on the basis of what the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said in introducing it—I urge caution at this stage with regard to the levy and using its funds for any purpose other than apprenticeships. In that, I think I am reflecting the comments which my noble friend Lord Young has just made.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, now that I have de-masked myself, I will first make two remarks to the noble Lord, Lord Watson. In my enthusiasm to start my speaking role on this Bill, I did not thank him for his kind words in welcoming me to the Dispatch Box. I also acknowledge completely his point about the timing of various announcements and the need to ensure that noble Lords have as much information as possible to help them to scrutinise proposals for this Bill. We will endeavour to do our best in that regard.
I am grateful, too, to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for giving us, on behalf of his noble friend, the opportunity to discuss apprenticeships, which are at the heart of the Government’s skills ambitions. As we recover from the impact of Covid-19, apprenticeships are more important than ever in helping businesses to recruit the right people and to develop the skills that they need.
I hope that noble Lords will allow me a little time to outline a few principles of the apprenticeship levy and its funding, as that will respond to some of the points made in this debate. The funds available to levy-paying employers through their apprenticeship service accounts can be used for apprenticeship training or assessment in their own businesses, or transferred to other employers. They are not the same, however, as the Department for Education’s annual apprenticeships budget.
While those unspent funds, therefore, expire from the employer’s accounts after two years, the broader funding contributes to the budget set by the Department for Education, according to its rules, and funds other costs associated with apprenticeships. This includes training and assessment for apprenticeships for employers that do and do not pay the levy, the cost of English and maths tuition and additional payments to support young apprenticeships—as I heard from noble Lords, those are a priority—and those with additional learning support needs.
On Amendment 39, I reassure noble Lords that we keep apprenticeship funding policy under review. I say to the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Aberdare, among others, that a key principle of the apprenticeship levy is that we should only pay for apprenticeship training and assessment costs from the apprenticeship budget, as apprenticeships deliver a significant return on investment from the public purse, rather than using the levy to fund wider skills training needs.
We have an ambitious agenda for apprenticeships and we have made huge strides forward with the apprenticeship reforms, but we cannot and will not stop here. We want to grow the programme, drive up quality and improve apprenticeships, to the benefit of all employers and ultimately the economy, through increased skills and jobs. While widening the scope of the apprenticeships budget to pay for other costs or skills training, even for a time-limited period, would not be in line with the Government’s aims for the programme, I hope that noble Lords who have raised questions about how it currently operates will be reassured by some of the improvements that we are making to make it easier for employers to use and to encourage take-up by potential apprentices.
We continue to listen to employers and to adapt apprenticeships to better meet their needs. Work is under way on a package of improvements that respond directly to employer feedback, so that employers can make better use of their apprenticeship funds.
First, we are introducing a new service that will make it easier for employers that pay the apprenticeship levy to transfer funds in their accounts to other employers, including smaller employers. Large employers will be able to pledge funds for transfer and other employers will be able to receive these funds, so that both will benefit from those transfers. In response to a question from, I think, my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, the lead employer that is transferring those funds will not retain any responsibility for the provision of training after the transfer. It is not an additional burden on them.
Secondly, we are helping employers to choose more innovative training models, such as front-loaded training and accelerated apprenticeships, which will help apprentices with relevant skills and experience to complete their training more quickly. Finally, we are supporting sectors of the economy that have more flexible working patterns, such as the creative industries. We will shortly launch a £7 million fund to help organisations in England to set up and expand new flexi-job apprenticeship schemes.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, asked about the funding available for apprenticeships. In 2021-22, the funding available for investment in apprenticeships in England is almost £2.5 billion. That is double what was spent in 2010-11. We have increased the investment available for apprenticeships.
My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, asked about the aims of the apprenticeships programme and its direction of travel. Our reforms to the programme have all been focused on making them longer and better, with more off-the-job training and proper assessment at the end. Many pre-reform apprenticeships were of low quality and involved little or no training. That is what we have aimed to change.
We know, however, that there is more work to be done and, in addition to the reforms that I have mentioned that will make it easier for employers to take up their levy funds, we have introduced new incentives for those employers, particularly during the pandemic, to take on new apprentices. Until the end of March those incentive payments were £1,500 for those aged 25 and over and £2,000 for those under 25—71,140 incentive payments were paid up to that date. We have increased the incentive to £3,000 and that remains in place until 30 September.
I hope that noble Lords take some reassurance from what I have outlined that we remain committed to the apprenticeship programme. While we do not agree with diverting apprenticeship funding to other forms of skills training, we acknowledge the need to continue to review and adapt the apprenticeship programme so that there is better take-up and it works better for employers and those who will potentially benefit from it. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, feels able to withdraw his amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
I have received no requests to speak after the Minister so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington, to conclude the debate on this amendment.
Lord Addington (LD)
I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, wanted to come in.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I have a quick question for clarification. I think what the Minister is saying is that she wants quality of apprenticeships, not quantity—for example, that level 2 apprenticeships are a thing of the past. I was saying that I am rather sorry about that, but I would like to be clear, either now or before Report, exactly what the direction of travel is on the lower grades. I completely support those doing level 6 including even the stonemasons , but I think that there is a place, especially among youngsters—those between 16 and 23 years old—whom we are trying to get to do apprenticeships, to do something perhaps a bit less sophisticated that brings discipline and the sense of attainment that apprenticeships can bring.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I believe the Government are aiming for quality and quantity when it comes to apprenticeships. On the noble Baroness’s specific question about lower-level apprenticeships, I will ensure that I write to her with that specific information before Report.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this has been one of those slightly odd debates. One thing that we have established is that it is complicated—“We are not quite sure what it should do; we think it is quite a good thing, so please do not get rid of it now.” That certainly seemed to be the attitude of the Labour Party. They may be right about that, but at the moment there is a great deal of scepticism about whether this actually delivers. The intentions are good, but that is the thing that paves the way to hell. Can we please just make sure that we get a little more clarity on this? Whether it is worth returning to on Report, I will have to have a word with my noble friend Lord Storey after he has read this debate.
I felt, listening to the first part of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, that with a bit of tweaking you would get to a classic sketch about bureaucracy in some lofty TV show of my youth when people were being clever. Because it is complicated, but there is an intention behind it. The noble Baroness replied, “Yes, but we are trying to do things.” There was a lack of clarity here and focus at the heart of this. We should keep an eye on this, because if it continues to bring itself into disrepute, it may well be doing more harm than good. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, we now move to the group beginning with Amendment 41. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Clause 5: Institutions in England within the further education sector: local needs
Amendment 41
Lord Addington
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is to make sure that the needs of students and potential students are regularly considered and reviewed in decision-making.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I almost feel that the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield—indeed, as we discovered in a debate in this House, my noble kinsman Lord Lingfield—should be the one opening this debate, because he has the more substantive amendment. Having said that, I think that I know better than to try to put words in his mouth.
My Amendment 41 concerns a part of the Bill that says, and I think it is best if I quote it, although I am beginning to wish I had put my glasses on:
“The governing body of an institution in England within the further education sector must … from time to time review how well the education or training provided by the institution meets local needs”.
I tabled the amendment because I do not know what “from time to time” means. I have absolutely no idea what “from time to time” means. Does it mean once a decade? Every six months? I have absolutely no idea.
Lord Lingfield (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 43, 44, 45 and 46 and, in doing so, remind noble Lords of my registered interest as chairman of the Chartered Institution for Further Education, which is a growing Russell-type group of the most distinguished FE colleges in the country.
Briefly, this amendment adds a requirement for institutions to review, from time to time, how well they are meeting the special educational needs of students in their areas. I read the guidance published after I put down my amendment, and it makes a short reference to special educational needs and disabilities, as did the Minister, my noble friend Lady Berridge, in her reply at the end of Second Reading.
The role of further education colleges in developing SEND provision is central to ensuring that those who have the most significant barriers to learning improve their life chances and are given the opportunity to develop new skills, establish independence and contribute to the local economy.
The parents of special needs students find that the best further education colleges provide their sons and daughters with safe, productive and supportive environments in which they can have confidence. I have been struck by the readiness of FE student bodies to welcome special needs colleagues and to extend friendship and help to them.
The best colleges are very good also at progressing special needs and disabled learners into employment. These institutions encourage close co-operation with local employers to provide work experience opportunities for SEND learners, often by supported internships.
All these young people gradually become less reliant on local support services and acquire an ongoing sense of achievement and self-esteem. Many develop a special level of expertise in certain vocational areas and are welcome additions to the local workforces in their areas.
In the past few years, far more companies have become more sensitive to the needs of disabled employees. There is no regulation in this country that requires the employment of a quota of staff with special needs, as there is in certain European countries, but I know a number of firms that have made the gratifying effort to ask colleges to steer disabled students in their direction.
We tend to think of FE students with some kind of special needs as being in a very small minority. Last week, I received the statistics from four excellent colleges in various parts of the country. They support the figures quoted briefly on Second Reading of around 20% of students requiring special support, rising to 25% of those under 19 years old.
For far too long, further education has been, as my noble friend Lady Berridge underlined earlier this afternoon, the Cinderella of this country’s education service, underfunded and often neglected as it has been. Too much of its provision has become mediocre today. If that were not so, this Bill would not have been necessary. The Government have woken up, at last, to the fact that high-quality vocational education is absolutely essential to our country’s competitive performance in a post-Brexit world, and all this is very welcome indeed.
However, too many colleges have still to improve, and as special needs and disabled students’ numbers are visibly on the increase, the regular legal requirement for review of the needs of SEND students becomes even more needed. With such a considerable proportion of the FE student population in this category, it is clear that we owe them a special duty of care. It is my view that the face of the Bill should reflect this in the way my amendments make apparent.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, the next three speakers—the noble Lords, Lord Adonis, Lord Young of Norwood Green and Lord Liddle—have all withdrawn from the debate, so I call the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham.
The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]
My Lords, I first need to declare my interest as chair of the National Society. I should also apologise that I was unable to take part in Second Reading because of other engagements; my noble friend the Bishop of Leeds spoke in my stead. I also need to apologise for a complete error on my part in not being available to speak to Amendment 11, to which my name was added, during day one of Committee; that was entirely an administrative error at my end.
However, I now enter into the debate on a very small matter, on Amendment 41, on which I simply want to endorse the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about the phrase “from time to time”. The language seems too loose. The word “regularly” implies something more frequent without expressing exactly what that regularity is. Put simply, regular review that connects with potential changing local needs makes good sense. The amendment simply tightens this up.
But I want to connect Amendment 41 to Amendment 43. My local college, Bishop Auckland College, which is an excellent example of FE provision, in reviewing the support for SEN in its own context, also found itself reviewing the wider provision for the students with SEN who were coming into the college. That led it to recognise that there was a serious gap in provision locally, which has led it further to now open a campus for a school specialising in special educational needs support for those who need the provision of a specific school with all the facilities provided. That means that the local FE has now added to the provision in the area. It also means that it has developed, or is developing now, a much longer-term vision for support for these students. It will see them through their secondary education and then into the FE itself. There are potentially all sorts of long-term advantages, I believe, for some of the students in this provision.
I think that Amendment 43 makes complete sense, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, has so helpfully outlined. I wish to add my support to both Amendments 41 and 43.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, my role in this group is really to add support to my noble friend Lord Addington, who knows more than I ever will about special educational needs. He and the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, are a formidable team for these amendments. Obviously, these two noble kinsmen disagree on the use of “from time to time”, but that is not as important as the fact that they call for reviews to take place on these matters.
What matters is that colleges should be fully aware of the skills, talents and opportunities, but also the limitations, of those with special educational needs. As I said previously in this debate, FE does lend itself to those with SEN because of the breadth of practical subjects that can be studied. I hope the Minister will appreciate how important it is to have those with SEN on the face of the Bill.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I am sure I am not alone in finding that there are times when I come across something that makes me look at it and look at it again and think, “Well, that’s stating the blindingly obvious.” That was my thought when I read Clause 5(1), which says:
“The governing body of an institution in England within the further education sector must—
(a) from time to time review how well the education or training provided by the institution meets local needs, and
(b) in light of that review, consider what action the institution might take (alone or in conjunction with action taken by one or more other educational institutions) in order to meet those needs better.”
Certainly, any principal or governor of an FE college reading that would have reacted with genuine astonishment, along the lines of: “Wow, that’s a great idea—why didn’t I think of that?” Actually, any principal or governor of an FE college would have reacted with astonishment, probably with language that might politely be described as “unparliamentary”.
I am not going to claim that every one of more than 200 FE colleges in England are faultless in how they go about their business or in the quality of their teaching. They employ around 120,000 full-time equivalent people and have a key role in developing career opportunities, enhancing skills, creating future leaders, transforming lives and serving businesses.
Not satisfied with having dug themselves into a hole in the form of Clause 5, the Government and the DfE then managed to dig even deeper with their attempt at an explanation for this clause in the Bill’s policy summary notes. On page 11, they ask themselves the question: “Why is legislation needed?” They answer their own question:
“Creating a statutory duty will ensure that aligning provision with local needs is a priority for the governing body of the relevant providers, alongside their other statutory duties, and strengthens accountability for this aspect of their performance.”
I have read that two or three times, and it always reads, to me, like gobbledegook.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, Clause 5 places a duty on governing bodies of institutions within the further education sector to periodically review their provision against local needs and to consider changes that might improve the way that those needs are met. Regular reviews of provision should be a key part of strategic curriculum planning within every college, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, pointed out. As well as reflecting the priorities set out in any local skills improvement plan, the reviews should cover the whole of the education and training offer and the needs of both current and future learners.
I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that this clause is not introduced with the intention of second-guessing practices that already take place within local providers or their value. But by placing a legal duty requiring reviews to be published, Clause 5 strengthens transparency and accountability around decisions on provision that are vital for local communities.
I turn first to Amendment 41, from the noble Lord, Lord Addington. I welcome the opportunity to respond to the points he made on clarifying the timing of reviews, including their frequency and regularity. In the draft statutory guidance—which we have been able to produce for this clause and which supports the new duty proposed in Clause 5—we set out the principle that reviews should be timely and undertaken at least once every three years. The term “from time to time” is often used in legislation, and can have the advantage that it can accommodate reviews that may, for very good reason, take place at different intervals and therefore could not, strictly speaking, be described as “regular”. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, himself asked whether you could have more frequent reviews or a review at a different point, perhaps in response to changing local needs or circumstances, and so “from time to time” is aimed at allowing for such circumstances.
I hope that there is a broad level of agreement across the Committee around the importance of reviews taking place on a timely basis, and that my explanation of the Government’s approach and the contents of the draft statutory guidance provide some reassurance that the proposals in Clause 5 will achieve that goal.
On Amendments 43 to 46 in the name of my noble friend Lord Lingfield, I completely agree with his remarks on the importance of provision for students with special educational needs, including those with an education, health and care plan. Provision for these students is an integral part of the education and training provided by an institution. Again, the draft statutory guidance published by the department makes clear that the review should include consideration of the needs of learners with SEND, including those with education, health and care plans, when governing bodies are considering the needs of different groups of learners locally. The existing statutory obligations on colleges relating to SEND, including the public sector equality duty, are a key reference point for the governing body when carrying out the review.
Colleges and other FE sector institutions already do fantastic work for students with SEND, and that provision is an integral part of the education and training that colleges offer. For that reason, we consider it essential that it is considered as part of any review of their wider provision, rather than through a separate or parallel exercise. To re-emphasise, in reviewing the college’s education and training provision under Clause 5, the governing body must do this in a way that is consistent with its existing statutory obligations in relation to SEND, and that is underlined in the draft statutory guidance supporting the review.
I hope that I have provided some clarity to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on the use of the term “from time to time”, and he will feel able to withdraw his amendment, and sufficient reassurance to my noble friend Lord Lingfield that he will not move his amendments when they are reached.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
I have received one request to speak after the Minister from the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield.
Lord Lingfield (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her reply. I understand the Government’s views. I particularly thank my noble friend and kinsman Lord Addington for his support. He is one of the House’s experts in the area of special needs and always worth listening to. However, it is a sad fact that not all further education colleges and suppliers of further education are up to the level of the very best ones, and a regular review, clearly required by the Act instead of being hidden in guidance and regulation, would be an important incentive to those that are mediocre to improve their offering to these vulnerable young people. I hope that my noble friend might think again, and I hope to return to this at the next stage of the Bill, but I shall not press my amendments.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I think we are in agreement on the importance of special educational needs being included in the reviews undertaken by providers. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, asked what the point of the provision of this clause is. The regular production and publication of these reviews might enable noble Lords and others to hold colleges more easily to account on how they have taken on that guidance, which is clear that the special educational needs of students have to be taken into account, and how they have taken that on in the conduct of their own reviews. I am sure that many colleges do an excellent job in that respect, but the additional transparency of having these reviews produced and published on a regular basis will aid in that job.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, I have now received a second request to speak after the Minister from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. No? I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington, to conclude this debate.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. My probing amendment got the reply, “Yes, we actually know what it means: it’s in the guidance”. If it had been put on the face of the Bill, I would not have asked. So, there we are.
As I have said, the more substantive amendment was from the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield. We should have a look at this. As we started speaking, we both went to different groups in that very big group that has special educational needs. As the Minister will accept, that means you have two different sets of needs, or different groups that have a variety of needs that interlock and overlap. It is a very difficult thing you are expecting an institution to do to meet all of those needs. It is not easy. If it was, we would not be banging on about it. It is difficult. The Minister said that they have to have a plan. I shudder every time I hear that, because most disabled youngsters do not have a plan. Most do not have parents who can fight to get one for them, or they have very severe needs, which are dealt with.
People who have a moderate difficulty and who may well, with a little bit of help, find a place in training, are the group we are worrying about here. Certainly, I am, and I think my noble kinsman is talking about the same thing as well. We need to have more clarity on this. It is a way in to giving a better description of what is supposed to be done, so that everybody knows. The Minister should listen to her noble friend; some colleges are not as good as the best. Aspiring to get there is what they should be doing. I agree that we should look at this again on Report, but for the moment I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
We now move to the group beginning with Amendment 47. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in the group to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Clause 6: Functions of the Institute: oversight etc
Amendment 47
Member’s explanatory statement
This is a probing amendment to test what level or type of education or training will fall within the Institute’s remit.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I think it fair to say that more than a little concern has been expressed about the role of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education in relation to qualifications. We seek to address that through the amendments in this group.
Turning first to Amendment 47, at present, education and training is currently within the institute’s remit if the training is or may be provided
“in the course of an approved English apprenticeship … for the purposes of an approved technical education qualification, or … for the purposes of approved steps towards occupational competence.”
The Bill proposes to add a fourth category to this list to enable a person to
“enter work within a published occupation (whether in the course of training of otherwise).”
However, it is not clear what level or type of education or training it is intended to capture. Can the Minister confirm that, essentially, this decision will be left in the hands of IfATE in publishing a list?
Amendments 48 and 49 require IfATE
“to report to the Secretary of State”
and for that report to be laid before Parliament. This is important for both ministerial and parliamentary oversight and scrutiny. The arguments are rehearsed regularly on Bills in Committee and I do not propose to rehearse them here, but accountability is really what is at issue here.
Amendment 55 is a probing amendment regarding IfATE’s new powers to implement fees and charges for the cost of technical qualification approval. The Bill’s impact assessment says that by giving
“the Institute powers that could allow it to charge for approval and to manage proliferation, we will ensure that the future qualification landscape is clear and straightforward for users to understand … This will avoid a return to the proliferation identified in previous assessments of the technical qualifications market.”
The Government’s impact assessment also admits that this will add significant extra cost to the awarding and FE sector. It states: “we would expect” awarding organisations
“to face more of these costs upfront, as initially”
awarding organisations
“will have to resubmit the majority of non-defunded qualifications.”
Can the Minister provide more detail about exactly how the charging regime is expected to work? What consideration has been given to the adverse impact it may have, particularly on niche providers of qualifications that may, in future, withdraw from occupational markets because the business case for investment is simply too prohibitive.
Lord Flight (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 47A requires that:
“In performing its functions in relation to technical education qualifications, the Institute must have regard to apprenticeships policy, including any future reform of the apprenticeships levy, in order to promote growth in apprenticeships opportunities.”
I believe that for many years, as a country and an economy, we have overextended educational qualifications and we have certainly underaddressed colleges. I hope that this Bill will be the catalyst that puts those things right. I agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Addington, had to say today. I view it as disappointing and shameful that the number of young people taking apprenticeships is now down to 160,000 in a year, and the Government have a tax revenue from the apprenticeship levy of £2.1 billion per annum.
Alignment on apprenticeship policy is needed urgently. This will be the third Bill extending the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education’s remit—the first created it in 2016 and the second extended it to T-levels in 2017—but there is still a complex four-way relationship between DfE, covering oversight, funding, intervention and the provider side; Ofqual and qualification regulation; Ofsted, the inspector of the provider side; and the IfATE and the development of programmes and their regulation. The Government should set out their approach to the apprenticeship levy alongside this wider skills agenda.
If the apprenticeship programme is to function successfully, it needs to remodel itself, with the offer of secure ongoing employment to apprentices upon successful completion of their programme, training and studies. This would be along the lines of the support and training offered when selecting officer recruits into the services. They are appointed in advance of taking up university courses and are supported through their degrees on the basis that, post qualifying, they devote a minimum number of years’ work to those who have sponsored them. Effectively, for an apprentice, this system could mean guaranteed support through study, with guaranteed work at the end. Similarly, the employers get exactly what they want in terms of skills and, equally importantly, a real return on their investment.
I hear employers are becoming increasingly dissatisfied at paying the apprenticeship levy without any guarantee of securing suitable training staff. This is particularly so in the context of niche, high-end skills, since apprenticeship programmes are designed to suit the masses. What works in terms of the necessary skills base for an employee at Wimpey Homes will not work for a high-end and very exclusive building company that requires not just a standard brickie but a true craftsman. Approaching apprenticeships in the way outlined above, in a bullet point, would go some way to addressing this concern. SMEs in particular have an understandably jaundiced view of apprenticeships, where they have often been left to pick up apprenticeship unpaid training plans.
Community adult education is a key part of the post-16 education landscape, supporting many adult learners to progress towards qualifications or into work and bringing many social and economic benefits. This is not prominent in the Bill as drafted or the White Paper which preceded it. There is a risk that some of the key objectives of the Bill, such as supporting adults to obtain level 3 qualifications, may not be fully recognised unless community adult learning is supported as well. It provides the stepping-stone for many adult learners returning to education and training.
There is a profound need to put right the balance between universities and colleges and to revive successfully the principle of apprenticeship. I hope that this Bill will be a major force towards achieving these things.
Lord Blunkett (Lab) [V]
My Lords, in speaking to Amendments 51 and 53 in my name, my job has been made a great deal easier by the very comprehensive and thorough introduction by my noble friend Lord Watson. I echo all that he had to say, including my support for Amendment 54 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who will follow my contribution.
Before speaking to Amendments 51 and 53, I just say that I welcome today the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s step back regarding clawing back resources from colleges. I hope it will do so again with those residential colleges which are so crucial to what the noble Lord, Lord Flight, has just spoken about in terms of adult education and the ladder of opportunity. Reducing or clawing back their funding would be a very major mistake. I hope the Minister might be prepared to write to me about that.
I want to deal with the issue of defunding on the one hand and overlap, or duplication, on the other. It arises, of course, from what has become a rather sterile debate about whether A-levels and T-levels are the qualification of choice at level 3—by the way, “qualification of choice” is the term constantly used by the department both in written material and in responses. I just pose this question to the Minister: choice for whom? If there is not a choice, you do not have one. If, as was originally mooted following the report by Lord Sainsbury, we were going to have two tramlines running alongside each other and no opportunity for anyone else, whether walking or riding, to carry forward along the same road to qualification and success, we would have been in really deep trouble. As an ambassador for further education, I am pleased that there has been some movement, including on the back of the consultation and the Government’s report yesterday. There is great ambiguity, however, and it would be very useful—if we are going to avoid having to move and carry amendments on Report—if the Minister would be prepared to go back to the Department for Education to get a much clearer understanding, and therefore clarification, on what we are talking about.
At Second Reading—I will not tediously repeat what I said—I illustrated my own experience of being able to take a vocational qualification which also had elements that allowed me to take A-levels in the evening. I saw no problem—in fact, I saw a massive advantage— in having a vocational qualification and academic qualifications at the same time, and it stood me in very good stead. It is true that industry or occupational standards are absolutely crucial, but too narrow an occupational standard, which defines what is to be funded and therefore seen as a success in a way that applies solely to a very current application in industry or commerce, would be a very grave mistake. Therefore, my appeal is that, if we do not want to have to move amendments on Report, we must get these matters clarified, both the issue of overlap or duplication and the issues around defunding, which have been addressed so ably by my noble friend already.
We must also listen not only to those who already have the Government’s ear but to those who often do not, out there in the sticks. For instance, it has been put to me—and I would be very interested in having this refuted—that in the development of T-level engineering, we do not so far have a perspective on electrical engineering. This is a remarkable situation, given that the whole move in engineering is towards that area, not least because of climate change and all its knock-on effects. I would be very happy to be contradicted, but I have had it from very good sources that we are nowhere near down that line that I referred to earlier—the very narrow line—in providing that option.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
I will speak to Amendment 54 in my name. I reflect some of the concerns that have already been expressed by the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Blunkett. It goes back to the very significant powers being provided to IfATE in the Bill, especially the simple and stark statement:
“The Institute may withdraw approval of a technical education qualification.”
I understand the need for that power. I would not justify every technical qualification currently in existence, but it is a significant power and I think we all want to know how it will be exercised and under what constraints. My anxiety is that power may be exercised in a way that does not serve the long-term interests of the economy or individual learners. For example, the Government have invested a lot in T-levels. I very much hope that T-levels will succeed. However, it would be tempting, if T-levels were not quite achieving lift off at the speed that was hoped. to close down the alternatives in order to drive people, not through personal choice, into T-levels. That would be very regrettable.
We also know that the Government believe in trying to divide young people into the sheep and the goats—the two routes. They are either going for a qualification that leads directly to skilled employment or one that leads to further study. Sadly, life is not that tidy, nor is the modern economy. There are enormous overlaps between the paths and there are qualifications that straddle that divide of which the BTEC—already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett—is a conspicuous example. It would be a great pity if BTECs lost out simply because they have an employment value as well as being accepted by universities.
I say to Ministers that expecting young people to give up on the option of university if they go for T-levels seems to me the wrong way of trying to promote them. In reality, young people do not want to close off their options. Of course they have a subsequent decision to take, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Flight, that they must have vocational options in apprenticeships, but expecting them to take a course that explicitly makes that impossible for them will not improve and encourage the take-up of T-levels.
Finally, we have to think of employers. Those of us who are veterans of these education and skills debates know how frustrated employers are by frequent changes in qualifications and frequent changes in the systems. Some qualifications, such as BTECs, have gradually achieved acceptance over decades. Employers are familiar with them and it would be very dangerous for IfATE simply to defund them when employers have become familiar with them and trust them.
All my amendment really does is ask the Minister to set out a process of consultation to be followed. The Minister has on several occasions during this Committee stage—and I commend her on what she has been saying—made it very clear how keen she is on a role for employer representative bodies. Would it not be a natural, logical result of the Government’s own approach that employer representative bodies should be consulted before IfATE exercises the powers that are being given to it?
I hope that as well as the designated employer representative bodies, the public consultation might also involve others, such as LEPs. I am not totally clear why LEPs appear to have fallen out of favour; they have a good understanding of the local economy and would be an obvious group to consult. There are also colleges—it is noticeable how the Association of Colleges has expressed some of its concerns about these powers—and students, whose choices we must trust. I very much hope that the Minister will accept that these powers need to be used in a way that reflects the needs of employers and the choices and preferences of individuals and that therefore the framework for consultation is entirely consistent with the underlying philosophy which she has been expounding.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) [V]
My Lords, I shall speak to the amendment that my noble friend Lord Willetts has just spoken to and the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, concerning T-levels. This gives us an opportunity to discuss T-levels, probably for the first time.
The Bill gives the Institute for Apprenticeships far too great a power in that it can decide, without any constraints, to abolish a qualification. In the past, this has lain with Ministers. Some Ministers have used it in a very absolute way and done it without consultation, while some have consulted. The power to cancel qualifications was probably seen best in Michael Gove when he abolished all technical qualifications in 2012, which determined the curriculum of all schools thereafter. It determined the basis of EBacc and Progress 8. The cancellation of qualifications is a very important political, as well as an educational, issue.
The Government are now promoting T-levels as the technical qualification at 18. I do not think they will ever abolish A-levels because no T-level that has been announced so far has been required to guarantee A-level maths as the level of maths at that level. There will be many engineering and manufacturing companies that will still require someone who is 18 to have passed A-level maths.
The practice under which T-levels has been established is that each subject has to be 20% practical and 80% academic. That is quite a small element for a technical qualification. At university technical colleges, students from 14 to 16 do 40% practical and 60% academic. When they become 16, they do 60% practical and 40% academic because by that time they will have mastered a series of tools and machinery—drilling machinery, turning machinery, lasers and all the very complicated equipment of engineering companies. They will have also learned to make things with their hands doing projects. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, asked whether the engineering T-level will give students that degree of experience at 18. It seems highly unlikely that it will not.
There is a digital T-level. We are trying to make it work in UTCs, and we are still experimenting with it. Once again, the general feeling is that it is very academically based with far too much concentration on coding and not digital skills, which are much wider than coding and relate to things such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and robotics. T-levels will succeed only if they are accepted by two groups: universities at one end and industry at the other.
For decades, industry has been accustomed to BTECs. Engineering and manufacturing companies up and down the country know exactly what they will get for a BTEC qualification or a BTEC extended diploma. In fact, the extended diploma is so important that it is one of the two subjects that industry requires to be provided to appoint an advanced or higher apprenticeship. Two qualifications are needed: A-level in maths, physics or chemistry and a BTEC extended diploma. This means that employers know that the students whom they employ will have had wide experience of using tools and machinery, making and designing things and problem solving. I have no idea whether that can be provided by the T-level engineering, but, if it is only 20% technical, I would have thought that the chances are slender.
My other point is that, technical qualifications have to be very wide, not narrow; they are not as narrow as academic qualifications. Over the years, industry has recognised their quality. The bedding in of T-levels will take some time. Not only universities but also businesses will have to see whether they are in fact providing the degree of technical expertise that they require. That will take some years to establish. Therefore, I hope that we have less talk of abolishing BTECs early on in order to give preference to T-levels before people really know what constitutes a successful T-level and what does not.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, have both withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking, who has done so much to keep the candle burning for technical and vocational education through many difficult times. This group on the role of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education is one of the most important and it has widened out in discussion.
In considering these amendments, I would like to understand more about the leadership of the institute and its level of independence from the department. I would like to know the extent of business representation, which has barely had a mention in that context, and understand any plans to change its governance or composition as the Government’s very welcome new emphasis on skills and post-16 education takes shape. How does it compare to the set-up in Germany, Switzerland or Austria? My concern is that it is much less employer-based and flexible than the arrangements that I have encountered there, but I would of course be happy to be proved wrong.
Is small business, the backbone of British innovation, properly involved? I agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on the importance of encouraging small business apprenticeships. Will there be a culture of simplicity and speed, or is this a very bureaucratic organisation, as, I am afraid, the impact assessment suggests? It would be helpful to have an answer on some or all of these points today or, if it is easier, in writing.
With his Amendment 55, the noble Lord, Lord Watson, is I believe right to explore the issue of charging for approval of qualifications, pointing out that the deterrent effect on providers might be a problem. That might lose us useful innovation and competition in the provision of qualifications. Should this not in fact be a public service, rather than a charged-for service, as I suspect it is in universities?
I also support the simple Amendments 51 and 53 of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, which probe plans to cancel some qualifications to avoid duplication. It is always a great pleasure to hear from him and to be reminded that he is a brilliant product of vocational education. Against a background of declining achievements in technical education, is the proposed moratorium wise? Could we hear which employers are likely to be affected? We have heard quite a bit about individual qualifications, but what kind of employers are likely to be affected? For example, I recall that at Tesco we were able to frame qualifications in a way that suited our work patterns and needs, and we helped many thousands of apprentices to get on and indeed rise up within the retail sector. Is that kind of arrangement now at risk? One of the reasons why I loved working there with my public sector background was that it was a great provider of opportunity for some of the most disadvantaged in the land.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I very much share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my noble friends Lord Willetts and Lord Baker in particular.
The last legislation that we had in this area was the Technical and Further Education Act. There was a belief then in the perfection of the new—almost a post-modern belief that destruction was the necessary precursor to success. The Government had just destroyed the sector skills councils and they have not yet managed to recreate the complex relations and understandings that led to their successes. In the run-up to the technical education Bill, the Bill team said they thought that this would probably result in the destruction of City and Guilds, as if that institution and all its reputation and quality had no value for the future in the face of their newly-created ideas. Now we seem to be destroying the local enterprise partnerships, which in many areas have established a pattern of understanding and reputation that has enabled projects to be undertaken that would have been very hard otherwise.
I do not share this disdain for the old; I think that it is best to work with it where we can. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, the reputation that qualifications have built up with employers is a thing of great value. It means that employers know what they are getting but it also means that, when a young person gets that qualification, it is something with strong currency. People know exactly what to expect. It has a high reputation and is a highly tradeable asset.
This is not yet true of T-levels. As noble Lords may know, I have run the Good Schools Guide for many years. I cannot yet imagine advising a parent to let their child do a T-level. It still seems a misconception that you should have to spend the whole of your sixth form years doing this one qualification to the exclusion of everything else. If one is aiming for parity of esteem then it ought to be through the route of being able to mix academic and other qualifications. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, that would allow the technical qualifications to be heavily technical to carry the sorts of skills an employer is looking for, rather than being overly general and not directed towards making someone instantly employable when they come out of school.
Doubtless we are all going to put a lot of effort into making things succeed. We are where we are; we have to make the best of where we have got to. But to give powers to IfATE and others to continue on a path of destruction without consultation and care, and in particular to give them the direction of this Bill without the permission of employers seems wrongheaded. I very much hope that, between those who have proposed amendments to this Bill, we will get something on Report that will help change the Bill’s direction.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is one of those occasions where I thought I knew what I was going to say before the debate started, but I have changed my mind—or, at least, my words—considerably having listened. When the Minister replies to this, I feel that the audience behind her might be the most worrying. I suggest that when the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Baker, are saying “beware of this”, any sensible Minister would listen. I know the noble Baroness falls into that category.
The Minister has to pay attention to what has been said. Everybody here said, “We are not sure what you are doing yet”. T-levels may sound neat, but we do not quite know what they are. Are they doing something else? Are they a replacement? I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who asked if they are replacing BTECs, which are an established way forward and allow flexibility, university entrance and other qualifications. That is the sort of thing we want, especially as we are giving more power to level 4 and 5 qualifications, which is overly due. Can we have some assurance that there is no government thinking that T-levels will be used to replace all this? They will simply not lead to these places; they cannot.
Other institutions with qualifications which are understood and known, such as City & Guilds—if I do not mention City & Guilds, I fear that my noble friend might well have a few words with me afterwards—will be saying, “Everybody knows what these are.” If you are going to bring in T-levels, do it slowly and make sure that you are adapting them to take over these functions. A one-off exam at this age cannot do what these do because they do wonderful and flexible things. A few employers cannot find their way around them, but others can. You could simplify them a little and not sweep them away to do something else.
I will not follow the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, into his very intellectual comments about the destruction of post-modernism because we have quite enough on our plates without thinking about the centre of Glasgow and its planning issues. But I hope that when the Minister answers she will say that we are not getting rid of all of these good and established things straightaway, just because we have a lovely new toy that sounded good when we first put it forward. T-levels, I am afraid, will have to earn their stripes. They may become something that replaces or works into the rest of it, but further education deals with a diverse range of subjects and paths. It will never be that straightforward. I look forward to the Minister’s response and do not envy her task.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, these amendments relate to the measures that support the implementation of the Government’s reforms to align the majority of technical qualifications to employer-led standards by 2030. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, we are aiming here for all qualifications for learners to be of high quality and connected to those employer-led standards.
I was disappointed that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, was not down to speak in this debate, because we had a very interesting discussion today where, as the noble Lord, Lord Flight, outlined, the key to what we are trying to do is to clarify the roles of a number of the institutions involved—IfATE, the OfS, which is relevant to the next amendment, Ofqual, the department and Ofsted.
We believe that the technical qualifications should cover the knowledge, skills and behaviours that are essential to an occupation. But the heart of the matter here, and one cause of the problems, is that although Ofqual accredits general qualifications such as A-levels and GCSEs, which are developed by awarding organisations, usually of the exam boards, in line with content set by government, the content of the majority of publicly funded technical qualifications is not specified or scrutinised centrally before the qualifications can be taught. That really is the nub of the problem here: Ofqual is not performing that function.
For parity of esteem, these reforms will bring the treatment of technical qualifications more in line with general qualifications. We have already done that process with T-levels, which were developed along with 250 employers to ensure that they met that standard. The content and employer-led standard then delivered, which could be by an FE college, is inspected and overseen by Ofsted. This process will raise the quality bar and deal with the issue of why we have, at level 3 and below, more than 12,000 qualifications, of which only about 800 are GCSE and A-level. As the Sainsbury review identified, we have had a proliferation of qualifications at that level, and many of them are currently created by the awarding organisations.
On the question of no one overseeing the content and it not being connected to an employer standard, we would not tolerate that in relation to GCSEs and A-levels, and someone needs to do that function. I have outlined the process for academic qualifications; the question then is who does that function. The institute currently manages the system of employer-led standards, and we believe it has the expertise to ensure that qualifications genuinely meet the skills of the economy, and the needs of learners and employers, and that it is right for the institute to lead this reform.
I explained some of these issues to noble Lords in the letter on 1 July. It is quite helpful that at the moment the position of chief regulator is being sorted out. Dr Jo Saxton, the Government’s preferred candidate, appeared last week in front of the Education Select Committee for the approval hearing, and was approved for the role. She was specifically asked about Ofqual and IfATE. She outlined that Ofqual will continue to play a key role with regulatory oversight of the standards of technical qualifications in live delivery, as it does currently. Ofqual and the institute are both needed as they contribute different and complementary sets of function and expertise. The two bodies will work together to assure, on Ofqual’s side, the consistency and reliability of assessment and awarding, as it does over the exam boards, and on the institute’s side the relevance to employers of the content of technical qualifications. When asked by the chair, she said:
“At its simplest, the curriculum side of it sits with IfATE. Once the curriculum has been agreed and approved to go forward, Ofqual’s job will be to make sure that any endpoint assessments and examinations continue to assess the curriculum that has been determined by IfATE and the employers and that receivers of the endpoint assessments and qualifications know that the awards they end up with accurately reflect what they know and can do. The relationship should work well. At its heart, it is essentially a separation between curriculum and regulation”.
I find that really helpful. That was the core purpose—she outlines why Ofqual was set up to be the regulator while the content of the curriculum was set out by the department.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for doing what she always does and giving comprehensive replies to almost all the points raised by noble Lords—not to anyone’s great satisfaction, I suspect, but, none the less, I think she has understood the points we have made without, perhaps, giving them as much credence as we would have liked.
This has been a really good debate, informed by contributions from many noble Lords who have considerable experience in the areas covered by these amendments. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, the Minister should be wary of not taking cognisance of the wise counsel of those on her own Benches who caution against the path that the Government seem intent on following on the powers to be given to IfATE and those being taken by the Secretary of State himself. The concerns of widely respected former Education Ministers, as well as established organisations in this sector, such as the Federation of Awarding Bodies and the Joint Council for Qualifications, should not be cast aside either.
I fear that the Minister’s description of the relationship between IfATE and Ofqual—between, as I think she said, curriculum and regulation—does not convince within the sector, notwithstanding the comments from Ofqual that she read out, because the Government insist that the Bill merely formalises the existing relationship between IfATE and Ofqual, but I and other noble Lords contest that. Ofqual currently has sole regulatory and approval responsibility for all vocational and technical qualifications apart from T-levels and apprenticeships, but the Bill proposes to broaden IfATE’s remit to encompass the approval of other—as yet unspecified—vocational technical qualifications that may or may not continue to be regulated by Ofqual. As I and other noble Lords have said, Ofqual is an independent regulator, and IfATE much less so, as a non-departmental public body.
To return to where I started, this has been the most lively debate we have had today on any group of amendments. I look forward—and not just because I genuinely enjoy the contributions of all noble Lords who have spoken today—to returning to many of these issues on Report. But, in the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
My Lords, we now come to the group consisting of Amendment 59. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate. The Committee should know that the noble Lords, Lord Adonis, Lord Young and Lord Liddle, have all withdrawn.
Amendment 59
“External Quality Assurance
(1) Within six months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must by regulations make provision for Ofqual to provide external quality assurance of all apprenticeship end-point assessments.(2) Regulations under this section must prohibit the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education from providing such external quality assurances.(3) Regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument containing them has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment places the external quality assurance (EQA) role that Ofqual exercises on a statutory footing.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I am moving this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson and, with the scratchers from this group, it looks as if it is just Front-Bench contributions.
If it is worth saying something twice, that is what I am going to do. The Bill currently gives the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, a non-departmental public body directly accountable to Ministers, the ultimate sign-off power for the approval and regulation of technical qualifications in future. So, despite the Minister’s extremely detailed and comprehensive reply to the previous group of amendments, I am going to press her further, because this amendment would ensure that, within six months of the passing of the Act, the Secretary of State must, by regulation, make provision for Ofqual to provide external quality assurance of all apprenticeship end-point assessments. Regulations under this section must prohibit the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education from providing such external quality assurances. Regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument containing them has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament. This amendment places on a statutory footing the external quality assurance role that Ofqual exercises.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, this amendment, so ably moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, raises an issue that engaged us at Second Reading—namely, the relationship between Ofqual and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education—and was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on a previous group. The matter of regulation is causing concern in the awarding sector, because it is not clear who has authority for end-point assessment for apprenticeships, and it is surely not desirable for there to be any confusion over which of these two bodies has most power, nor where the expertise lies.
The Minister tempted me to come in on the previous group and I nearly came in after her—but I knew I had the opportunity to speak on this group, so I thought I might as well save my thunder.
My noble friend Lord Addington referred to my connections with City & Guilds. I remember that it was the employers who set the curriculum, because they have always been involved with vocational workplace qualifications. Of course, there was heavy regulation of everything we did but, over many years, both BTEC and City & Guilds have developed a reputation for standards and quality. They are understood and trusted by employers, and BTEC has the added cachet that it is accepted by universities, in many cases, because of the academic rigour of its awards. Part of the work I did for many years at City & Guilds was talking to universities to see where they could accept City & Guilds vocational qualifications for their degree programmes. There were certainly some, in engineering and areas such as that, who were prepared to accept that people who had the right level of City & Guilds qualification had met the criteria for entry to a university programme. They are doing different things, by and large, so not many people went down that route, but it was possible. So this constant mention that employers are in control, as though it was something new, always concerns me, as it has been going on for over 100 years.
The noble Baroness also made a brief mention of copyright. I remember going through the Technical and Further Education Bill, which was cut short by the election, and having stunningly good amendments that were all of course dropped in the wash-up. The suggestion then was that the copyright of any of the awarding bodies would immediately be taken over by the Government. I objected strongly and said “You can’t do this. You can’t just assume the copyright of an organisation”. I got a phone call from the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, who asked me why I was objecting to his wonderful Bill. I said that it seemed to me outrageous that the Government could just take over the copyright of other organisations. He said, “Oh, I didn’t mean for that to happen at all”. I said, “Would you mind very much ringing up the department and telling them that?” I do not think he ever did, because nothing happened on it. But the issue of copyright is vital, because many awarding organisations earn income from the copyright of their qualifications.
Anyway, the noble Baroness very kindly sent us a chart of Ofqual and the institute, showing where they all were, and the complexity of it is absolutely mind-boggling—I am sure that a brighter soul than me would reckon that it is all very straightforward. The institute has responsibility for the curriculum, but Ofqual has end-point assessment. Ofqual provides advice to the institute with regard to the validity of technical education qualifications submitted for approval and the reliability of assessment, but the institute will be responsible for reviewing technical education qualifications to determine whether they continue to meet the criteria. This seems to be an incredibly complicated way of running these qualifications. However, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that it is obviously more appropriate that responsibility lies with Ofqual, which is an independent regulator, whereas IfATE is of course less independent, as a non-departmental public body.
We have no information about how IfATE’s approval fees would be regulated, how often the fees would be charged and how accurate the estimation costs are. Would the fees be per qualification, per sector, annually or for the lifetime of the qualification? That is not clear. There is a lot of obscurity around the setting up of these qualifications.
I find it very strange that, as has been mentioned, Ofqual has regulatory and approval responsibility for all vocational and technical qualifications apart from T-levels. I thought that T-levels were supposed to be the be-all and end-all of vocational qualifications, so why have they been split off into another body? I am afraid that I am a simple soul and I find this very complicated, so perhaps the Minister could enlighten us and clarify it all for us.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the external quality assurance of apprenticeships’ end-point assessment is a vital tool in ensuring that all apprentices receive a robust, high-quality assessment. In this amendment, we are now dealing with what is an Ofqual function. Ofqual does not set any curriculum for A-levels or GCSEs and neither would it, in our view, be the appropriate body to set any content for any level 3 or level 2 technical qualifications. It oversees the assessment process, seeing whether grading is fair and examinations are being run properly.
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education introduced an external quality assurance framework in 2019 in order to bring consistency to the sector. Following this, the institute put the matter of external quality assurance out to public consultation between February and May last year. This resulted in the institute taking the decision that the EQA for most apprenticeship end-point assessments would transfer to Ofqual to bring further consistency and quality to the assessment of apprenticeships. This is Ofqual’s bread and butter: overseeing examinations.
There are a small number of exceptional standards—chartered surveyors, for instance—where an existing statutory regulator oversees entry to a profession. The best way to quality assure these standards is currently being worked through with those regulators. I would like to make it clear that the Office for Students must continue to provide EQA for integrated degree apprenticeships—because Ofqual does not have statutory jurisdiction over degrees and therefore cannot provide EQA for apprenticeships at that level.
I will specifically address the noble Lord’s suggestion that regulations under this proposed amendment must prohibit the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education from providing EQA. While the institute is stepping back from direct delivery of EQA, it is an employer-led organisation, working to develop apprenticeships that meet the needs of employers. It is right that it should continue to have responsibility for securing the quality assurance of apprenticeship assessment in order to retain an independent, impartial voice in the sector and to maintain clear focus on supporting employers to develop the right apprenticeship skills for the labour market.
Regarding the suggested six-month timing for the transfer proposed in the amendment, the pace of the EQA transition currently taking place from the institute and other EQA providers to Ofqual has been carefully planned to ensure the development of a balanced end-point assessment offer to continue to develop a high-quality apprenticeships system. The first phase of the transition is well under way and is focused on transferring the majority of standards that currently have the institute as the named EQA provider. This phase will conclude at the end of the year. The second phase is to transition to Ofqual the remaining standards that are externally quality assured by other EQA providers, excluding the standards that will be regulated by OfS and statutory regulators, as aforementioned. This will conclude at the end of September 2022.
The sector is made up of a great number of end-point assessment organisations of different sizes and natures, some covering single standards, some covering around 50 standards. To attempt to transition all these organisations and standards over to Ofqual in a six-month period would cause severe disruption in the sector and would negatively affect the apprentices’ experience. The proposed amendment would also place a great burden on universities, as under this amendment they would be required to be regulated by the OfS and Ofqual, rather than just by the OfS, as is currently the case. I hope I have set out that, as the successful transition of EQA is already under way, it would have a detrimental effect if we were to remove the institute from the process entirely.
In relation to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, on fees, any future approach that is developed will be proportionate and take account of the operational costs of institute approval in the reformed landscape. This may differ across qualification categories and levels.
On this basis, and with the explanations and reassurances I have given, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel comfortable to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
I thank the Minister for the further explanation. I will analyse it in greater detail when I read it in Hansard tomorrow. The point from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, about regulation being a matter of concern is absolutely correct. Indeed, employers have always been involved in qualifications. I am afraid that I am unsure of the background of many of my fellow Peers, but I can assure noble Lords of the quality standards of BTEC qualifications because I taught them for many years, alongside A-level qualifications, which are another quality qualification—I actually wrote A-level examination papers, as I was a principal examiner for the AQA examination board.
Nevertheless, the principle remains that we need responsibility and accountability. That is what Ofqual would give. I am sure we will return to this issue on Report, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 62. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in debate. Before I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I inform the House that, again, the noble Lords, Lord Adonis, Lord Young and Lord Liddle, have all withdrawn.
Amendment 62
Lord Addington
“(2A) Regulations under subsection (1) must include provision to require ITT(FE) courses to include special educational needs awareness training relevant to the students of ITT(FE) courses within an institution.”
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, the intention of this amendment is straightforward. It is to probe and clarify. When you are training teachers in this field, can they be sure of the 20% to 25% of their students who have been identified as having special educational needs? When you get to further education, the proportion of those with special educational needs often rises. Those who have passed all their exams are not doing level 1 and level 2 qualifications, so in that situation you have a higher density.
Anybody who ever doubts this just needs to look at the number of people who we know have a neurological condition that is passed on. The figures make it clear. You are going to have a higher number of people. If we look at the number of people who have been identified as having these needs in the school system, many more will be unidentified. The maths just tells you that from the genetic stock and the numbers we have got.
What I am trying to get out of this is whether people will be trained to identify and train those people in front of them correctly. People will have different learning pathways. If someone cannot take notes from a blackboard very easily, can we do something else? Does the teacher know how to spot these people? Remember these are not the people who have been identified and have the plan; it is those who are on the edges.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, once again, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Addington on special educational needs. I am sorry that we seem to have seen off all the Back-Benchers. It gets a bit lonely when you have only the Front-Benchers in these debates, but I hope that some of them will come back for the next group, because we value the contributions from those who are not on the Front Bench.
We on these Benches have long campaigned to ensure that initial teacher training encompasses awareness of special educational needs, and it is important that those training for further education should be fully aware. As my noble friend said, in some respects, it is more important for FE, because those with special educational needs may well be drawn to the provision within FE, which tends to be more practical and less academic. So the amendment is a no-brainer.
We should ensure that all FE students, whatever their educational needs, have every opportunity to learn skills appropriate to their abilities. Some special educational needs are quite difficult to identify, so teachers need to be trained to spot them.
My noble friend is particularly expert in dyslexia, and I remember, years and years ago, when I was at school, a girl at school was always labelled as thick. She went on to be a very successful businesswoman, having been diagnosed late in life with dyslexia, but her school days were pretty miserable, because she could not do the things that everybody else could and the teachers thought she was just not trying. We had a pretty untrained set of teachers, obviously.
This is a very important amendment, and I hope that the Minister will see that it deserves serious consideration.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to signify our support for Amendment 62 and commend the passion with which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, spoke, as he unfailingly does on matters relating to those with special educational needs.
The Government must surely accept this amendment because page 30 in the Bill’s policy summary notes, under the heading, “What is the Government doing to support the teaching of SEND in FE?”, states:
“The government is also funding an in-service training grants programme to support those training in-service to teach maths, English and SEND. In Academic Year 20/21, 24% of bursaries and 73% of grants were awarded were for teaching SEND.”
Therefore, to add the requirement that SEND awareness training is included is an entirely logical follow-on to that. However, I await with interest the ingenious, perhaps even tortuous, argument that the Minister’s officials have crafted for her to tell us that it is not really necessary. That really would be unfortunate. I say, in a relatively gentle way, that the Government need to understand that accepting that something they have drafted could possibly be improved or even complemented is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of strength.
My main concern regarding Clause 16 is its intention. It seems to fit the pattern of the excessively hands-on and controlling position that the Government are adopting in many aspects of education. It is already happening with regard to initial training for schoolteachers. The policy summary notes address this question, again on page 30, under the heading, “How do these proposed changes align with the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) market review for school teachers?” It answers its own question:
“The government is not seeking to replicate the reforms taking place in the schools ITT system ... However, officials within the Department for Education are working together to ensure a coherent relationship between our reforms in the two sectors”—
hence my fears and those of many others in the teaching profession at school and college level.
The Government may protest that there is no connection between the two but, as politicians, we naturally do not believe in coincidence. Perhaps the Minister can explain just what is meant by
“a coherent relationship between our reforms in the two sectors”
because there is uproar in the teaching profession and among those who provide teacher education at the Government’s highly controversial and potentially damaging proposals for the review of initial schoolteacher training which are currently out for consultation.
On the FE ITT system, the policy summary notes say:
“The government believes that the FE ITT system could be much better than it is”.
Can the Minister enlighten noble Lords about the evidence for that? There is no clamour in the sector for such a change. I have to say that, again, that Clause 16 smacks of an increasingly voracious government appetite for centralisation and control, with Great Smith Street the control centre. If the Minister believes she can gainsay that impression, I am sure I would not be alone among noble Lords in being very interested to hear it.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for this amendment. It highlights the importance of equipping teachers to identify and support learners with special educational needs. Further education teachers must be trained to identify and support the needs of all learners, enabling them to overcome barriers to their learning and allowing them to meet their full potential.
I concur with the noble Lord’s intention and I understand that he intends it as a probing amendment. He may be unsurprised to hear that I do not believe it is necessary to specify such a requirement in the Bill. Other mechanisms for achieving the same aim are more appropriate, and steps are already being taken.
Our reforms to teacher training are founded on a new occupational standard for FE teaching, which will specify the knowledge, skills and behaviours expected of FE teachers. This standard is being developed by a group of employers—colleges and other providers, so organisations which employ teachers—from across the sector, who bring a wealth of experience and expertise and are well placed to determine the right content for teacher training that will meet the needs of all their learners. We fully expect that the new standard will be explicit in its requirement for further education teachers to meet the needs of all learners, including those with a wide variety of special needs as well as learners from diverse backgrounds. We anticipate that the standard will be in place in time for the next academic year. It will form the basis of a new FE teaching apprenticeship, and we will support the reform of FE teaching qualifications so that they are also based on the standard. If, in future, the content of FE teacher training was considered of insufficient quality to meet the needs of all learners, this clause would give the Secretary of State the power to take appropriate steps.
To address the point I think I have understood from the noble Lord, Lord Watson: the reason we do not believe this amendment to be necessary is that we do not intend to use the powers in this Bill to take greater control or gain more centralisation of FE teacher training. We believe that the sector is doing the work needed to set out that standard and that steps will be taken within it to make the right provision for the training with regards to special educational needs. To allay his fears in relation to initial teacher training reforms for schools, I undertake to write to the noble Lord to further clarify that point.
I hope that with those brief remarks the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is assured that we are already taking steps to ensure that teaching in the FE sector meets the needs of all learners, including those with a wide range of special educational needs. On that basis, I hope he will be content to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is an odd one. Actually, I do not think that response really hit it, because there is supposed to be a report. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, pointed out that it is supposed to be out now. I cannot quite match the withering sarcasm he put into it: “Oh, autumn then, maybe.”
The entire education system is squaring up to the fact that special educational needs is not working in our schools at the moment. There is a series of cock-ups made by other bits of legislation, for which I have some of the blame for not spotting them coming down the line. Unless you are going to be specific about having somebody in there who can spot, transfer and change the way they are dealing with at least some of the most commonly occurring conditions, you are guaranteeing a degree of failure and underachievement. We might have a conversation about how this works, and there might be something behind this that I need to hear, but what I have heard today convinces me that this needs some more time.
I would have intervened on the noble Baroness if the process was going through, but I suspect we are going to have a more robust Report stage than normal because of this. It is not the noble Baroness’s fault, unless she wrote the brief herself. I think we have opened up something here. Teacher training is the best way of dealing with this so that you can deal with those who have moderate difficulties and certain patterns of behaviour. Small changes and a bit of reassurance—telling them they are not thick—are the best way to get a reaction out of many of the groups that I deal with. Saying “Hey, I think you’re dyslexic or dyspraxic or have ADHD; here are a few quiet, basic strategies; by the way, you’re not an idiot” dramatically improves the outcomes of that group, which is about 20% of the whole group we are dealing with. Dealing with that type of action enables them to start that process to take them on to somebody else, and that is so important.
The transition I am looking at is away from: “I have somebody in my classroom who is a pain, can’t concentrate and won’t spell. Oh, God, can we get rid of him?” And it is towards: “Oh, I think he needs a bit of help and support.” It is not about the dramatic ones who are easy to spot, who are going to get the plan. It is that level of expertise that we need.
Can we please engage so that we actually know what is coming? At the moment, there is a review going on. There should be more there. I hope that the next time we raise this, the noble Baroness, if she is still with us—I should not have opened that one up —or whoever answers this, provides better answers. Good intentions have always been there. The problem remains.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I will briefly respond to the noble Lord, because I do not think I will get the opportunity to take this conversation forward with him ahead of Report, although I am sure that others will be happy to continue that conversation.
The point of differentiation here is specifically about the approach to regulating teacher training in FE colleges versus the regulation of teacher training in schools. The latter is subject to a regulatory regime that allows the Secretary of State to set conditions for its content and delivery, but we do not have that equivalent provision for FE teacher training as the content is determined by the sector itself, working with organisations. Although this clause as drafted would enable the Secretary of State to prescribe course content if desired, with a view to improving the quality of FE initial teacher training courses, the initial intention is for the sector to do that work itself. The points that the noble Lord makes about how important it is that SEND is properly accounted for in this and the widest understanding—and not just those with education, health and care plans but the broadest spectrum, and those who may not have been identified before—are an integral part of that. With regard to specifying that as part of the reforms to the initial teacher training, we would hope not to use the powers of the Secretary of State to intervene in this area at the moment and would rather do it through collaboration with the sector.
I thought it might be useful to say just one or two words. That is not the end of the conversation, but someone else will take it forward with the noble Lord.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank the Minister for bending the rules quite positively there. There will be a continuation of this discussion but I thank her for that and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 63. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate. I inform the Committee that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has withdrawn.
Clause 17: Office for Students: power to assess the quality of higher education by reference to student outcomes
Amendment 63
Lord Lucas
“and,
(b) by reference to— (i) the degree to which the mental health and wellbeing of persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution are sustained and improved while they are attending the institution;(ii) the quality improvement and response to mental health crises among persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution;(iii) the pastoral and academic care of students attending the institution.(5A) In this section “quality improvement” has the same meaning as in the report by The King’s Fund, Quality improvement in mental health, published in 2017.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that higher education institutions should be evaluated on the basis of their care for students as well as purely academic measures.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I welcome Clause 17. There has long been a lack of satisfactory information available to prospective students on the outcomes of a degree. What happens afterwards, other than a degree, first, second or even third class, as in my case, awarded on obscure criteria—although no doubt correct in my case—but with no indication to a prospective student of what comes afterwards? How do students who have been through the degree course look back on their time at university? Are they appreciative of what was done for them? Have they suggestions about what could have been done better? What sort of careers have they secured?
This can be very different in further education, where a good FE college, running a course in, say, golf course management, will have an immense network of alumni with whom it will work to improve the course and with whom it will be in correspondence about the prospects for their current students. It will be able to portray to someone who intends to take on the cost of a course exactly what the outcome will be. For such a substantial personal investment by students, universities owe prospective students a much better set of information about what their prospects are.
My interest in this clause, though, is in the opportunity to broaden it to include mental health and well-being because, in my experience, this is an area that universities have been much less good at than they ought to be. I agree that this has, to a certain extent, come up on them. It is the result of increased parental interest in university education—that is, in parents wanting to make sure that they are launching their children on a good course. I have been a champion of that for a long time. I do not think that it sits easily with universities, which have historically taken refuge in the mantra that their students are adults and therefore do not need support from home, and communication with home is inappropriate.
I sense that that is changing but, for it to change to good effect, it needs some kind of support from the Government. Universities need to know that they are being watched—that information will reach prospective students as to how good their mental health and well-being services are and how well they look after their students. This will form part of a student’s decision on which course to take. If we do not have that kind of visibility, we will see a continuation of the inaction that has been my experience of universities’ response to this over the past 10 years or so.
I am sure that we all have stories about a mental health crisis hitting a friend’s child at university, perhaps even to the point of suicide. Mine, fortunately, has a happy ending. The son of a friend of mine went to a Russell group university, found that the course they were on did not really have its own social life, went back to university accommodation, which likewise had no social life, and fell into a cycle of despair. Bar a casual acquaintance knowing someone who knew his mother and getting a message back, that might have been the end of it. Fortunately, he had a very active mother who whisked him out of university and helped him to find a course that was much better socially adapted to his needs. He flourishes still.
There are many, however, for whom the outcome has been much less good. Universities have not traditionally seen themselves as having a duty of care in looking after their students. I remember—it must be about 10 years ago—trying to tell universities that they should pay more attention to teacher recommendations, that they could use some kind of online reputation system to score the teacher recommendations in the light of their experience of the student when they arrived at university, and that this would enable them to reach through the surface of qualifications to look at the underlying person and maybe start to use that to address the inequalities of access that were very apparent then.
The answer I got from universities was, “Can’t do that. We never get to know our students well enough to know whether that teacher recommendation is accurate or not”. I contrast that with my experience of the better degree apprenticeships and the way in which a company looks after children of the same age whom it has recruited into much the same circumstances. It can be extraordinarily good. I single out JCB in that respect: the way they look after young people who arrive in the wilds where the JCB factory is set and look after them through their degree is absolutely exemplary. JCB is, however, by no means alone. It has set a standard, in the minds of parents and people like me who advise parents, for what we now expect of universities, and I would really like the Government to take a hand in moving the needle.
I am not in any way committed to the particular formula in this amendment. It is a formula that is necessarily stated by its circumstances; it has to fit in with the structure of this Bill. I am not at all convinced that having a scored measure—an outcome measure—at the end of the day for mental health and well-being is the right way to go, but we have to get to a point where universities know that they are being observed and where accurate information finds its way to prospective students.
In the Good Schools Guide, if a school is a place that is a difficult environment for the less robust, we say that. It is fine. You can happily say that you have to be pretty rumbustious to get on in this school, and students and parents know what you mean. It will absolutely suit some people. Others will be put off by it and will find a place that is better suited to them. There is no reason why all universities should be the same, but it is absolutely obvious to me that prospective students and their parents should be given the information needed to make good judgments as to the environment at the university and whether their child will flourish there.
I also hope that, by doing that, we will raise the standard of universities generally. This is a move that Universities UK talks very strongly in support of, and some individual vice-chancellors are clearly ahead of the crowd in this. We ought to be out there supporting them, helping this change to happen and helping universities generally to up their standards. At the end of the day, these are children, and it is a big transition between home and local school to university in a strange city a long way away with completely different customs. We want them to be cared for; we want them to be looked after; we want to be a part of that, where we have a relationship with our children that will support that. We want the university to be strong and active in looking after them. If we cannot do that through this amendment, I hope that the Government will confirm that they have plans in this direction. I beg to move.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
My Lords, I wish to speak to my Amendment 69 very much in the spirit of the powerful speech that we just heard from my noble friend Lord Lucas. We definitely need more information about student outcomes. One way in which that information can be presented is the absolute information on the absolute outcomes. I am sure that the Minister will be eloquent on that. There is nothing in my amendment that tries to suppress any of that sort of information—far from it. However, the way in which the legislation is currently drafted means that it goes out of its way to exclude a different sort of equally valuable and relevant information: how our higher education institution is doing relative to the types of students that it has. That is a measure of distance travelled; it is a measure of how a university is performing, given the students that it recruits.
We have heard several important interventions in the course of our debate about students with special educational needs. A university that recruits an unusually high proportion of students with special educational needs, within the approach set out by Ministers, will not be able to signal that it does that; it may just appear to be a less well-performing institution. To offer a second example, which I know is a source of deep frustration and shame to us all, we should look at the performance of students from ethnic minority backgrounds. For any given level of academic qualification, a graduate from an ethnic minority background may do less well in the labour market than a graduate of similar academic achievement but not from a minority ethnic background. That is shocking; it is also a description of the British labour market as it is today. This would mean that, on the approach set out by Ministers, a university that had a disproportionately high number of graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds would do less well on labour market outcomes without the university being able to display its commitment and what it was doing.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is an interesting group of amendments, because I think everybody would agree that universities as institutions have a duty of care to their students. They are adults, but most of them are only just adults. I must declare an interest here; I have an 18 year-old daughter who is expecting to go to university—and not only go to university, but a university in another country: Wales in this case, but there we are.
Lord Addington (LD)
At least I have got that confirmed; I thank the noble Baroness for that aside.
The point here is about “Students like us, how do they do and what do they go through?” I have heard it from many people, and indeed from members of my own family. Two of my nephews are of mixed race and are wondering “Where do we go where people like us are?” We have to get this information out, because it is a perfectly normal thing. You are leaving the support structure of home and your parents, but there is some way of intervening.
The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, referred to special educational needs. We have a universal package there called the disabled students’ allowance. We have a structure within universities that means you actually have to give things. Members of the Front Bench have sparred with me on this—I think “sparred” is quite accurate—in the past. There is a structure of support and a standard, and you can take action if that standard is not fulfilled. That is difficult, but it is there. You have a support structure going through.
So having more information about what happens here and what goes on will not hurt. It is not that big an ask. People are posting about entrance requirements and groups are coming across—it is happening at the moment. I suggest that having more information gives a better guide to what can come out of the experience and what other people are experiencing on their way through. I think this information is being gathered in many places anyway, usually for internal commercial reasons by the institutions. It would not hurt to have it in there.
I do not know whether the Government are in the mood for accepting amendments at the moment. I always remember when it happened to me many years ago; it stunned me into silence for the rest of the evening. It may be a bit late in this day for doing that, but I just throw that out. It would be something that would be quite good to have. I would hope that the Government at least give us some idea that they are encouraging, if not requiring, people to do it.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, this is a particularly important group of amendments and the debate on it has been very good. I support all the amendments in this group. They have been very well spoken to by the people who put them down. I really want to add support and try not to go over the same points again.
They fall, basically, into two groups: the first on mental health and well-being and the second on how we measure outcomes. I will briefly comment on both. I very much support the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the way in which he put them forward. I was going to say that I was not sure the amendment was the right way to solve the problem, but he said it beforehand, so I see the amendment as very much drawing the issue to the attention of the Government and wanting a response.
My experience really came from when I was chair of council at one of the London colleges. I had the honour of giving out degree awards at the ceremonies twice a year. There is nothing as heartbreaking as giving out a degree posthumously to the parents of a student who has passed away through suicide. It is absolutely heartbreaking, and it happened more than once. That was just my experience at a relatively small college, and it will be replicated throughout universities.
We think of those children as adults, and they are: they are legally adults and they do adult things. But to begin with they are only a year out of school. By the time they graduate, they are only three years out of school, and children—young people, adults—develop at different rates. Somehow, we put a whole chasm between the pastoral support they get by the end of school, and the lack of pastoral support they get at the start of university. Somehow, we have to build a bridge between the two, particularly with academic high-flyers. There is often an emotional inability to cope with failure. One university lecturer said to me once that they had had an overseas student who committed suicide. They had to greet her parents from China and go through what had happened. They did not know, but their view was that it was the first time the child—the young woman—had ever found it difficult to come top of the class. She has come top of the class right the way through everything; she gets to a Russell group university and she does not come top of the class. She did not have the resilience to know how to deal with that.
We could spend a week discussing this, but the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, got this absolutely right. Universities hitherto have been slow to see this as an issue that they have a role to play in addressing. I should give credit to the Government, because I think I am right that they did something recently that means universities can tell parents if they feel their child is at risk. Certainly, in my day, when I was chair of council, legally a university could not phone up the parents without the young person’s permission, to say they were at risk.
The only way in which I would disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is that I am not sure they need to be “watched”—I think that was the phrase he used. Universities need to be worked with to make them realise that this is a core part of their job. Once they can see that, they will extend their considerable prowess and commitment and care for their students into pastoral health, mental health and well-being, as much as they offer academic support. But they are at the beginning of that journey and anything the Minister can offer in this Bill, to give them the powers or the freedom, or just the direction, to do this, I certainly think would be a step worth taking.
I also want to say a little bit about the other amendments to which the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, spoke. This is also exceptionally important, because I absolutely agree with the premise that universities ought to be measured by student outcomes. It would be silly not to take into account student outcomes. We take them into account in schools. Why we would stop doing it when we get to universities, I am not quite sure.
I do not think we have a great record so far in deciding what outcomes universities should be measured by. I will not go into it, but I am a bit critical of some of the teaching excellence framework, the TEF criteria for success. One measure is whether their students are in employment 12 months after they finish their degree. For some subjects, they are not likely to be in employment in a degree-level subject. People in the creative arts very often make do for a year while they are finding their feet. They very often work in a pub or a restaurant while they are doing the creative work. Measure them in five years’ time and they will be flying, and that is a credit to their university, but it will not get the credit if they are not in a degree-level job after 12 months.
One measurement that is not used by the teaching excellence framework but is regularly used by the newspapers that publish the tables is the A-level mark needed to get into a university. If universities want to take risks and bring on young people who got Ds and Es at A-level and say, “We believe in them and want to give them a chance; they come from an area of disadvantage”, they get marked down in the league table. Why on earth would they do that? I thought that was what we wanted to do.
I do not think there is a very good record of getting the outcome measurement right. Universities are partly at fault because they did not want this and did not engage in the discussion. I think they left others to decide what the measurement outcome should be and are paying the price.
I have a couple of specific points. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts—why would we not want this extra information? Why would we not want to know what universities have achieved, in terms of outcomes, with specific groups of students? It adds to what we know about universities and it means that when we are developing policy, we can do so with more knowledge about how existing policy affects different groups of students and different institutions than we would have without this information. I cannot see one good reason for not requiring that information at this level should be collected. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Clause 17(7) says:
“The OfS is not required”
to collect this information. I think it should be required, but will the Minister confirm that neither is it banned and that it could collect it if it wanted to? The noble Baroness is nodding, so I take it that it is allowed to collect it. That leads us to the question of whether it should be up to the Office for Students to decide whether this information is collected. It should not be up to the OfS, because it is useful to other people as well. I want to know it, as somebody who is involved in education and interested in policy-making. The Government should want to know it; the universities should want to know it; employers should want to know it. Why should the Office for Students not collect it so that others can have that information? Whether the OfS or the Government do anything with it is a different discussion, but not to collect it means that no one else can do anything with it.
My last point is that the world of schools is far more advanced in collecting data about pupil progress: it is 20 or 30 years more advanced. It has been through a lot of pain and made a lot of mistakes, but it is in a better state now than the universities. I just hope that the Office for Students learns lessons from those decades of trying to get the collection of data improved in schools.
One thing that ties into the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, is that, to begin with and for many years, Ofsted and the examiners did not discuss with schools what the outcome measurements would be. All it created was a very poor relationship that has not done well for children, teachers or schools. We are still trying to get over it, so I very much support the amendments proposing that the Office for Students, in developing these measures, should discuss them with universities and all higher education providers. We are setting the framework now for the next stage of using measurements of outcome for university; it is really important that we get it right and I very much hope that the Government’s response to these amendments will give us greater clarity and perhaps highlight areas where further attention is needed.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group and shall talk about Amendments 63 and 66 in particular. For far too long, pastoral care in these institutions has been inconsistent, sometimes even unprofessional and neglectful, to the great detriment of students’ achievements and well-being. Like other speakers, I personally know of suicides and cases of severe depression among students that I think could have been prevented, and there are plenty more in the statistics. It is only right that the institutions should be evaluated on these grounds.
On Amendment 66, because discrimination is often associated with mental health vulnerability, there are many such cases among those in the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities who have struggled through obstacles to gain entry into higher and further education. It is important to publish different student characteristics to get a proper handle on the data, as this amendment proposes.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I begin by making a general comment in expressing concern about the way in which this Government and others have sought to judge and rank higher education institutions and have directed the Office for Students to do so. I associate myself with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, about universities being penalised for welcoming students who have succeeded in their school and college studies despite the socioeconomic odds.
I want to add a more general concern about the ranking of institutions by the level of pay or classification of jobs that graduates attain. Education should be for life, not just for jobs. We know that there is often an inverse relationship between the levels of pay in a role and the contribution that it makes to society. An anthropology graduate who goes into community organising, say, might never earn much at all but is making a huge contribution to our society in a highly fulfilling role.
However, it is encouraging to see that the amendments all seek in some way to make judgments fairer, so they are to be welcomed. I shall go through them in turn. Speakers have already concentrated quite a lot on Amendment 63 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and backed by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal. In this context, it is worth pointing to an important report from the British Psychological Society in 2019 entitled Mental Health and Wellbeing in Higher and Further Education. I should perhaps preface what I am about to say by saying that this contains some disturbing material.
At least 95 university students took their own lives in 2016-17—and while the rate of suicide is lower than in the general population, it is a serious concern for the sector—and one-third of students experience a serious psychological issue that requires professional help. Some 94% of higher education providers reported an increase in demand for counselling services. And of course that was in 2019, while all the evidence and anecdotes that we have suggest that the situation is likely to be significantly worse now. The professional report says that all higher and further education institutions should make mental health and well-being a strategic priority. I think it particularly focuses on the need to train all staff and on how to assist them in signposting to the right support. There is also an important note in the report about UCAS needing to update the application process to reduce stigma, removing the need for applicants to disclose mental health conditions as a disability.
Let us think about the practicalities of this. The report cites Student Minds research that found that many academics feel ill equipped to assist students when they encounter difficulties or are approached by them. This is a pretty obvious problem when you think about it: a PhD or postgraduate studies in physics or medieval history do not necessarily equip you to deal with situations that you might face. This has a substantive negative impact on the well-being of academics as well.
I turn to the series of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, although I am slightly handicapped by the fact that they have not really been properly introduced. I am not going to cover them in great detail, except to note that Amendment 65, which calls for consultation with providers over the way in which these assessments are made, is essential. The assessment needs to be embedded in real-world experience and practical possibilities of what is deliverable.
I come to Amendment 66, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, to which I have attached my name and for which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, expressed support. It seeks to ensure that the OfS reflects in its outputs
“differences in student characteristics, different institutions or types of institution, different subjects or courses, or any other such factor.”
I am drawing here on my experience as a school governor. Of course, in schools, we have increasingly sought to look at what value has been added, acknowledging that students start from many different starting points. That is true at all levels of our school system, but it is also very much true of our higher education sector. A university that caters particularly well to students who perhaps have not had a great experience at school or college deserves to have its successes acknowledged fairly in the assessment.
Amendment 68, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, makes the related point that it must
“ensure that the … measure of student outcomes does not jeopardize widening participation for students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.”
Finally, I will mention Amendment 70, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, which says that
“The OfS must work together with the devolved authorities”.
I somewhat feel that I should have a hymn-book, because I speak on this in practically every Bill that we discuss, but it is clearly in the interests of prospective students and employers that these assessments are conducted fairly.
The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]
My Lords, I particularly want to support Amendment 63, but also the others in the group. Just last month, in June 2021, the DfE itself published a report, Student Mental Health and Wellbeing, based on research done before the pandemic. It points out that 96% of institutions ask their students about their mental health but only 41% ask them about their general well-being. It also notes that only 52% of universities would say that they have a “dedicated strategy” for the mental health and well-being of their students. So the DfE’s own report, from last month, highlights that there is plenty of work to be done on universities having proper, dedicated strategies around mental health and well-being—particularly on the well-being side.
We know that Covid has highlighted the issues further, particularly around loneliness. Just today, the head of the OfS, Nicola Dandridge, spoke of her concern that more than half of the student population feels that their mental well-being has not been supported enough this year. I have not had time to explore her comments more fully, but it is notable that she made them today, when we are having this debate.
Well-being has to be covered by a whole range of services, and I note here the value—which you certainly cannot put into legislation—of universities having chaplaincy teams. During the pandemic, the chaplaincy team at Durham University was given an award for being the most important group of people in the university over the last few months. In the University of Sunderland, the vice-chancellor decided that the chaplaincy team should be awarded extra money so that it could do further work in the future, on the basis of how significant its input had been to student well-being during this time. So when we look at mental health and well-being, we need to look at counselling services and all sorts of other support, but it should include the work and role of chaplaincies.
I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, has raised a really important point in suggesting that this is put in the Bill. The overall well-being of students really matters as much as their academic outcomes. This needs to be known, seen and observed. I also support the amendments, and particularly their probing nature, of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the intent of those of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, to look at other social outcomes. They are significant and should be in the Bill.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 63 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who is rapidly becoming my noble friend at this rate. I support all the others in this group, which are concerned with the mental health of students, well-being, student outcomes and widening participation.
Because of this Committee stage, I was sorry to miss a meeting this afternoon on lifelong learning, which was sponsored by Graeme Atherton, a brilliant champion of widening participation. He has done more than most to promote access to higher education, through such wonderful programmes as Aimhigher, which introduced so many non-typical students to university, with some inspirational results, before having its funding withdrawn—such is life.
The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, bear witness to their tireless support for disadvantaged students and those suffering from poverty of family, opportunity or aspiration. Of course, the pandemic has caused additional stress for our students, who have been very badly affected in many cases by being locked up and not being able to have classes or socialise in the way that they might have expected.
I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that universities should not be penalised if they accept young people with lower school exam results if they come from disadvantaged backgrounds, where they have actually achieved a great deal just to get the results they have. I think we should bear that in mind. Of course we have to ensure the quality of our great institutions, but, at the same time, we have to make sure that our students are properly cared for and have all the opportunities that they can.
I think this is a very worthwhile set of amendments, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, in responding to this excellent debate I will also introduce my Amendments 65, 66, 67, 68 and 70—albeit, I apologise, too late for the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, whom I thank for her support. Together, my amendments are designed to draw out from the Government the approach that is to be taken regarding regulating higher education providers, especially on quality and standards.
To start, despite lots of research, I still do not know whether this Bill will change the powers that the Office for Students has at the moment. We are told that this is a technical clause required
“To put beyond doubt the Office for Students’ ability to regulate in relation to minimum requirements for quality.”
But can the Minister tell us: is this Bill needed to ensure that the OfS can keep doing what it does now without risk of legal challenge? Or is it to enable it to do something different, for which it needs extra powers, and if so, what?
The OfS currently applies a series of conditions, in categories A to E, for an institution to be registered. The B conditions focus on quality and standards, and I am most interested in B3, which says that
“The provider must deliver successful outcomes for all of its students”,
measured against minimum standards for student continuation, completion and graduate careers. My Amendment 65 says that the OfS must consult the HE sector before determining those minimum standards. We had a general OfS consultation, which closed in January, but no response has yet been issued. Another is due any day now on most of the B criteria, but the key one—these B3 metrics—will not be consulted on until much later in the year. Given the concerns we have heard about the direction of travel, and since that consultation will take place after this Bill becomes law, it is really important that it is full and meaningful. It needs to be clear on what metrics are proposed, how they will be measured, where the data will come from and how they will be applied. It should provide the evidence for any metric being advanced as a proxy for quality, assess the impact of any proposed move away from benchmarking, and be transparent about how the baselines will be set. Are they objective standards which, in theory, all institutions could meet, or are they designed to cull the lowest performers, irrespective of absolute scores? Can the Minister give us some assurances on this? Can she tell the House how Parliament can express a view on these hugely important decisions which will be taken by the OfS?
Amendment 66 is designed to flush out the Government's intentions on contextualisation. I understand that Ministers do not want different outcome standards for different groups—this is a probing amendment; I am not proposing a new scheme—but there are clearly differences in student outcomes between groups which reflect prior experience, advantage or the lack of it, or their current circumstances, rather than academic ability. I shall not repeat the excellent points made by my noble friend Lady Morris and the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, on the whole issue of contextualising data, but I look forward to hearing the Minister explain why we are legislating to enable the OfS to refuse to collect that data.
Amendment 68 would ensure that the OfS’s student outcome measures do not jeopardise the goal of widening participation for students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups—a matter of concern to many in higher education. MillionPlus points out that
“if you remove the ability to contextualise, you also remove the ability to assess”
value-added—or distanced travelled, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said. MillionPlus also points out that setting minimum thresholds on student outcomes while removing any need for benchmarking
“sits incongruously in a Bill designed to diversify access to higher education and boost mature and part-time study.”
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, Section 23 of the Higher Education Research Act 2017—HERA—which relates to the assessment of the quality of higher education provided by registered providers, currently places no restrictions or stipulations on how the OfS might make an assessment of quality or standards. Clause 17 provides some much-needed clarity, or so we hope. It puts beyond doubt the ability of the OfS to determine minimum expected levels of student outcomes. These levels would be taken into account alongside many other factors, such as the context in which a provider operates, when the OfS makes its overall and well-rounded assessment of quality.
Amendments 63 and 64, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas, seek to add provision for the mental health and well-being of students to the outcomes measures that higher education institutions are evaluated against, in addition to academic and post-study progression measures, and to allow for more than one measure that institutions are expected to meet. I reassure my noble friend and other noble Lords that student mental health is something that this Government and the OfS take extremely seriously. The testimony that we have heard from many noble Lords in this debate has shown exactly why this issue is so important.
We continue to work closely with the higher education sector to promote effective practice. Higher education providers are autonomous bodies, independent of government, and have a responsibility to support their students, including those with mental health conditions or mental health needs. They are experts in their student population and best placed to identify the needs of their student body. The Government therefore strongly support Universities UK’s step-change programme, which focuses on the need for a whole-institution approach and in doing so supports the spread of good practice and the agreement of guidelines for co-commissioning and the provision of mental health and well-being services. In addition, the Government actively back the sector-led university mental health charter which aims to drive up standards in promoting student and staff mental health and well-being and invites universities to meet high standards of practice, including in areas such as leadership, early intervention and data collection.
While it is for higher education providers to determine what welfare and counselling services they need to provide to their students to offer that support, the OfS provides funding, support and guidance to providers to support students’ mental health. Noble Lords are right to say that sufficient attention has not been paid to this issue in the past and that, while steps are being taken to put this right and move in the right direction, there is more to do. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, noted, that may not be best addressed through more legislation or regulation. However, I reassure noble Lords that, if the OfS wished to impose a condition of registration that related directly to mental health, the exiting legislation under HERA is flexible enough for it to do so.
The Government and the OfS do not see that as the right route at this stage. Rather, the aim of Clause 17 is to put beyond doubt the ability of the OfS to set minimum expectations of quality and performance by reference to objectively measurable outcomes. My noble friend Lord Lucas acknowledged that there may be some difficulty in defining those outcomes on something such as mental health provision. I confirm to my noble friend that the existing legislation can be read so as to allow institutions to be subject to more than one measure, so Amendment 64 is not required.
I turn to Amendments 65 to 68 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. I first reassure the noble Baroness in relation to Amendment 65 that not only does the OfS already have a statutory duty to consult before determining or revising its regulatory framework in relation to outcomes, it has already undergone one round of consultation, as she has already noted, and a further consultation on specific outcome levels is planned for late autumn.
With regard to Amendment 66, leaving out “not”, as the amendment does, completely reverses the purpose of this clause. Driving up quality and standards in higher education is a priority for this Government and a fundamental part of the levelling-up agenda. This amendment would mean that students would be expected to accept that they might achieve different outcomes—and in some cases, lower ones—depending on their background. That cannot be right. That is why we included the provision in this clause to make it clear that there is no mandate on the OfS to benchmark the minimum levels of standards it sets based on factors such as particular student characteristics. Benchmarking or setting minimum levels by reference to the outcomes the OfS would expect from students with certain characteristics or certain types of providers risks entrenching disadvantage in the system.
I hope I can clarify one point and reassure a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Sherlock and Lady Morris. Subsection (7) means that the OfS is not obliged to set minimum expected levels of outcome based on these factors. It does not prevent the OfS collecting data or considering the type of students a provider has. Indeed, the OfS will look at this when reaching a rounded judgment of quality.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked whether this is about clarifying the existing approach or giving new powers or a new approach. The OfS is already regulating based on absolute student outcomes data. In practice, the amendment will not affect the OfS’s current approach but will put beyond doubt its ability to continue to operate in this way. I will return to this point later in relation to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Willetts.
Amendment 67 seeks to probe the OfS’s powers of intervention at subject level. The current drafting in subsection (7) is intended to make it clear that the OfS is not required to determine and publish different minimum levels to reflect differences, including differences in the subjects being studied. While this does not preclude the OfS from doing so, the intention here is for minimum levels to be set by reference to the outcomes set out in subsection (5).
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked me to clarify her understanding, based on correspondence with Bill officials, of the powers of intervention at subject level. The OfS can intervene at subject level. As the noble Baroness noted, the OfS has an obligation to be proportionate in its interventions. However, any conduct that the OfS has decided constitutes a breach can be enforced, whether that conduct relates to all subjects or an individual subject. Courses could also be included in extremis.
The noble Baroness also asked how the OfS may assess quality when it comes to modular provision, given the changes that we are aiming to make in the LLE. The Government and the OfS are working closely together as part of the development of the lifelong learning entitlement. The OfS quality measures are designed to be flexible and used effectively by the OfS across a diverse provider base and different courses, for example part-time courses. As we will come on to, the OfS is currently consulting on its approach to regulating quality and standards. This includes consideration of its approach to modular and flexible provision. The OfS will consult on the indicators it proposes to use and how it proposes to take the context of the provider into account as it makes regulatory judgments. The purpose of Clause 17 is to provide clarity on the ability of the OfS to use absolute outcome measures, not to remove its ability to use other contextual or relative information.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful for the support of those who have spoken. The question of supporting students and getting their mental health needs looked after is one for which I—and, I suspect, a very large number of other parents—absolutely have a minimum expected level. I therefore find my noble friend’s statements of government policy in this area uncomfortably flabby. The Government support UUK—good. They back the mental health charter—good. However, universities have been subject to this sort of pressure for a long time and have not moved.
In the spirit of the Bill and of a minimum expected level, I really hope that the Government will consider what else they might do. It absolutely does not need to be measurement under Clause 17; it would work very well if, to pick up on the spirit of the suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, someone with character and reputation set out as an individual to work with the universities to get them to the place they should be. Such people are not impossible to find. However, we need something to make universities focus, and which says, “This isn’t just one of the other things that the Government find important but one of the things which we must do, and we know that, even if it can’t be expressed as a number, there is a standard which we have to reach”.
Not surprisingly, I listened with interest to my noble friend Lord Willetts’s explanation of his interest in this area. The question “How are people like me doing at this university?” absolutely ought to be something that interests the university just as much as the student. They should be looking at, for instance, students they have recruited with high and low qualifications relative to the average of a class and asking, “How do they do? Why are students dropping out? Is there stuff here we should be feeding back to their schools because perhaps they have not had the advice that they ought to have had there? Do we really understand the needs of particular types of children, whoever they might be? Are we seeing effects that might reflect something we could improve in this university?” There are lots of different ways of cutting that cake. The self-improving university comes from an attachment to data and a care for its students, rather than just a care for process; that is what we must strive to inculcate, improve and increase in our universities. That human side of the interaction is the foundation of making sure that the physical university survives in a virtual world.
As I said, I am grateful for all the support that I have received. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Henig) (Lab)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 72. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Clause 18: List of relevant providers
Amendment 72
Lord Aberdare
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that relevant providers will not be charged further costs when a provider’s contract for services with the Education and Funding Agency already requires a contractor to maintain at its own cost a policy or policies of insurance.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, this is a probing amendment intended to explore more fully the Government’s intentions in respect of independent training providers—ITPs—and their role in relation to the provisions of the Bill. I was delighted that my noble friend Lady Greengross raised this issue right at the beginning of our debate, so it has in a sense been bookended by ITPs.
According to the Bill’s impact assessment, there were 3,737 ITPs in 2019-20, about half of them small businesses. Some 700 of these are members of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, delivering vocational learning and employability support to 350,000 employers. They train around three-quarters of apprentices and young people on traineeships, as well as delivering adult education and programmes for the unemployed.
Some ITPs are large and well resourced, but the great majority are small, demand-led specialist businesses, often in towns and rural areas not served by colleges. There are 1,186 towns in England, I gather, but only about 170 FE colleges. Employers choose them because they are responsive and fleet of foot, as my noble friend Lord Bichard pointed out at Second Reading, and reach the parts other training bodies cannot reach, filling gaps in available training provision. The quality of their training is evidenced both in Ofsted reports and in employer and learner satisfaction surveys, with generally higher ratings than FE colleges. As such, they are an extremely important part of the education and skills landscape, and should be fully involved in the development and delivery of LSIPs. They should also receive a fair share of the funding available under government-supported schemes, whether directly or, more often, as subcontractors to larger providers. This is by no means always the case: frequently the funding available to ITPs is capped or reduced, with the result that they are unable to deliver the level of training for which they have capacity, for which there is demand, and on which their business plans have been based.
The main focus of the Bill, in respect of ITPs, is on protecting students from the effects of providers making unplanned exits from the market and failing to complete delivery of contracted training. There have of course been such failures, some of them high-profile and resulting in learners being left with debt on their loans but no course to complete. Again, according to the Bill’s impact assessment, 60 ITPs made unplanned exits in 2019-20, but there are many reasons for unplanned exits and it is not clear how many involved scandal or fraud, or what impact there may have been on learners. I have seen little evidence to justify the unduly negative reputation of the ITP sector, nor am I convinced that the measures proposed in the Bill would resolve the problems that exist. On the contrary, I fear that they might have the opposite effect, by forcing providers out of business, or discouraging new entrants to the market, thereby reducing innovation, competition and availability of needed training. The Government’s own impact assessment for the Bill admits that the measures
“are likely to have a significant impact on small or micro businesses from a resource and cost perspective.”
There was no mention of a list of providers in January’s White Paper, and there has been no consultation on the proposal, although this is promised for next spring, by which time the Bill will no doubt have been passed. The Bill would create a new list of relevant providers, and to be eligible to receive government funding an ITP would have to be included on this list, which would require it to meet a series of conditions and to pay a fee. I have no problem with the idea of such a list, nor with its being a prerequisite for receiving government funding. There is already a register of apprenticeship training providers, including many ITPs, and a broader register of training organisations that, somewhat ironically, is being decommissioned at the end of this month.
I do worry, however, about the specific conditions likely to be required for inclusion on the list, and the fact that they appear, albeit only as possibilities, in the Bill before there has been any consultation. These conditions include requirements for student support plans, for insurance cover, for providers to be fit and proper persons, and for the provision of information to, and taking action on directions from, the Secretary of State. The Bill also makes provision for fees to be charged for entry on to the list. Some of these conditions seem perfectly acceptable, and indeed are already required under existing ESFA contracts—which is where I believe they are more appropriately based—but I would argue that imposing this additional level of centralised regulation and cost is disproportionate and potentially damaging. It is based on the idea of a unified system of protection for all learners, without recognising the substantial differences between small independent providers and more established publicly funded bodies, such as FE colleges and schools.
There are particular concerns over the possible insurance condition. ESFA rules already require providers to maintain a range of insurance cover, including professional indemnity, employers’ liability and public liability insurance, but the Bill’s impact assessment seems to envisage a new form of insurance to offset costs to the Government in the event of a provider failure. Such insurance does not currently exist, and it is not clear how it might work in practice, let alone what it might cost. My amendment therefore proposes simply removing the mention of insurance cover from the list of example conditions in the Bill.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 74 probes the charging of fees in connection with entries on the list of relevant providers. The Bill would enable the Secretary of State to make regulations to provide for a list of post-16 education or training providers, including independent training providers.
We have no argument with the principle of introducing legislative measures to protect the interests of learners, and agree wholeheartedly that those who run providers on the proposed list of relevant providers should be “fit and proper persons”. But we are concerned that many of the provisions appear to be just piling costs upon ITP delivery without any consultation or rationale as to why they are necessary. Can the Minister explain why no such exercise has taken place and assure the Committee that meaningful consultations will take place before any new requirements for providers are introduced via regulations?
Under the proposals, any provider not on the approved list will not be granted funding agreements or be allowed to subcontract with another provider that is on the list, so this will not be an option going forward. Yet being on this list does not guarantee future financial sustainability, given that the Government admit that listing will have a “significant impact” on the costs of smaller providers because of the need to pay to join and the imposition of mandatory professional indemnity insurance, as highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, in his Amendment 72.
If this is in response to concerns about provider failure, I too fail to see how enhanced liability insurance and more stringent entry registrations will have any impact or give protection to learners. Meanwhile, it risks destabilising the entire ITP sector at a time when the economy desperately needs more skilled staff as we emerge from the pandemic and as the effects of Brexit on the labour market are felt.
The Association of Employment and Learning Providers has also raised concerns about the practicality of this indemnity requirement, given that it is not aware that the insurance product that the Government may have in mind actually exists, despite such a requirement being written into primary legislation. I hope the Minister is able to address this in her response.
There is also understandable concern in the sector that increasing costs may be a backdoor way to reduce the number of ITPs in the market. Can the Minister confirm whether this is indeed the Government’s intention? If it is, I am concerned that such a policy could backfire spectacularly and have significant adverse consequences for learners and communities.
ITPs deliver three-quarters of all apprenticeship, traineeship and adult education budget programmes. While many are small, they provide crucial and valuable opportunities and bring much-needed responsiveness, innovation and competition to the skills training marketplace. Many ITPs are either specialist providers or serve areas out of easy reach of a local college—indeed, there are 1,186 towns but only 170 FE colleges in England. Does the Minister recognise that ITPs are very good at reaching out to small businesses in small towns and rural areas which do not have a local college, including the Chancellor’s Yorkshire constituency and some red wall areas? Does she agree that they have a major contribution to make to the Government’s levelling-up agenda?
I hope the Minister can provide some clarity on these issues and assure the House that independent training providers will be able to continue to provide value opportunities, which will be crucial to the country’s post-pandemic recovery.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for the agreement in principle that a list of independent training providers is a requirement, as I believe it was suggested in this House in previous legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, is correct: the core focus of the list is to protect learners and reduce the significant disruption to learners that provider failure can cause. We value highly the role of relevant providers, including independent training providers and in particular those small providers noble Lords have mentioned. We are not unduly negative at all about their role in providing a diverse and innovative learning offer. They provide a great deal of variety to many learners.
The provisions in Clause 18(7) include a requirement for a provider to have insurance for examples of conditions that may be specified in regulations that providers must meet in order to be on the list. In a similar way, subsection (10) gives examples of provisions that may be specified in regulations in connection with the keeping of the list, which would ultimately help deliver a well-functioning, transparent and fair scheme to all those involved.
We propose that the student support plans we envisage providers having will, subject to consultation—which I will mention further—follow the approach in the HE sector, where the Office for Students requires a statement of the level of risks to the continuation of study. We must remember this is study paid for by the taxpayer, and obviously it is in everybody’s interests that that course of study is completed.
I would like to allay the fears of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox: as the clauses require, we will consult on the conditions and provisions for being on the list, prior to making the first set of regulations, to help ensure that those conditions manage and mitigate the risk of disorderly exit. That consultation will allow us to fully take into account the views of those affected by the scheme, particularly the small providers noble Lords have outlined.
I turn to the specifics of the amendments. Amendment 72 is intended to ensure relevant providers will not be subject to further costs relating to obtaining insurance cover. The introduction of insurance, or an equivalent, may be useful in preventing or mitigating the risk of provider failure and assist with learner transfers at that point. If we were to introduce a condition in relation to insurance, the aim would be for learners to benefit from greater continuity of provision. Clause 18(9) allows different conditions to be applied for different descriptions of providers. It is not one size fits all. This would ensure that, where appropriate, we could make the scheme as flexible as possible.
Amendment 74 is intended to probe how the charging of fees in connection with entries on the list will be regulated. It is reasonable to expect that some fees may be necessary to recover the costs—I emphasise “costs”—of administering the list. It is important that we retain the ability to introduce fees if they are deemed necessary to run an effective and fiscally responsible scheme. I can, however, offer an assurance that this would be the sole purpose of any fees. They would be set to a reasonable level, with reasonable notice and with consideration of the impact on providers of all sizes. There would be no intention to make a profit at the expense of providers.
Regulations to create the list are subject to the affirmative procedure, so there will be further opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny of any conditions or provisions specified. This includes regulations relating to any requirements for providers to have insurance or an equivalent, if proposed in the regulations following consultation, as well as any requirement to charge fees. If regulations setting out the basis for charging fees were to change again in the future, those amending regulations would also be subject to the affirmative procedure.
I therefore hope the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment and that the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, will not feel the need to move her amendment when it is reached.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, who made some good points, very strongly. I entirely agreed with her.
Despite the Minister’s hope, I am rather less comfortable with her response. This is going to have a very big impact, particularly on the smaller ITPs. The Minister talked about it being designed to avoid significant disruption to learners. What is this “significant disruption” and where are the examples? I have heard of two major cases, and a lot of others where nobody can produce any evidence at all, so I am not clear whether the problem being addressed justifies the scale of the sledgehammer being used to address it. I appreciate that the conditions in the Bill are examples, but the fact that they are there seems to make it very likely that they will turn up as conditions when the actual contracts get written. I would much rather see that left to the ESFA or the contracts, or whatever.
I think the Minister also mentioned that the approach was based on the higher education sector, but there is no comparison at all between a university and some of these small ITPs. It is just ludicrous to have the same sort of requirements placed on them as would be placed on a university. I very much hope that this consultation will be serious and deep, and taken great account of when it happens. I also hope that the fee will indeed be reasonable.
Before I withdraw my amendment, as the only Back-Bencher left standing I congratulate those on the Front Benches who remain in place, and particularly the two Ministers, on their efforts today, unhappy as I am with this final response. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Monday 19th July 2021
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-IV(Rev) Fourth marshalled list for Committee - (19 Jul 2021)
Lord Clarke of Nottingham
“Provision of opportunities for education and skills development
(1) Any person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to Level 3 supplied by an approved provider of further or technical education, if he or she has not already studied at that level.(2) Any approved provider must receive automatic in-year funding for any student covered by subsection (1), and supported by the Adult Education Budget, at a tariff rate set by the Secretary of State. (3) Any employer receiving apprenticeship funding shall spend at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at Levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25.”
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
My Lords, I tabled Amendment 76 in collaboration with the noble Lord, Lord Layard, and I am glad to see that my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has added his name in support.
In moving this amendment, I hope to get a reasonably sympathetic response from the Government—I am sure the Minister will endeavour to provide one—because it is very much in the spirit of the Government’s policy of trying to address the skills gap in this country and enable individuals to develop skills relevant to today’s labour market in their area. I therefore hope I can get a sympathetic and even positive response to what I propose for the category of people covered.
The Government’s policy so far, based on their excellent White Paper—to which they are slowly adding some substance as they develop it—is to concentrate particularly on the higher levels of skill to make sure we have an alternative to the traditional route through school and university for the academically able that gives equal status and value to technical and engineering skills. I very much welcome that. This amendment is tabled for a slightly different target, which does not have adequate attention: people who unfortunately did not take advantage of opportunities when they were young and should have devoted at least some of their time to their education and training, who realise that they need to improve their skills to get better career prospects and move to a more sensible job pattern in future.
Teenage angst takes a whole variety of forms, but it leads to some people completely failing to take advantage of the opportunities they had at school or wherever. There are people who have intrinsic intelligence and ability but drop out of school or the labour market because of whatever phase of the world they are going through. They even join the category given the dreadful jargon name of NEETs—people not in education, employment or training. By the time they get to the age of 25, as people begin to mature and face up to the realities of life, quite a lot of them wish to address it. I think society as a whole wishes to give them an opportunity to make themselves better opportunities in the labour market.
For that reason, we are concerned with those seeking skills at level 2, which is the equivalent of GCSE, and level 3, which is the equivalent of A-levels. Anybody who failed to take their opportunities when they had them should have a lifelong opportunity to do so in order to improve the contribution they can make to the local economy and their life prospects.
As I said, the Government are producing quite substantial proposals in the Bill, but so far there is much more support for levels 4, 5 and 6 up to degree level. This is not in any way challenging that—I support all that—but there is a gap that we seek to address in this amendment. The first component of the amendment says:
“Any person of any age has the right”
to free tuition if they wish to make up for what they have omitted so far and to take a level 2 or 3 qualification of some kind. The Government have not covered that. A statutory right would be extremely valuable.
Some financial support will be required. The Government are developing a lifelong loans entitlement for people who at any stage wish to improve their skills, but that is confined to those seeking skills at levels 4, 5 and 6. I hope I have made the case for making available some equivalent to those at levels 2 and 3. The form can be settled, but the legal entitlement would give substance to the Government’s policies. In due course, the Government could provide the sort of funding that should be made available to persons who make the sensible decision to gain qualifications at that level.
It is no good offering people government funding for courses of any kind if the providers are not supplying such courses and if the budgets of the relevant institutions do not allow them to make those courses available. This is all part of a much wider problem in the further education college and sixth-form college sector, which has been the Cinderella of our education and training system for several decades but will have to play a vital part in supplying a response to the skills gap at every level, and will certainly be very important at this level.
The problem at the moment is that, while further education colleges do try to provide relevant courses—I welcome the fact that they will be working much more closely with local employers for relevant local skills and I am not remotely hostile to the broad brush of policy—they are, of course, funded on a quite different basis from other parts of our education system. Every school gets a guaranteed sum of money for every pupil it persuades to stay on in the sixth form. Every university gets a very generous sum of money guaranteed for everybody it can entice into any sort of course. Colleges of further education, however, work to cash-limited budgets, which have not been treated generously in recent years; there is a finite limit to what they can offer and they have to make a choice.
This is why the second component of our amendment suggests:
“Any approved provider must receive automatic in-year funding for any student”
who, as we have already said, is seeking a level 2 or level 3-type qualification at a tariff rate to be
“set by the Secretary of State”.
I hope that there will be much wider moves than that to get further education funding, further education college status, and the attractiveness of employment and careers in the further education service made more attractive by the Government—but this proposal would provide automatic funding for all those courses that are taken up by an adequate number of people seeking level 2 and 3 qualifications.
Finally, on a slightly broader point, the amendment addresses the uses to which the apprenticeship levy is being put at the moment. Again, I am not just trying to persuade the Minister to be forthcoming; I very much welcome the apprenticeship levy system, the development of apprentices and the way the Bill addresses very important things, such as the quality and variety of qualifications, trying to sort out the maze of them, and so on—and the levy system has had some extremely beneficial effects. However, in its current form, it has had some unintended side-effects. In recent years, there has been a steady drift in the use of levy money towards higher-level qualifications, and towards existing employees of companies seeking to refresh or modify their skills, go through management training and so on, and a decline in the number of young people getting apprenticeships and in the number of people getting more ordinary-level training in skills.
Management trainees, middle-ranking managers and quite senior managers can be described by large employers as apprentices—most of them are utterly unaware of the fact that they are apprentices—for the purpose of claiming levy money to cover the costs. Public sector bodies do this—as, I suspect, do government departments when they are training civil servants; some high-flying civil servant is probably being described somewhere as an apprentice, in order to recover the levy. In answer to questions from the Select Committee on Youth Unemployment, another Minister told us the other day that they have stopped funding MBA courses out of the apprenticeship levy. However, the whole thing has drifted away from its essential point.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I warmly support the amendment moved by my colleague and noble and learned friend Lord Clarke of Nottingham. We are both members of the House of Lords Select Committee on Youth Unemployment, as are the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who is a supporter of this amendment, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who speaks for the Liberals. We are exploring all ways in which we can improve skills training in our country, which is pretty dismal at the moment and compares very badly with many European countries.
One aspect that the Government boast of is the lifetime guarantee. This affects in particular those people who do not have A-levels and decide in their 30s, 40s or 50s that they would like to take an A-level course. To do that they will have to pay a course fee of about £5,000 to £6,000 a year, for which they may require a loan. As they are studying, they could not apply for the minimum wage or universal credit so, if they are unemployed, they would almost certainly have to take out a maintenance loan of another £6,000 or £7,000. So we would be asking unemployed people to pay £12,000 to acquire an A-level qualification that, had they stayed at school, they would have got for free. It is simply outrageous and unacceptable, and it makes a complete farce of what a lifetime guarantee is.
I am very hopeful that the Government will accept this amendment. Why am I hopeful? Well, about four weeks ago, the Government announced a skills fund on which they are going to spend about £2.5 billion. They suggested four items on which the fund could be based, the first of which was £93 million for free A-levels. They have now said that they want to go into consultation on the skills fund, which means that those original four proposals are on ice. I suggest that they should think very carefully and put the first item back in. That would be a way for the Government to fund this. Can the Minister tell us whether the four items of expenditure on the skills fund are on ice? They have spent most of the £2 billion among them.
I would go further than my noble and learned friend has done. If you go to an FE college at 18 and you get to level 3, you will want, if you are able enough, to go on to level 4, the higher national certificate, or level 5, the higher national diploma. This is where the main skills gap in our country is. If you analyse the skills gap in digital, in engineering or in the creative industries, you see that it is greatest at levels 4 and 5. These are two qualifications just below degree level—you would describe those taking them as high-quality technicians—and we have a huge skills gap in that area. We should be promoting levels 4 and 5.
A course at level 4, which currently costs about £6,000 or £7,000, should be free. If an unemployed person is doing that, they will not be able to claim the living wage or universal credit, so they will need a maintenance grant of probably £6,000 or £7,000. So someone who wants to study at level 4 today for whom the alternative is unemployment has to find a loan of £12,000, which by the time they finish will be £15,000. I do not think that is at all reasonable. Strangely enough, neither did the Department for Education about nine or 10 months ago, because it put to the Treasury the proposal that level 4 should be free for unemployed youngsters, as should level 5, the higher national degree, which is just below level 6—a degree. The Government should consider this proposal and I hope our Select Committee will consider it as well. We have to stimulate real growth at levels 4 and 5. If we do not, our country will fall behind technologically.
I am sure the Government will accept my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke’s proposal today because it would be totally illogical and unfair not to accept it, but I hope they will think a little wider and broader because we have to upskill our country and catch up with Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. We are so far behind. This is a moment at which we can make significant changes for generations of young people to come.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I support both amendments in this group. I put my name down mainly to speak on Amendment 76, which has been so powerfully moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, and to focus on Section 3, about apprenticeship funding for young people before the age of 25, which is badly needed.
The question I am asking myself is, how will this affect the overall funding of apprenticeships and how will it help to deliver, as stated by the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, a stronger focus on levels 4 and 5 as well? Where are those apprenticeships going to come from, and what is going to persuade employers to provide those opportunities? Many employers, of course, have limited capacity to take on new staff, particularly young people coming directly from education without previous working experience, however much they might wish to do so if they could. The result has been that those employers tend to use their levy funds to upskill or reskill existing employees—although, as I have mentioned before, even that may use up only a limited proportion of their available levy funds. That creates yet another incentive for them to recast what training they need in the form of apprenticeships where they can.
So, I strongly support the amendment. My question is, where are those apprenticeships going to come from and what impact are they going to have on the ability of employers to focus on reskilling and upskilling at the same time? I suspect that a significant number of apprenticeships for young people are likely to come from SMEs, yet many are put off from offering apprenticeships because of the bureaucracy involved and a lack of time and resources to manage the process, despite the generous incentives available. I encourage the Government to look at offering specific, more generous incentives to SMEs to take on young people aged 25 or under for level 2 or 3 apprenticeships, including help with their administration and simplified arrangements for fee-paying employers to transfer part of their levy funds to SMEs for this specific purpose. There are such arrangements but they do not seem to be as effective as one might hope.
I always fail to understand why there cannot be more specific support and encouragement for apprenticeship training agencies to run apprenticeship programmes for SMEs, perhaps as a specific element of the local skills improvement plan for a particular area. That would seem a useful way in which an LSIP could contribute to the take-up of apprenticeships in its area, specifically among SMEs and new entrants to the job market, and maybe with a slight slightly broader applicability of the apprenticeship levy than it currently has.
I very much support the provisions in Amendment 80 putting the lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing. One of these days, I look forward to hearing an explanation of why the skills guarantee is “lifetime” and the learning entitlement is “lifelong” and what the difference may be; it would make many lives much easier if we just used one term. I hope the Government will accept the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, in particular and explain how they want to achieve a better balance between younger apprenticeships and level 4 and 5 apprenticeships, for example.
Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]
My Lords, it is an honour to speak in this group with many noble Lords who have made an enormous and outstanding contribution to the education system in this country. I support both Amendment 76, tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, and Amendment 80, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie. Both amendments seek to provide skills training for those who do not hold level 3 qualifications, and I thank both noble Lords for tabling these important amendments to the Bill, which I believe really enhance it.
The amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, would ensure that a person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to level 3, supplied by an approved provider, if they have not already studied at that level. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has a similar intention but would provide this training only to people between the age of 19 and the state pension age. Given the number of people who continue to work over the state pension age, and given that the Equality Act 2010 makes age discrimination illegal, I prefer the wording of the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke. I also support the work of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, on level 4 qualifications.
The issue of skills training at all ages is important in our changing economy. It is estimated that 35% of current jobs are at high risk of being replaced by automation by 2040, if not earlier. This impacts on workers of all ages, but we must understand that for people who have been made redundant the situation is very difficult. According to figures from the Centre for Ageing Better, over 1 million people between the age of 50 and state pension age are not working but would really like to. One in four men and one in three women in that age group have been out of work for over five years. Many older workers find it very difficult to participate in skills training, and much more so if they left school without gaining qualifications. We must do all that we can to support older workers to participate in training.
The other component of the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, is that an employer receiving apprenticeship funding shall spend at least two-thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at level 2 and 3 before the age of 25. This specifically encourages the training of younger workers at a time when we know that the youth unemployment rate is 13.2%, compared with 4.7% for the whole population. Many young people struggle in our school system and, at the age of 16 and 17, may not yet be in the right mindset to complete their level 2 or 3 qualifications. A few years later, when doing an apprenticeship in an area where they are interested and see the potential to progress their career, is a much better time to gain the qualifications that they were unable to get at school.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I support Amendments 76 and 80, for the obvious reason so clearly set out by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, and others that unless full funding is available, many students who could benefit from and would in turn benefit society by attending these courses will simply not be able to do so through poverty. This applies to a significant proportion of those from the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities, and no doubt to other minority-ethnic students, as well as to the rest of the NEETs referred to by the noble and learned Lord. I hope that the Government will respect the powerful arguments in favour of these amendments.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, this is a hugely important debate for the future of not only our education system but our society, because unless we have a properly trained workforce in the future and young people have real prospects and qualifications, we are in for a terrible time. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said, there cannot be levelling up unless we have qualifications, skills and opportunities that level up. It is good that he and my noble friend Lord Watson have tabled these amendments, which give us an opportunity to explore this broad issue and to hear from the Government what their intentions are.
Amendment 76 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, and my noble friend Lord Watson’s Amendment 80 are superficially similar. But I notice that as soon as you start probing them, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, said, there are significant differences. I wonder whether my noble friend might elucidate, because his amendment is much more circumscribed then that of the noble and learned Lord, and I wonder why. I find the noble and learned Lord’s amendment very appealing: it has a broad statement of policy objectives, which looks to be absolutely correct for the future of our workforce and society. The bold statement in the noble and learned Lord’s amendment is:
“Any person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to Level 3 supplied by an approved provider of further or technical education”,
whereas my noble friend’s amendment says:
“All persons aged 19 or older and under the state pension age have the right to study a fully-funded approved course”.
The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, asked whether that eliminated all people who are over the retirement age. By the way, we need to eradicate from society the concept that once you get to the age of 60, 62 or 65, you are now unemployable and should not be eligible for proper training and the full opportunities that we extend to other people. If the House of Lords—average age 72—does not stand up for those beyond the statutory retirement age, who in this country is going to do so? The noble Baroness’s point is very well made and I look forward to my noble friend Lord Watson, speaking on behalf of my party, making it clear that we are fully in favour of people post retirement being eligible for these benefits as well.
My noble friend’s amendment also does not specify whether this is to be a right, which must go with funding, or simply an entitlement. The amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, says:
“Any person of any age has the right to free education”,
whereas my noble friend’s amendment says:
“All persons aged 19 or older and under the state pension age have the right to study”.
The big question is: who is going to pay for that? I know that we are having a policy review at the moment. The noble and learned Lord is a former Chancellor, so he is well aware of the forms of words that need to be used when you can give no commitment that involves any spending at all. I fully appreciate that may be why my noble friend’s amendment does not extend, so far as I can see, any rights that go with funding. but it would be as well to make that clear.
In the policy review which my party is conducting, it is essential that we put the rights of those who are on a path to technical and vocational education on a par with those who go on to university. We keep mouthing these platitudes about equality of opportunity but we never deliver it. When we look at the priorities facing the country, there is none more important than seeing that those on a technical education track, who at the moment too often do not get those opportunities, have them extended to them. These two amendments give us an opportunity to explore the terrain in this area.
However, the noble and learned Lord’s amendment also raises the very important issue of the apprenticeship levy. In all the instances of major acts of public policy which have delivered the exact opposite of their stated intention within the last generation, I cannot think of a more significant example than the apprenticeship levy. George Osborne, the late lamented Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced it in his Budget speech of July 2015, said about apprenticeships that the then Government were
“committed to 3 million more”,
and that,
“while many firms do a brilliant job training their workforces, too many … leave the training to others so we are going to take a radical and, frankly, long overdue approach … an apprenticeship levy on all large firms”—[Official Report, Commons, 8/7/15; col. 328.]
to ensure 3 million more apprenticeships. Very few policies which came out of the Government during the past 11 years, which have been a bit of a wasteland for public policy at large, have I applauded more warmly than the apprenticeship levy. It looked to be, and I think George Osborne intended it to be, a bold step forward to raise significant additional funds that would have been available for training. The CBI was not wild with excitement when that policy was announced because it thought that was to be the case.
What then happened is what always happens when there is no one in government who really gets a grip on these things: the policy was essentially abandoned and became an orphan. As we know, Mr Osborne left the scene a year later—one of the many casualties of the Brexit disaster, which has managed to consume all its children during the last five years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer who had been behind the policy vanished and there was never an Education Secretary who was behind it. The noble Lord said that vocational education is the lesser priority of the education department, but among recent Education Secretaries I am hard put to see that it is a priority at all. As I said during the first day in Committee, there has been one Minister of Further Education each year since 2010 and the only one who showed any interest in apprenticeships, Robert Halfon, was promptly sacked because he was becoming too enthusiastic, and was shunted off to become chairman of the Select Committee in the House of Commons. There was nobody taking a grip on this policy and, as a result, two fatal flaws developed in its evolution.
The first, which the noble Lord highlighted, was that firms themselves were allowed to define what constituted training—as he said, it was anything up to and including MBAs. This is why there has been a massive decline in entry-level and level 2 and 3 apprenticeships, while all the emphasis has been on high-level apprenticeships. It is only large firms that pay the levy and that is how they best use the money which they have hoarded for apprenticeships.
The figures speak for themselves. The number of apprenticeships actually being provided is far from George Osborne’s 3 million extra. In the last four years it has declined from 213,000 to 161,900. This is a decline of nearly 50,000 apprenticeships from a policy that was supposed to increase the number by hundreds of thousands: it has moved in exactly the opposite direction to the one intended.
These figures are all taken from a House of Commons research paper from 30 March this year. For the under-19s, the fall has been catastrophic: the fall over that four-year period is more than one-third. The number of under-19s going into apprenticeships has declined between 2018 and 2021 from 66,000 to 39,000. That is a colossal tale of human deprivation and misery, because this means there are 17, 18- and 19-year olds who are basically going on to no proper training whatever.
That leads to the second flaw of the apprenticeship levy. It was a design flaw that I put to George Osborne at the time; he said he was prepared to look at it but, again, things moved on. The apprenticeship levy is not, in fact, a levy. Again, I look to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, as a former Chancellor. When the Government introduce a levy, normally—in almost every other case that I can think of—the levy is Her Majesty's Government by Act of Parliament requiring other bodies to pay a contribution to the Government or a public body for the delivery of a service, or to go into the Exchequer.
This is not a levy of that kind; it is a requirement on large firms to undertake training up to a certain level, which is the amount of the levy as a percentage of their turnover. Only if they do not provide training up to that level is the money then supposed to be volunteered under a scheme, which is very haphazard, and go to the Treasury or a designated public authority.
That was a fatal flaw in the design of the levy. It is like stamp duty being given to estate agencies, which have to pay the money to the Treasury only after they have paid all their expenses, paid into every imaginary marketing scheme that they can think of and paid vast salaries to all the agents. It was a fatal flaw and was done as a concession to business because the deal was that, if the money was first made available to the employers, this would be less of a burden on the employers. As a result, it was a huge incentive to the employers only to train their own workforce—which, by definition, was the existing workforce—so there were not many of those at entry level. This included training up to level 4, MBAs and bespoke training courses at vast expense.
There was no incentive to increase the number of apprenticeships and no mechanism for taking any of the money away from them and distributing it more fairly, nor, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, so rightly said, a provision for small and medium-sized enterprises to get the money either because they do not pay the levy. It applies only to large employers, and SMEs only get any of the proceeds by the process of redistribution if money is returned to the Treasury over and above what companies spend, which is virtually nothing. SMEs are the major employers in this country and should be providing an army of new apprenticeships.
The apprenticeship levy is a complete catastrophe of a policy. It has significantly reduced the supply of apprenticeships, even though it was meant to increase them. It has particularly done so in respect of small and medium-sized enterprises and young people. Therefore, the third part of the amendment of the noble Lord and learned, Lord Clarke, which states that any employer
“receiving apprenticeship funding shall spend at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at Levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25”
is vital. I would take it further and take the funds out of the hands of the employer and see that they are distributed on a fair, national, basis including to SMEs.
I look forward to the Minister’s response, particularly on what steps the Government are proposing. It is a very basic question: what steps are the Government going to take to ensure that the number of apprenticeships in this country goes up rather than down? Each year at the moment the numbers are going down and we need them to go up.
What I would most like to see is the Minister accept the amendment put by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke. It is an excellent amendment and comes with the great pedigree of a former Chancellor; he was not a notable high spender as Chancellor but was quite discriminating in the object of his affection when he was in charge of the national money bags. If he thinks that this should be a big imperative national priority, then we should think so too. I very much hope that something like his amendment becomes the law of the land.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in such fine form, but I am going to argue with his conclusion on degree apprenticeships and other higher apprenticeships. They have been a great boost to the quality of British management. We have needed for a long time to put more effort and skill into that level of business. We needed better management; we needed more and better managers. The money going in that direction has not been a waste—it is just that we needed rather more money in addition to go towards young people.
I am not sure whether the pattern of apprenticeship that we dreamed up, and now have some experience of, has really proved itself. If I understood the Minister aright on a previous day, we are going to make a serious attempt to provide apprenticeship-style funding and opportunities for people in the creative sector where the pattern of employment has so far precluded apprenticeships. We are going to look at, I believe, something much more akin to a series of shorter-term training opportunities, with something that glues it together into a career progression, such as a relationship with a learning provider or someone else independent of an employer.
That is a much better pattern for a lot of young people than an apprenticeship. They can get the skills they need to get into a job and to regularly have opportunities to upskill, not a year or three years at a time, but two or three months at a time. It is a pattern that has evolved quite successfully in the IT and creative industries. The lack of support and effective government funding has had some unfortunate socially exclusionary consequences—people have to be able to afford the training themselves rather than having support. I am delighted that the Government are coming into that area.
I do not think we should assume that, just because we dreamed up apprenticeships at levels 2 and 3, in a lot of cases they have proved themselves. They have in some places, but it would suit young people in particular and employers better to have something made up of shorter-term elements with the pastoral care—particularly for small companies—being provided by experts rather than randomly through an overstressed corporate HR department.
That would provide quite a good structure for looking after the interests of returners and career changers. We ought to be providing these people with a real opportunity to contribute to the economy in the way they can. That will involve a degree of retraining. There should be no hurdles as to the level someone has reached previously. They might well have a degree in Greats but want to retrain as a motor engineer, and it does not help if they are not able to access the right level of provision for that change. We ought to be supporting that.
We ought to do it through grants initially. I agree with my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke that for someone coming out of education and into their early years of economic life with no substantial qualifications, to have a chance to get something under their belt is important. However, it should be what is necessary to get on the ladder for the career they are looking at. That may well be a level 2 or 3 qualification, or it may be something much shorter.
If you are looking at doing something more substantial than that, I do not think that we need do more than make sure that people can access the loans system to get themselves on track. However, we ought to be being fair. I like the spirit of these two amendments, and I hope that the Government will move in their direction.
Lord Layard (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 76. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, has argued so powerfully, we are, as a nation, very good at producing graduates and pretty bad at producing skills for the other 50%.
I start with a quite extraordinary statistic: if you ask what proportion of all the 18 year-olds in our country are not in any form of education or work-based learning, the answer is 30%. That is an absolutely incredible situation, and it really is time that we addressed that problem. It is a problem for our national productivity and, of course, it is a big problem for the subsequent incomes of those people. If we are looking for priorities, which is what this is all about, the central aim of post-school policy development must now be to deal with that problem and get more of our young people up to level 3—or at least level 2.
The lifetime skills guarantee is of course a very welcome proposal towards that end—giving a first level 2 or 3 to everyone, free of charge, irrespective of age—but it should be put into law. If the Government are serious about it, they should have no reservations on that point. That is covered in the first bit of this amendment. However, the more substantial issue, to which my noble friend Lord Adonis referred, is how to deliver that guarantee. Unless the places are there, there is no point in a person feeling that they have the right to free education if, when they look around, they see nothing that they like. They would not, in effect, have a right—they have that right only if the money automatically follows their choice.
What we are saying to the Government—I hope that the Minister will reflect on this—is that there is actually no chance that the guarantee can be delivered through the existing system of contracting with the colleges. In that system, each college has a capped budget, the size of which it negotiates annually with the Education and Skills Funding Agency. That agency, in turn, has a capped total budget, which, currently—even taking into account recent increases—is half of what it was in 2010. So that is what our present funding system enables us to do for the other 50%. We can do whatever we will, but, unless we do something about that funding system, we will not be able to deliver the right to a lifetime skills guarantee.
The contrast between what faces those people and what faces people going down the academic route is extreme because if you go to university or sixth form, the money of course follows you automatically. That is why our academic education is among the best in the world. It is difficult to think of anything more completely unjust in our social arrangements in this country than the comparative treatment of people going down the academic route and of those wanting to go into further education.
We have to dynamise the system of further education in the same way that we have dynamised universities: by enabling any institution that thinks that it can attract the people who are entitled to put the course on, knowing that the money will automatically follow. It is very nice that we have the “lifetime skills guarantee” expression because we can say that any student who is accepted by a college should automatically be funded for exercising their guarantee. What is a guarantee if the money does not come with it? It should be a guarantee of free education, funded in an automatic fashion. We want our colleges to lead in transforming the skills of our non-graduates, which, as I say, is more important than any problem relating to graduates. Let us take the colleges off the leash and pay them for any eligible student who they can attract—that is the only way that we can implement the lifetime skills guarantee. I hope that the Minister can reflect on how that guarantee could be implemented in any other way.
I turn finally to apprenticeships. Again, as many noble Lords have already said, we have to be clear about what the really big problems are, as opposed to other things that would also be desirable but are not of the highest priority. As I said at the beginning, the biggest problem is that so many young people are entering adult life without any proper training—we absolutely have to address that. The key moment occurs before people are 25; we must do better for people at that stage. To put that in context: 30% of people have had no form of work-based training or education. This is a problem of opportunity and of places. We are still trying to get the figures, but we know that there is huge excess demand from young people for places on apprenticeships. There are people who want apprenticeships and cannot get them. Finding a mechanism to generate those places is absolutely critical. At the Youth Unemployment Committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred, we constantly have evidence of this huge excess demand. We are trying to get the numbers; we do not have them yet, but everyone says that that demand is there.
We can only solve that problem if we use the apprenticeship levy to generate those places. One could imagine all kinds of subtle ways to incentivise employers to spend the apprenticeship money on younger people, but I do not think that they would work. That is why this very simple rule—two-thirds of apprenticeship funding going to people under the age of 25—is the most direct approach. Of course, it has to be for people taking apprenticeships at levels 2 or 3 because, if we said “under 25” but not the second part, we would see that they would want to fund degree and graduate apprenticeships. They would want to recruit bright young graduates and not bother about the other half of the population.
I stress the need to focus not just on the places but on the money for the places, because places for younger people are cheaper than those for the older people. As the amendment says, two-thirds of the money should go to people starting at levels 2 or 3 when aged under 25. Of course, I am very keen on degree and graduate apprenticeships but, if employers want to do those, they should come from the other third of the money or their own resources.
This whole amendment is about how to generate the places for young people to get the proper start in life that we want them to have and, thereby, earn a decent wage and contribute to national productivity. Such things do not happen just by saying, “You’ll have a guarantee”; you have to put it into law, as the other amendment also says, and then have proper ways of funding both the guarantee and the apprenticeship.
It is true that the Government now have the right aspirations. We are in a new situation with huge opportunity, and the skills White Paper absolutely heads in the right direction, but this amendment is, in a sense, a test of how serious the Government are about actually realising their admirable aspirations. I hope that the Minister will find the amendment helpful.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 80 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, but I also strongly support Amendment 76 from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, and the noble Lords, Lord Layard and Lord Rooker. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Layard; we are among some of the giants of the education world here.
If the Government are serious about wishing to reskill and upskill the nation, lifelong learning is an absolutely essential component. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, that “lifelong” is the word we are more used to—but I agree with him that we should sort out before we go much further whether it is lifelong or lifetime. As we shall discuss later, adults are much less likely to wish to take on repayable loans, so the right to free education up to level 3 is a very positive measure.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, again, we have had a stimulating debate, with many insightful contributions. I have to say that we support Amendment 76, in the names of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, and my noble friends Lord Layard and Lord Rooker. It is similar in its first provision to ours, which references
“All persons aged 19 or older”,
while theirs states:
“Any person of any age has the right to free education … up to Level 3”.
Below the age of 19, that right is already there through school or college or via an apprenticeship, although I accept the points made by my noble friend Lord Adonis about apprenticeships since the levy was introduced.
I acknowledge the important point about the pension age made by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, reinforced by my noble friend Lord Adonis. As they rightly said, many people now have no alternative but to work beyond—perhaps in some cases far beyond—that point in their life. That has given food for thought for these Benches, if we decide to return to this at Report. It is a valid point.
We also support the other two provisions in Amendment 76, the first concerning funding through the adult education budget. Of course, what happens to the adult education budget is a great unknown, as much of it has been devolved to the metro mayoral authorities, which we know the Government, probably for political reasons, want to keep at some distance from this Bill. We think that is a great shame and is quite wrong, but perhaps the Minister can clarify the Government’s view of the role of the adult education budget going forward.
The third provision in Amendment 76 relates to the apprenticeship levy and attempts to right a wrong that has developed since the levy was introduced in 2017 that not enough of it has been used to pay for apprenticeships for young people. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, highlighted some of the anomalies that have resulted, for instance, with MBAs. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that the points made in the amendment point to a more important misuse of the levy. I really do not think that MBAs were anybody’s intention when it was introduced.
We also support the stated objectives of the Bill as a whole to
“make it easier for adults and young people to study more flexibly - allowing them to space out their studies, transfer credits between institutions, and take up more part-time study”.
The Prime Minister’s lifetime skills guarantee was a central plank of the Queen’s Speech and the build back better and levelling-up agenda. Last week, we hoped to find out more about levelling up and what it actually meant, when the Prime Minister made a speech, but I have to say that, having heard that speech, we are still waiting. The lifetime skills guarantee forms an integral part of this legislation but, to the disbelief of many people across your Lordships’ House and the FE sector, the Government’s flagship policy is not in the Bill. Our Amendment 80 aims to rectify this oversight by placing the lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing. As the Federation of Awarding Bodies has said:
“Support for adult education in future could be as comprehensive as access to the NHS, but only if we get the passage of the legislation right.”
The lifetime skills guarantee is welcome, but it needs to be a much wider guarantee, supporting retraining and learning in a range of levels. It is beyond my comprehension why the Bill is silent on qualifications below level 3, as other noble Lords have said. At present, 13 million in the UK do not have a level 2 qualification, and around 9 million adults lack functional literacy and numeracy skills, leaving them more vulnerable to job loss and making it harder for them to secure alternative work if that happens—yet they are being offered no support in this Bill. Why?
There is no recognition of the value of qualifications below level 3 in creating progression pathways for students. The report from the Department for Education, snappily titled Measuring the Net Present Value of Further Education in England 2018/19 and published two months ago, revealed the return on investment of these qualifications and concluded that the net present value of qualifications below level 2 is actually higher than for level 3. Why have the Government ignored their own evidence?
Six million adults were identified in the Augar review as not having qualifications at level 2, yet the total number of adult learners has fallen in recent years. If we want people to reach level 3 and above, surely more of them need to achieve level 2. To repeat: we are particularly concerned that no support is provided for any qualifications below level 3, despite lower level qualifications offering many adult learners key progression routes.
Nor do the proposals support subjects outside a narrow band of technical disciplines. A list of 400 qualifications is too restrictive; 1 million priority jobs will be excluded from the lifetime skills guarantee in sectors facing a major skills shortage, including retail, hospitality and the arts. Jobs in sectors such as veterinary care, building and architecture, as well as computer programming, which have been designated by the Government as priority for work visas, are also excluded from the guarantee offer.
Last week, we saw the Government’s response to the level 3 qualifications reform. Despite all the consultation responses that the Department for Education received, it was disappointing to see the Government continue to focus on the number of regulated qualifications instead of supporting course diversity and real careers choices for young people post-16. The suggestion that the number of qualifications made available can be reduced from around 75,000 to a mere handful is surely fanciful. If the Government listened to college leaders, learners and parents as much as they do to employers, they would know that. As the Federation of Awarding Bodies also said
“The outcome of this particular review”—
that is, the level 3 qualifications reform—
“is taking the country in the wrong direction. It will not help level up across the regions of England and it will result in less opportunities for disadvantaged learners in future.”
We are seriously concerned by the Government’s intrinsically flawed conception of how to measure value in post-16 education and that it will prevent the proper funding of socially useful and valuable, if lower earning, professions and paths in life. Our Amendment 80 ensures that all adults aged 19 and over without an A-level or equivalent qualification, or who hold such qualifications but would benefit from reskilling, can study a fully funded approved course, and requires the Secretary of State to consult on and review the list of approved courses to ensure that they are compatible with national skills strategies.
We also believe that the lifetime skills guarantee should be extended to include subsequent level 3 courses to unlock retraining for even more people. Eligibility for retraining is all the more important given the impact of the pandemic and ever-changing market needs. This is why the amendment allows for flexibility for a provider, perhaps on the recommendation of a Jobcentre Plus work coach or a qualified careers adviser, to allow for a subsequent level 3 course of study if the person would benefit from retraining in an area where there is a demand for skills. This is more important than ever before, given rapidly changing market needs and to support industrial decarbonisation goals.
The entitlement to a first full level 3 qualification for those under the age of 25 was introduced by a Labour Government in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. As things stand, the Bill would do away with it. The Augar review recommended an all-age level 3 entitlement, and the Government have now put this into effect with a guarantee, but only to a limited list of level 3 qualifications and only for those who do not have one. An adult who is made unemployed and needs to retrain but already has a level 3 qualification—an A-level perhaps, or BTEC equivalent—will not be able to access the entitlement.
Why are the Government shutting the door on people who want and need to retrain for the future needs of the economy that the Government tell us the Bill is intended to prepare for? It simply does not make sense. These amendments are necessary if, as my noble friend Lord Layard said, the Government’s stated aim of parity of esteem between the academic and technical routes is to be meaningful. I look forward to the response from the Minister.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for the opportunity for this important debate on the provision of skills to those who may not have got them earlier in their lives or who are seeking to retrain. I hope I can give noble Lords quite a bit of comfort in that the Government broadly concur with many noble Lords’ ambitions around lifelong learning in this area. That is backed up by some clear policy statements and funding commitments. It is not necessary to specify such requirements in the Bill.
Amendment 76, tabled by my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke of Nottingham, seeks to provide free access for approved courses up to level 3 for any person if they have not already studied at that level, including automatic in-year funding to providers to cover these students. It may help if I explain the current position. Up to the age of 18, participation in education and training is fully funded. For adults aged 19-plus, the adult education budget fully funds or co-funds provision from pre-entry to level 3, to support adults in gaining the skills that they need for work, an apprenticeship or further learning. This includes a significant amount of fully funded provision, including English, maths and digital courses, the first full level 2 and level 3 for learners aged between 19 and 23, and fully funded training up to and including level 2 where learners are unemployed or in receipt of low wages. The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, referred to this category of learner, which includes learners who have already achieved level 2 or above but need to retrain to improve their job or wage prospects. I will cover my noble friend’s final but important point about level 3 funding for those aged 24 and above, which I have not covered yet, when dealing with Amendment 80, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson.
A number of noble Lords spoke to the part of the amendment relating to apprenticeships. From August 2020 to January 2021, 16 to 24-year olds accounted for 53% of apprenticeship starts. In the same period, level 2 and level 3 starts made up over two-thirds of starts, so across the programme we are already meeting the aims of this amendment by focusing on younger and entry-level apprenticeships. However, that does not mean that every employer should meet that goal. Legislating in the way proposed will reduce employers’ ability to meet their individual skills needs, and reduce opportunities for individuals, including older workers who may need to retrain or want to progress in their career.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
I have received one request to speak after the Minister, from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Baroness said that there was now a scheme for enabling large employers to transfer part of the proceeds of the apprenticeship levy to SMEs. What is the incentive for them to do that? It was not clear to me why they would do it, apart from just good will—they may do it for good will, but it is good to have some incentives. Also, although she issued a lot of warm words about younger apprenticeships, she did not—unless I missed it—directly address the third part of the amendment from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, which requires employers receiving apprenticeship funding to spend
“at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at Levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25.”
What is the Government’s view on an actual requirement that two-thirds of the funding be spent on those who are under 25?
Baroness Penn (Con)
As noble Lords will be aware, when large employers pay the apprenticeship levy, those funds stay in their account for up to two years and, if unspent, return to the Government. They fund wider apprenticeship provision, such as the provision of maths and English tuition, the administration of the scheme and other aspects of it. However, we know that large employers have unspent funds. They may, for example, want to transfer those to other businesses in their supply chain that would benefit from taking up apprenticeships in that form. That is one incentive they may have to transfer the levy funds.
On the point about obliging employers to have two-thirds of their apprenticeships filled by young people, while we want to ensure that young people and employers are incentivised to take up apprenticeships and are working towards that, one piece of feedback we get from employers about the unspent levy is a lack of flexibility on how to spend it. There is always a balance in ensuring that there is sufficient flexibility for how employers can use their levy while making sure that it delivers on the aim: high-quality, technical apprenticeship schemes that deliver the skills that employers need.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
My Lords, I have received no further requests to speak after the Minister, so I call the mover, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I asked specifically about the skills fund. When it was published, the fund said that it had four items of expenditure—it is a huge fund of over £2 billion, and the first item was £93 million to pay for free training for A-levels. The Government are consulting again on the skills fund; is that proposal on ice or has it been withdrawn?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I will have to undertake to get more detail for the noble Lord on that specific point. I can confirm two things: the current consultation on the skills fund does not mean that existing funding committed under that fund for this year has been put on ice. I referred to the national skills guarantee for level 3 qualifications—of course, a full level 3 is equivalent to A-levels—and the skills bootcamps, which are also funded this year. I undertake to write to him to address his specific point about A-levels.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
I believe I have no further requests to speak after the Minister. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Baker; I am afraid the message arrived rather tardily, but I am sure that that was the technology. I now call the mover, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham.
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her reply, and I realise the constraints a Minister has in replying to a debate of this kind in the Lords. She was obviously trying to be helpful. I was very grateful for the wide level of authoritative support that the amendment received. I hope that, before we return to this subject on Report, she will try to come back with a little more substance in response to the points that were made.
Very briefly, on the first point in the amendment, that we should put the Government’s lifelong learning guarantee on a statutory basis, my noble friend’s only reply was that she saw no need to put it in the Bill. Well, given the problems that often arise between Governments announcing noble intentions and the actual delivery of things on the ground, I beg leave to doubt that. Of course, one can ask the opposite question: what exactly is the reason for resisting putting it in the Bill if the Government are all in favour of it? Given that I so welcome the lifelong learning guarantee, perhaps the Government would consider signing up to it—not in blood exactly, but at least putting themselves under a legal obligation to those who should be entitled to it.
On the questions of expenditure that we have been asking, it is certainly the case that noble Lords kept referring to my being a former Chancellor. I am also a former Minister of Employment and Secretary of State for Education. As a former Chancellor, I am quite traditional; I am fiscally responsible—a bit of a fiscal hawk, sometimes—but I do think there are two subjects on which it is unavoidable for the present Government to spend more money. That means I would probably be at least as hawkish as the present Chancellor in resisting all the other lobbies which are inevitably piling in as the atmosphere of free money prevails. Social care and skills training—filling the skills gap—are irresistible things to which we must devote more resources.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 76A. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Clause 22: Further education in England: intervention
Amendment 76A
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to make it clear that the role of an institution in the further education sector is to ensure that there are no gaps in local provision, and that the Secretary of State must take account of provision from other providers that can reasonably be accessed locally e.g. online.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, the question I ask with Amendment 76A is: who is making sure, in this new world that we are creating, that the overall educational provision at sixth form and beyond is as it should be? I hope we are not dividing the world into academic and technical; there is such a broad stretch across that divide. I hoped that we were trying to heal that divide, but we seem to be creating new structures for driving technical education that do not obviously or easily fit into the structures we have for driving academic education.
On technical education, the Minister told me last time we were here that the Sussex Chamber of Commerce would be a trailblazer. That is an area that is not obviously different from the South East local enterprise partnership. The main differences for the constituent parts of Sussex are that this is a new entity unused to this sort of responsibility; that it has none of the old associations, familiarities and relationships that go with, in this case, either of the local enterprise partnerships that cover the area; and that it is not congruent in any way with the providers of ordinary education, which are, at that level, East Sussex and West Sussex. It is not clear how they will have a co-ordinated voice in dealing with academic provision, because a lot of the academic provision in our part of the world is provided by further education institutions.
If we look at what is happening in Eastbourne, where I live, we are a town of 130,000 people with no substantial academic sixth form provision. There is one fine free school, but it is small. There is an excellent FE college, whose A-level provision consists of business studies, English, history and sociology. In this new arrangement that we are looking at, who will be responsible for making sure that the young people of Eastbourne have the educational opportunities they deserve? It is not clear to me that there is anyone effective to do that without making a change, such as I have suggested in this amendment, to ensure that the FE colleges sweep up where the schools have failed to provide. I beg to move.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, the points from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, are very well made regarding the need to see adequate local provision of technical education, including, as his amendment would provide,
“academic qualifications, taking into account other provision accessible locally”.
I would like to raise one very specific matter. I do not expect the noble Baroness to be able to answer me immediately, but I would be very grateful if she could write to me about it. A very significant aspect of further education—by which I mean post-16 academic education—is the availability of the international baccalaureate. I would be grateful if the noble Baroness could write to let me know what the recent trends are in the availability and provision of the international baccalaureate—availability in terms of how many providers there are in the state system, and provision in terms of the take-up of places over recent years.
I see this as a very important part of academic further education provision. There is a bit of history here that I would like to draw to the attention of the House, because this may be an issue we wish to return to on Report. One issue being debated in respect of this Bill, and which is a live debate in the whole of the post-14 education arena, is what should happen to GCSEs and whether we should move to a more baccalaureate-type system. I am sympathetic to the argument in both respects: that we should conceive of the phase of education from 14 to 18 or 19 as a single phase and that we should move to a broader provision of subjects as part of the mainstream academic curriculum—and indeed the vocational post-16 curriculum—rather than the very traditionally narrow curriculum we have had, with the emphasis typically on three A-levels or technical subjects.
A generation ago, the introduction of the international baccalaureate sought to deal at the post-16 level with this very narrow academic subject focus by introducing a now well-established international course, which is taught in international schools and many schools within national jurisdictions. The international baccalaureate requires six subjects to be taught and studied between the ages of 16 and 18, leading to the diploma of the international baccalaureate, which must include mathematics, a science and a modern foreign language besides, obviously, the language which students study as a matter of course.
It is my view—and the view of a large number of educationalists—that the international baccalaureate is a superior course to A-levels. When I was the Minister responsible for these matters, the judgment we reached was that it was too difficult a reform to carry through, for all kinds of reasons, to replace A-levels entirely with a baccalaureate-type system. It was our policy to make the international baccalaureate much more widely available—and available in state schools as well as private school. As the Minister may know, the international baccalaureate is quite widely available in the private sector but, going back 15 years, it was hardly available at all in the state system.
At the time, we provided a significant incentive for the teaching of the international baccalaureate by requiring that each local education authority area should have at least one provider of the international baccalaureate in either a school, sixth form or further education college. This led to quite a big take-up of the IB, which was a positive development in the education sector and led to a raising of the skill level and an extension of choice.
However, after 2010, the requirement for there to be at least one IB provider in each local education authority area was dropped—not, I think, because the then Education Secretary, Michael Gove, was against the IB but because of funding cuts and insufficient funding in the system to provide for it. My understanding is that the number of providers offering the IB and the number of students studying it have plummeted. I see this as a retrograde step and a significant denial of choice in the education system, particularly for students in the state system because, as I said, there are providers in the private sector and parents can choose to pay for their children to study at schools or colleges that provide the IB.
Can the Minister provide—either to the Committee now or, if she unable to do so, in writing to me and other Members; I perfectly understand that she may not have the figures in her brief—an update on the actual position with the IB in terms of numbers of providers and students and how those numbers have changed in recent years?
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, on Thursday—day 2 of Committee—I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, about the need for the new section to be introduced by Clause 5. It states:
“The governing body of an institution in England … must … from time to time review how well the education or training provided by the institution meets local needs, and … consider what action the institution might take … in order to meet those needs better.”
I said that I did not think this necessary because, to me, it is self-evident; that is what local further education colleges are about. I asked on what basis the Government felt it necessary to draft Clause 5 if there were many failing FE colleges. The noble Baroness made it clear to me that that was not case.
I feel the same about Clause 22 because, again, it seems to be based on the assumption that, for some reason, a number of colleges are operating on a day-to-day basis oblivious to what is happening in their own back yard. I just do not think that is the case. I repeat what I said on Thursday: not every further education college is perfect, does everything it has to do and does everything well, but there seems to be an impression by the Government that there is an attempt to undermine what the FE sector does—quite apart from the fact that, as we heard in the debate on the previous group of amendments, that sector has been seriously and serially underfunded, which can only inhibit what it is able to deliver for its local area.
I find myself a bit uncomfortable with this clause because, if a further education college does not ensure that there are no gaps in the local provision, as this amendment seeks to ensure, then what does it do? I cannot believe that such colleges just turn a blind eye. I cannot argue with Amendment 76A but I must say something to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. He used the example of Eastbourne, which he mentions, along with its 130,000 inhabitants, often. I must visit it some time; it must be a very attractive place. However, even in that local example—and, by all means, use local examples in these debates—I do not think he made the case for there being widespread failure. I repeat the point I made on Thursday: the vast majority of FE colleges know what they need to do for their locality and do it well.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
My Lords, before I call the Minister, I remind Members that, for this week at least, they should send an email to the Table if they wish to speak after the Minister.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 76A relates to intervention in FE college and sixth-form college corporations and designated institutions.
The measures that we set out in Clause 22, to which the amendment relates, will enable the Secretary of State to intervene where the education or training has failed adequately to meet local needs. It is, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, outlined, a new duty under Clause 5, and the corresponding change to the enforcement powers comes in response to putting that duty on local providers. This builds on the existing intervention powers under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 by enabling the Secretary of State to direct the governing body to restructure. This measure is part of a package of reforms, including the introduction of local skills improvement plans and the new duty under Clause 5. However, I can assure noble Lords that the statutory intervention powers are intended to be used only as a last resort—that is, when all other alternative courses of action have failed to secure the improvements necessary to deliver for local learners.
The amendment from my noble friend Lord Lucas seeks to ensure that the Secretary of State takes into account academic qualifications and other local provision when considering how well local needs have been met. I join the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in being fascinated by my noble friend’s descriptions of Eastbourne. I can confirm for him that, at East Sussex College, 118 students are enrolled on A-level courses as their core study course, which is more than 50 in each of the two years. He also mentioned Gildredge House, a free school with around 65 students on level 3 academic programmes. I understand that East Sussex College is undertaking on each of its campuses a review of the specialisms offer that it makes to ensure that it best fits with local needs, and that it is considering enrolment activity and the level of demand from young people.
The assessment we envisage under the Bill will therefore not be restricted to a particular type of provision. Although the Secretary of State must consider the priorities set out in any LSIP, this does not exclude other provisions that are relevant to local needs—including academic provision specifically—also being reflected in the assessment. If there is a failure to meet needs in a local area, there is a responsibility on all the providers serving that area to work together to agree the changes required to bring about improvement. Every college involved in meeting the needs in a local area should be accountable for how well those needs are met.
I hope that these brief remarks provide some reassurance to my noble friend, and I ask him to consider withdrawing his amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that answer. I would be delighted to entertain her in Eastbourne for a day or two, particularly in this weather; I think she would enjoy it.
I understand that there are processes that are supposed to deliver what a local area wants, but they seem to be becoming ever more remote and fractured under the arrangements in this Bill. I remain unconvinced that what we are setting up in this Bill will deliver better provision than we have at the moment, but I will read my noble friend’s answer carefully and with interest. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
My Lords, we now come to the group beginning with Amendment 76B. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Amendment 76B
Baroness Berridge
“Relevant date for purposes of fee limit for certain higher education courses
In paragraph 3(3) of Schedule 2 to the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (the fee limit where the provider has no access and participation plan), omit “before the calendar year”.”Member’s explanatory statement
Certain fee limits for academic years of higher education courses depend on whether the provider had a high level quality rating on a particular date. This new Clause changes that date to 1 January in the calendar year in which the academic year begins from 1 January in the previous calendar year.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I speak to government Amendments 76B and Amendment 101 in my name. They relate to the high-level quality rating, which is currently the teaching excellence and student outcomes framework, known as TEF, for providers without an approved access and participation plan.
Higher education providers with a TEF award currently benefit from an uplift to their fee limit, meaning they are able to charge a higher level than higher education providers without a TEF award. Despite the best efforts of noble Lords and the Government, there is an error in the legislation that could prevent a timely link between TEF awards and a provider’s fee limit. For example, currently, where a provider does not have an approved access and participation plan, whether the provider is entitled to the TEF fee uplift in any academic year is dependent on whether it had an award on 1 January in the calendar year before the relevant academic year. This means that a provider seeking to charge the TEF fee uplift in academic year 2022-23 would be able to do so based on an award in force in January 2021, rather than January 2022, which was the original intent of the legislation. This amendment will correct this and ensure a more timely link between fee limits and TEF, helping to further incentivise excellence in higher education. These amendments are of benefit to the institutions that I outlined.
Amendment 101 is a related consequential amendment to Clause 27, which sets out that the proposed new clause in Amendment 76B will come into force two months after Royal Assent. I beg to move.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, in the previous group on Amendment 76A, the noble Baroness did not reply to my point about the international baccalaureate at all. I fully accept that she may not have the data I was after, but I would be grateful if she could put on record a commitment to write to me about it.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, having had a look at this amendment, I really put my name down to speak to ensure we can thank the Government when they correct things on the go. It is a precedent that should be encouraged as we go through this, so I thank them for doing it. The description of the amendment the noble Baroness gave made sense to me, so more power to their elbow. I hope they will correct things as they go, with great rapidity.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her explanation of these amendments. From what she said, this appears to be a minor change to Schedule 2 to HERA. I gather it will apply only to providers that have a TEF award but not an access and participation plan, which therefore can charge only the basic fee plus a TEF supplement. The legislation currently says that they have to have held the TEF award on 1 January in the year before the course starts, but I presume it should have said on 1 January before the course starts. That is a good lesson to all of us on the importance of careful drafting. Although it went through in 2017, I am glad they have now been able to correct it.
I take this opportunity to ask the Minister a couple of quick questions. First, will any current providers be affected by this? I imagine that none will be, as the last TEF assessment exercise was in 2018-19. All TEF awards had been due to expire this summer, but were extended to 2023 to give the Government time to create a new TEF scheme and make assessments under it. I imagine that means that the only people who will be affected by this amendment, any time soon, are new providers applying for provisional TEF awards. Could she confirm that? Since that provisional award process has only just opened and the awards will not be confirmed until September, I imagine it will only affect courses starting in 2022, but it seems a sensible move.
We are now in the strange position of most providers having a TEF award but being told by the Office for Students not to advertise it, because the assessments that led to them are now out of date. This is a rather sad state of affairs for a system launched with such fanfare, so could the Minister take this opportunity to give the Committee a brief update on what is happening with TEF and when we can expect to see proposals for a new TEF system?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions, particularly the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and his thanks for this technical amendment to fix an error in the existing legislation. In relation to the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, as far as I understand it, the most recent TEF assessments were from 2017-18. This is a change to make the legislation fit for purpose for when the new round of TEF is announced. I will write to her with any update of the course for the new TEF.
I had hoped, given that these amendments would not affect any underlying policies, that noble Lords would be able to support them but, in the circumstances, I beg the leave of the Committee to withdraw Amendment 76B.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
At least I am consistent in forgetting twice. I beg the noble Lord’s pardon. We have no intention not to fund the IB going forward, but I will write to him with the statistics.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 77. Anyone wishing to press this to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 77
“Offence to provide or advertise cheating services
(1) A person commits an offence if the person provides, offers to provide or arranges for a third person to provide an academic cheating service to a student enrolled with a further, higher or post-16 education provider on—(a) a course of study at such an education provider in the United Kingdom, or(b) an overseas course of study provided at such an education provider in the United Kingdom, and the academic cheating service is for commercial purposes.(2) A person commits an offence if the person advertises or causes an advertisement to be published, either directly to a student enrolled with a further, higher or post-16 education provider, or through an intermediary.”
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I bring apologies from my noble friend Lord Storey, who is in foreign parts but assured us, before he went, that he would be able to get connectivity and come in and join us on this and other amendments. He self-evidently is not here, so my noble friend Lord Addington and I will try desperately hard to fill the gap he leaves.
I support this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. He has been assiduous in his efforts to tackle cheating in all its forms. His research has resulted in a “Panorama” programme following foreign student colleges that collected large sums of money to accredit bogus students with qualifications, which were awarded by reputable awarding organisations that had taken their eye off the ball in their scrutiny of candidates and processes. It was horrifying to see how much money changed hands by falsifying student records and buying certificates with no shred of competence. We saw classes of foreign students who could barely say their names in English, with no language or professional ability, yet who, on payment, could obtain genuine certificates with utterly false credentials. Those awarding bodies have now been tasked and scrutinised, and had their processes significantly tightened.
This amendment is aimed at those who seek to part students from their money in return for validation that has no reality. Cheating has become easier in the technological age. It was more arduous when you had to go to a library and photocopy material—literally cut and paste—but there are those with money and very few brains who aspire to qualifications. It is in the interests of those of us who admire our education system that cheating is stopped, at all costs. If this is not already an offence, it should be. This amendment will ensure that those who seek to cheat in this way can be taken to task and it surely has a place in the Bill. I beg to move.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I speak on the subject of cheating partly because I have a son who is an academic and I know what agonies this creates for conscientious tutors. I offer two insights. First, cheating at universities and elsewhere is made much easier by the prevalence of coursework, which means there could have been an increase during Covid, to add to our woes.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, rightly said, it is easier in the technological age. The safest thing is to base assessments on exams in person and, if that is not possible, to have tight turnaround times for papers, because that makes cheating harder. The penalties should also be clear—whether being chucked out of university or made to do another year—and whether they apply to essays, which are under examination with this amendment, or to exams only.
Secondly, it is an international problem. An amendment banning services in the UK, which this seeks to do, will just move these services overseas. It is an important issue and I look forward to hearing from the Minister about how it is best tackled. I very much thank those who have brought the amendment to the House today.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, these essay mills are getting ever more sophisticated and are employing in some cases quite high levels of artificial intelligence to disguise what they are creating based on existing sources so that the cheating software cannot find it. I suspect that there is no reasonable solution if we are to continue with a system where essays produced in unsupervised conditions count towards a qualification. However, there is some hope, and I encourage the Government to look down this avenue in the work that has been done, for instance, by FutureLearn on analysing the pattern of keystrokes made by a particular individual typing an essay and working on that essay while they are in the course of preparing it. That sort of analysis is very difficult to duplicate and defeat. If we use technology to defeat technology, we can again be confident about the quality of essays.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend—despite the fact that he has been defeated by the wonders of technology—here addresses one of the other problems we have. Something went from students who knew certain essays would come up in certain courses at certain times, and vaguely plagiarising them—that went on just about everywhere—to an industry that means students can gain a qualification. Continuous assessment is reckoned to be quite a good way of learning or of assessing somebody’s ability, or has been in many cases. That is particularly vulnerable to some of these services. The sums of money involved are considerable, because people are paying for it. Furthermore, a student who does this is then open to blackmail for the rest of their professional career. Their qualification, which is the way they make their living for the rest of their life, could be invalidated or they could have a black mark against them. They might not have to pay just a few hundred pounds but could end up paying tens of thousands over the course of their lifetime.
I hope that the Minister will give us a positive answer. My noble friend is quite assiduous on this—he has a Private Member’s Bill going through. If I may appeal to those who are planning government business, it might be a quicker and easier way to accept this amendment or one like it than to have to have an entire Bill go through Parliament. There is not much hope of that but let us try.
Can we find out what the Government are planning to do about this? Technical checking of every essay might be possible—I do not know the state of play of the technology—but everything will have to be entered to be assessed by it, and I am not sure how long that takes. We will have to look at this and at things such as dissertations, or studying by oneself, which are a traditional part of long-term studies in further and higher education. These cannot really be done in any other way than a person working independently, unless there is a lot more monitoring or a lot more time spent on it by staff.
We will have to deal with this problem, or at least learn to live with it and minimise its impact. I hope that the Minister can tell us that there is a coherent plan to at least display the dangers of blackmail and coercion that people are exposed to throughout the rest of an academic career. This is a real problem, and if we can solve it or at least make it slightly better now, surely we should.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has withdrawn from this group so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for stepping into the breach and introducing this amendment and thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I may try to fill in some of the gaps left by the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I should say at the start that we fully support the outlawing of cheating services.
The Minister needs to address three questions: is there a problem, is it getting worse, and what is the right policy response? I think we now all agree there is a problem. We discussed this recently at the Second Reading of the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. In responding to that debate, the Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay—acknowledged the growing availability of cheating services and said that this
“puts vulnerable students at risk and threatens the reputation of our world-class higher education sector … it is reprehensible for essay mill companies to profit from a dishonest business that exploits young people’s anxiety and can undermine our world-class institutions.”
Yes, we have a problem. Is it growing? Again, yes, it is. The QAA believes there are now over 1,000 essay mills in operation.
In that debate, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, told me that he had not read the paper by Lancaster and Cotarlan published this year in the International Journal for Educational Integrity. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, has read it or that at least she has been given a summary in her brief. It cites the 2015 work by Ardid et al which found no difference in the results students got when they took exams in person or online, provided that both types of exams were supervised. But when students took an exam online and it was not supervised, they got higher marks. That raised the obvious question as to whether students were using contract cheating in online exams. Lancaster and Cotarlan took up the challenge raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and analysed how one website, Chegg, was used during the pandemic by students in five STEM subjects.
They found that students were using it to request answers to exam-style questions and that these could be put live and answered within the duration of an exam. The number of student requests posted for those five subjects increased by almost 200% between April and August last year compared with the same period the year before. Of course, that was exactly the time when many courses moved to being delivered and assessed online. They conclude that
“students are using Chegg for assessment and exam help frequently and in a way that is not considered permissible by universities.”
In 2016, the QAA said it that would approach the main search engine companies and ask them not to accept adverts for essay mills and to block them from search engines. That does not work. This week I did a search, and loads of them appeared. I visited the Chegg website today and it still says:
“Ask an expert anytime. Take a photo of your question and get an answer in as little as 30 mins.”
There is even a website which acts as a comparison site for essay mills. I went mystery shopping on one website before the Second Reading of the Private Member’s Bill, and last week I tried another one. This time round I priced up an undergraduate essay on Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, with three sources and Chicago referencing. With a new customer’s discount, I could have had 750 words in just three hours for £72. A full 2,500-word essay could be mine in 12 hours for £193. I did not even have to subscribe to find that out.
The noble Lord, Lord Addington, is quite right: if I were a student and I succumbed to this, as well as risking my academic career, I could be putting myself at risk of being blackmailed. The HE blog wonkhe.com has given examples of students who had problems either because they felt the quality of the work was not good enough or they got cold feet, and were told that if they did not pay the fee, and sometimes pay more money, the site would tell the university that they had used an essay mill.
We accept that we have a problem and that it is growing. What is the policy solution? In the past, Ministers have insisted that legislation was not needed, and they would get sector bodies to get tough and issue guidance and penalties. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said that the Government have been working with the HE sector and tech companies but concluded:
“Despite that work, cheating services remain prevalent.”
That takes us to legislation. It is now three years since 46 vice-chancellors wrote a joint letter calling for these websites to be banned. Meanwhile, other countries have banned essay mills, including New Zealand, South Africa and, most recently, Australia and Ireland.
On 25 June, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, mentioned emerging evidence from Ireland and Australia which
“suggests that those laws are deterring essay mills from providing services to students, and regulators there have reported that having the legislation has provided them with more tools to engage students, higher education providers and cheating services”.—[Official Report, 25/6/21; cols. 536-37.]
Can the Minister tell the Committee why the Government do not think British students deserve the same protection from being preyed on as students in those countries? Contract cheating is a growing problem which puts students at risk and threatens academic integrity. If it keeps growing, it will start to disadvantage students who will not cheat, and that is a problem for all of us. We need to know that our doctors, engineers and lawyers have qualified based on their own merits, not on those of strangers on the internet.
So when will the Government act? If the Minister does not like this amendment, fine: she can bring her own back on Report. But if she does not, how long will we have to wait for another legislative opportunity to deal with a problem which even Ministers acknowledge is real and growing? I look forward to hearing her reply.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for moving Amendment 77 on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. It would make it a criminal offence to provide or advertise academic cheating services in connection with post-16 education. I pay tribute to the tenacity and detail with which the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, has given your Lordships examples of the situation, which the Government accept is a growing problem. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, is obviously to be commended for his unstinting efforts to clamp down on essay mills, where unscrupulous online operators write assignments and other pieces of work for students for financial gain.
The Government have consistently made it clear that using these services is unacceptable. Research indicates that cheating services are prevalent, and the evidence suggests that higher education is the area of greatest risk. This is despite the Government working closely with the higher education sector to clamp down on the cheating services, and we have worked with the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the National Union of Students and Universities UK to produce guidance for providers on how to combat contract cheating. On a specific point raised by several noble Lords, we have worked with the National Union of Students, which has also provided advice for students so that they are aware of the consequences of contract cheating, sending a clear message that these services are not legitimate.
The use of plagiarised assessments is, of course, unacceptable and, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said, it devalues the hard work of those who succeed on their own merit, as well as potentially undermining the reputation of our world-class higher education sector.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, will know, that is why the Government welcomed the principles set out in the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, the Higher Education Cheating Services Prohibition Bill, at its Second Reading, and we agree that we should put an end to the scourge of essay mills.
However, the noble Lord’s amendment would make the provision and advertising of cheating services to all post-16 further education and higher education a criminal offence. Although we support the principles behind the amendment, there is little evidence to suggest that cheating services are a problem in post-16 and further education providers, as they are for higher education. We are therefore of the view that this Bill is not the appropriate vehicle for this important policy.
To note the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, the amendment lacks sufficient legal detail and precision to demonstrate how it would work in practice. We shall, however, be working with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on his Bill, which covers much of the same ground. It is important that, when we legislate in this area, we legislate correctly and make clear the implications for those who use these services. Sometimes, that can be a response of support for vulnerable students; but, in certain situations, that will be a sanction. We need to make clear, as the amendment does not, what will be the penalties for either advertising or being a service that offers cheating services, or essay mills, and what sanction will follow. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, will feel comfortable in withdrawing the amendment.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that positive reply, and those who supported the amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for their contributions—and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, not only for filling in the gaps but for her substantial research and powerful reasons for legislating on these matters. I come back to the point made by my noble friend Lord Addington about how cheating can completely blight your future career, making you open to blackmail and the like.
I sort of accept the reasons that the Minister gave for not accepting the amendment, particularly with her encouragement that my noble friend’s Bill may receive government backing, because I do think this is an incredibly important issue. We are at risk of undermining our higher education and further education systems if cheating continues at this incredible level. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 78. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Amendment 78
Lord Addington
“Further education colleges: careers advice
(1) In carrying out inspections of further education colleges, Ofsted has a duty to take into account the careers advice provided to students by colleges, including for the delivery of LSIPs.(2) Ofsted may only give a good or outstanding rating to a college if it considers that the careers advice provided by the college is of a good or outstanding standard.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment aims to ensure that young people are supported in their career choices with good careers guidance by making poor careers provision a limiting factor for grading in inspections.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this group of amendment refers to careers guidance. They are very appropriate to go into the Bill, and many different options run through them. The one tabled by my noble friend is more compact, but with more information than we find in some of the others. Any one of these approaches is valid, because we need to get something in the Bill that gives some guidance through our system of education.
At the moment, our teachers have gone through a series of exams—GCSEs, A-levels and university—and know what they are doing there. The system knows what it is doing. If we can provide a better service that takes people through the various aspects of what is on offer to various people—particularly in further education—they will get a better idea of what their options are as a student or person going through training, and can go back to refer to it.
The principle has had almost universal agreement; it is just about how we implement it. How will we make sure that somebody knows this quite complicated series of routes? It is further complicated by the fact that, at the moment, further education is the thing you do if you are not academic. The Bill suggests that there are ways forward for which a degree of academic rigour will be required but which are actually training—they are level 4 and 5 qualifications.
As has already been stated today, I have heard that we have been short of people qualified at technician level for 30 years—and I think the shortage goes back further than that. We have always had this problem. There has always been this approach of “Well, you can if you want to”, or “If your A-levels aren’t quite good enough to get to university, you can take on this.” There are myriad qualifications lower down—justifiably, because you have myriad training paths to go down. We will need somebody who studies the options to explain to students and parents how to proceed. I hope that we will get an idea in the debate about the Government’s thinking on this and how they will change the process because, at the moment, it does not matter what you do in the other sector if you do not let anybody know about it in a coherent and planned pattern.
If I remember correctly, my noble friend’s amendment would introduce interventions in certain years before students make decisions, which may well be a valid approach; certainly, it is as good as any I have heard so far. We must make sure that people understand, know, make decisions and plan their lives and the various steps so that they are taking these options on board—or at least are not ruling them out.
Most people generally know where they are headed in education by the age of about 14, so some form of intervention from about then onwards would be sensible, but it will be a difficult job and will require specialist, trained people with a great deal of knowledge to do it properly. It is something we should have done a long time ago, and I hope that, when she replies, the Minister will give us at least a coherent steer as to where the Government’s thinking is. At the moment, we are dealing with something that simply does not work and should have been dealt with a long time ago. I beg to move.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, first, I owe an apology. Normally when I speak in this House I ad lib from a handful of notes and do not read out a written speech. The last time I read out a written speech that I had written myself was 29 years ago, when I was a Minister. So I am breaking my record, and I am reading it out only because this matter involves the law. Not being a lawyer, I remember some advice my father gave me a very long time ago. He said, “When you grow up, be careful what you say to a priest, a doctor or a lawyer”. So I ask noble Lords’ forgiveness.
I declare my interest as chairman of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust. In 2017, the Government accepted my amendment to the Technical and Further Education Act to allow providers of alternative education, such as FE colleges, apprenticeship providers, private learning and training course providers, and university technical colleges, to go into secondary schools and explain to students the various alternative education pathways for their education and training. At the time this was looked on as a breakthrough in careers guidance.
When my old department was devising the legislation, I asked it to make it a statutory duty for schools to provide such meetings, but I was told that the Department for Education would depend on giving ministerial guidance to all secondary schools, and the secondary schools would follow. The advice was largely disregarded by schools and, when complaints were made to Ministers about schools refusing access to specific providers, such as university technical colleges, the department did not act on these complaints to insist that the meetings should take place. There has been no help from the department for the last three years.
This amendment would make it a statutory duty for all secondary schools to provide meetings with their students between 1 September and 28 February in each academic year. These dates are essential because school recruitment lists end on 31 March. By then, students will have selected which school/education pathway they wish to attend. The amendment specifically provides for years 8 and 9, year 11, and year 13, which means that 13 and 14 year-olds, 15 and 16 year-olds, and 18 year-olds will be advised of the various alternatives available for their education and training.
The amendment has secured cross-party support from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, from the Labour Party, the noble Lord, Lord Storey, from the Lib Dems, and the noble Lord, Lord Field, from the Cross Benches. I have taken separate legal advice and I am assured that this amendment would work satisfactorily.
I acknowledge that improvements to implement the Baker clause have been taken by Ofsted and the Government. Ofsted has said:
“If a school is not meeting the requirements of the Baker Clause, inspectors will state this in the inspection report. They will consider what impact this has on … CIEAG and the subsequent judgement for personal development.”
That is most welcome, although it does not directly say whether this would influence the inspectors’ judgment of the overall position of the school.
Robert Halfon, the chair of the Education Select Committee in the Commons, has said that, if a school has not implemented the Baker clause, it should not be rated either good or outstanding. I understand that he has support from members of his committee on that position. This is putting Ofsted’s judgment very close to the judgment on safeguarding, which merits inevitably an “inadequate”. It should also be remembered that only a relatively small number of schools get inspected each year, and some heads may be encouraged to delay a meeting so that it does not take place and risk whether that will be noticed. One should never underestimate the determination of heads of secondary schools to prevent their students knowing about alternative pathways and so keep them in their school’s sixth form, even knowing that several of them would do much better in alternative education.
The Government have also significantly improved the guidance, which was issued only on Friday in a document of 43 pages. I might be the only Member of the House who has read it from beginning to end. I do not recommend it for light reading. Page 7 confirms that the Baker clause has not been implemented; page 14 makes it clear that any complaint against a refusal of access should be heard locally and made to the governing body of the school, which will make a decision on it. This could be a lengthy and expensive process.
The case can then be referred to the Department for Education, but the department recognises that it cannot change an academy’s decision about a complaint—it does not have that power. The role of the department is solely to ensure that the complaint has been handled properly. This means that it is clear that the Baker clause does not impose a statutory duty to provide a meeting, because if it did the department could tell the school that it must arrange a meeting forthwith. No such direction has been given by the department over the last three years. So the present law is defective, and the Government recognise in this document that it has to be changed.
Page 35 makes it very clear that the department wants to see the Baker clause implemented. It says it will “consult on policy proposals” and announce these in September, and it plans to change the law for January 2022. I, of course, welcome that.
My amendment would provide a solution to this problem. I invite the department and the Minister to study it very carefully, as it would clearly create a statutory duty for a school to provide a meeting for all students of the appropriate ages between 1 September and 28 February. Those dates are very important as school admission lists close on 31 March. Therefore, a meeting in the summer term would be futile. Moreover, in the summer term schools are preoccupied with revision, and in June and July, as a result of exams, they are half empty.
I am also glad that the Government make it clear that heads cannot select to attend these meetings those students they want to off-roll and send to other schools. That is an improvement on what they have said in the past.
The guidance, which is good, goes on to say that all students must be able to attend to hear post-16 and post-18 options. This seems to exclude university technical colleges, studio schools and FE colleges that wish to recruit at 14. Year 8 students at the age of 13 must also hear these options. This is recognised in the guidance document on page 41, which says that events for UTCs should take place in the autumn term for year 8 students—a quite specific statement. That should also apply to studio schools and FE colleges—I hope that the Minister or the officials are noting that—because they also recruit at 14. I very much welcome that clarity. I am satisfied that it does make quite clear that UTCs can apply to have meetings in the autumn term, but I suggest that this could be extended to the spring term as well. It is a matter of logistics for the local school as to whether it is more convenient.
This is a very clear statement of the policy that the Government want to pursue, but it must be backed up with a statutory duty that schools must comply with the guidance. I suggest to the Government and to the Minister that, during Recess, I could meet with her—I have not had the chance to meet with her personally, which I am sure I would enjoy—and her officials, as they have made it clear that they would welcome views. When we return in September for Report, we will know what the legal position is. If it is satisfactory and the duty of the school is clearly defined, it will not be necessary to submit this amendment for debate. But if it is not clear and there is not a very clear duty for the schools to arrange these meetings, this amendment will be retabled and put to a decision of the House.
Lord Patel (CB) [V]
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, and I support his amendment. If he has to bring it back, I will support it and join him in the Lobby.
I will speak to Amendments 83 and 84, which would ensure that there is always an up to date careers advice strategy in England. I referred to this in my short Second Reading speech, saying that simply offering more further education and training courses alone, although clearly important, will not deliver on the levelling-up agenda and improve the UK’s skills picture. I made the point that advice and guidance on how to access courses and the pathways into certain careers are central to the Government’s ambitions and to the ambitions of the Bill.
In 2017, the Government published a careers strategy, which acknowledged that careers advice had for some time been unevenly distributed across the country, hindering opportunities for some groups to gain insights into different career options. Its aim was to make Britain a fairer place and promote social mobility by ensuring that everyone, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to build a rewarding career. It also promised to assess the breadth and effectiveness of current careers provision in schools and colleges on STEM subjects, and test new approaches if necessary.
The strategy provided a central role for the Careers & Enterprise Company—CEC—tasking it with co-ordinating support for schools and colleges across all the Gatsby benchmarks. It asked schools and colleges to meet the standards set out by the eight Gatsby benchmarks, and introduced the National Careers Service. Assessments of the impact of the careers strategy to date have highlighted the progress made in terms of careers provision in schools and colleges in England as a result of the strategy, and the impact it has had on young people.
A recent report published by the Careers & Enterprise Company, which looked at the impact of schools following the Gatsby benchmarks on post-16 destinations, found that there is a positive relationship between schools using Gatsby benchmarks and where young people end up post 16. The report asserts that improvements made in relation to the Gatsby benchmarks have led to fewer young people becoming NEET—I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, that that is a terrible acronym—saving the Government about £60 million a year in lifetime NEET costs alone.
A different report, by EngineeringUK and seven other STEM and careers organisations, and the Royal Academy of Engineering report, which I mentioned at Second Reading, also highlighted the importance of good careers provision in schools and colleges in England in the drive to encourage more and more diverse groups of young people to choose a career in STEM, and in particular engineering. For example, it praised the positive impact that careers hubs have had on STEM careers provision in schools and colleges. I will come back to that point in relation to Amendment 84. However, the report from the Royal Academy of Engineering also highlights some of the challenges that still persist. It shows that Covid-19 has had a profound impact on how schools can—and do—deliver employer engagement, for example, and it draws attention to the capacity and funding issues hampering the ambition to provide insights into the kinds of careers on offer in the STEM sector to all young people, rather than a select few.
For the Government to succeed in making the UK a science superpower, to achieve net zero and to experience economic success, they need young people and adults to know what careers are on offer and how to get there. As it stands, many pupils leave school unaware of the exciting career opportunities available to them, for example, in the STEM sector. A misunderstanding of STEM professions among many young people and a lack of awareness of the pathways that can be taken into STEM careers mean that many pupils, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, still do not visualise themselves being successful in these roles. In order for the Bill to succeed, we need to sort out the loans system, and make sure that the lifetime skills guarantee is truly that—but we also need to make sure that young people and adults have access to information, advice and guidance and are inspired to go into the careers that this country needs.
The 2017 careers strategy came to an end in 2020 and there is as yet nothing to replace it. Although the White Paper implies that the Government will continue with this strategy, I would like to know from the Minister what the plans are. My amendment aims to ensure that careers provision will continue to be considered an important piece of the education and skills puzzle, and will have the status and funding it requires to succeed. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, also mentioned schools and, although my amendment does not include schools or secondary education for skills advice, I think that should be included.
I will now move on very briefly to Amendment 84, which follows on from Amendment 83. The proposed new clause looks to ensure that all further education providers in England—and, through that, by default, all secondary education providers—will be able to access the support, training and guidance that careers hubs can offer. As defined on the CEC website, a careers hub is a group of between 20 and 40 secondary schools and colleges in a dedicated area which work together to deliver the Gatsby benchmarks. Collaborating with business partners, the public, education and voluntary sectors, they help deliver the Gatsby benchmarks and improve careers outcomes for young people.
As I mentioned in my earlier contribution, career hubs play a pivotal role in the careers provision landscape. Schools and colleges that are part of a careers hub generally perform better in the Gatsby benchmarks. They also fare better on certain aspects of STEM careers provision than those not in the hub. For example, among schools and colleges in careers hubs recently surveyed by EngineeringUK, 80% said their pupils received at least one STEM employer encounter every year, compared with 53% among schools and colleges not in the careers hubs. The Skills for Jobs White Paper, which predates the Bill, made a commitment to continue with the rollout of careers hubs in England. However, the White Paper was much less clear on timelines and the extent to which the network will be expanded. The Bill itself makes no mention of careers hubs, so I ask the Minister: is it the Government’s intention to continue with the careers hubs, and will they support the CEC in rolling out this programme? Will it be rolled out by the end of 2022?
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 83 and 84 in this group, from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and it is a pleasure to follow him. I will also speak in support of Amendment 78, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and Amendment 82, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. My approach tends to be the opposite of that of the noble Lord, Lord Baker; I tend to start with a written speech and then have to try to update it in line with what people have said before—which sometimes results in a greater degree of incoherence than might otherwise have been the case.
A comprehensive, well-informed and properly funded system of careers information, advice and guidance for people of all ages and stages should be an integral part of our education and skills system. Such a system needs to be based around professional advisers who, firstly, have a very good awareness and information about the opportunities and skills available in their area and, therefore, should be properly engaged in the local skills improvement plan process; and, secondly, are capable of giving personal advice to the individuals they work with. That means, firstly, being able to understand the interests and abilities of those individuals and, secondly—by no means the lesser part—understanding the different pathways and approaches to pursing those interests and achieving the aims that the individual seeks.
The Bill is designed to create the framework for the post-16 education system going forward. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, it would seem extraordinary if such a framework made no reference to careers guidance. The four amendments in this group seek to ensure that the proposed new arrangements under the Bill include essential provisions relating to careers guidance. The one I would perhaps add to those—or at least to the planned guidance on LSIPs—is a requirement for careers guidance professionals to be fully involved in the development of local skills improvement plans, along with the other partner organisations.
Amendment 83 would introduce a duty to publish a careers strategy for England, with updates every three years. As my noble friend said earlier, the careers strategy launched in 2017, which expired at the end of last year, has played an important part in improving the quality of careers guidance over recent years, largely through the efforts of the Careers & Enterprise Company, the National Careers Service and other bodies, including LEPs, careers hubs and the Career Development Institute, representing careers professionals. One of the key elements of that was including a requirement for employer engagement and workplace experiences, which again links to the Bill’s aims.
Careers guidance nationally is now less patchy than it was, and schools are making steady progress towards achieving the eight Gatsby benchmarks of good career guidance. I hope the Minister will indicate in response how that momentum will be maintained, with a careers strategy that properly integrates national and local needs and provides the resources and professional support to schools and colleges to deliver careers guidance in line with those needs.
Local careers hubs have been a central feature of the strategy and currently cover 45% of secondary schools and colleges in England, with a focus on areas of disadvantage. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned, they have proved highly effective in careers education delivery, with results better than those in areas that do not have careers hubs, and should be available to all education providers across England, as required by Amendment 84.
Other aims of a new careers strategy might include ensuring lifelong availability of personal, face-to-face, professional careers guidance for everyone who needs it; boosting the pipeline of qualified careers development professionals to provide that personal guidance—the Government have put resource into the National Careers Service, but other professional advisers need funding as well; increasing co-operation between the Careers & Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service—I would be interested to hear when we are going to hear some of the results of the work that Sir John Holman is doing in that area; and including the role of careers guidance in initial teacher training, so that new teachers are fully aware of the importance of that role.
Of course, the strategy would also need to ensure that there is adequate funding so that schools and colleges can access the support they need to deliver high-quality careers guidance. A while ago it was the responsibility of schools—it still is—but they do not have all the resources or skills they need to deliver it.
Amendment 78 would require Ofsted to take into account the careers advice provided by FE colleges in conducting its inspections, and further would make it impossible for a college to receive a good or outstanding rating unless its careers advice were also rated good or outstanding. This would provide an important incentive for colleges to give proper focus to their careers guidance efforts. I hope the Minister will either accept it or at least explain what other mechanisms the Government might use to ensure that careers guidance in colleges meets required standards.
Finally, Amendment 82 from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, provides another vital brick in the construction of a strong careers guidance system. As he said, the Baker clause inserted into the Technical and Further Education Act 2017 is honoured more in the breach than the observance, so Amendment 82 would make it a statutory duty for secondary schools to provide such access and is more specific about the precise form it should take.
The great majority of apprentices I encounter still have not learned about apprenticeship opportunities from their schools. This amendment could make a real difference in making more young people aware of the technical education, training and employment opportunities available to them, including apprenticeships, and I strongly support it. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government will ensure that high-quality career guidance will be an integral part of the system created by the Bill.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, particularly the detail of Amendment 82 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, because of its focus on the years before further education comes into play. These are the years when choices are determined and motivation aroused. If we want to make a success of further education and produce the skills our economy would so much thrive on, we need to extend the reach of these opportunities to all our children and attract those who might not otherwise have the confidence or aspiration.
This is particularly important in light of the Covid pandemic. The Bill could have been brought before the pandemic, so little account does it take of the effects on education. Indeed, it probably was worked out before the pandemic—but Covid mattered to education. Its damaging effects on achievement, participation and morale mean that many young people have quite lost sight of what careers they might strive for, so these amendments are all the more important, quite apart from their general value to access to higher technical education.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con) [V]
My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests as a non-executive director of the Careers & Enterprise Company. It is a pleasure to follow noble Lords in speaking to these four amendments. As others have said, their overall purpose is to ensure that all pupils get the best possible advice about future careers that may be open and attractive to them—that they get information about all types of education establishment, including those offering technical education, and the steps needed to get there, and are inspired about their futures.
As I said in the last Committee session, although the Bill looks particularly at post-16 education, careers education is vital right the way through, even from the earliest stages, including the upper levels of primary school. Indeed, that inspiration about the future is why I wanted the Careers & Enterprise Company to be set up: to bridge the gap that had emerged between the world of work and employers and that of education. It was based on a model I had seen operating in Loughborough called Bridge to Work.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and other noble Lords for their remarks about the Careers & Enterprise Company. In November 2020 the company published a report, Careers Education in England’s Schools and Colleges. It said:
“England now has the foundations of a coherent and well-established careers education system, driven nationally by the internationally recognised Gatsby Benchmarks, and delivered locally through The Careers & Enterprise Company’s strategic partnerships with Local Enterprise Partnerships, Mayoral combined authorities and Local Authorities.”
Previously in Committee we have discussed the importance of involving mayoral combined authorities, local authorities and others in the local skills improvement plans.
In relation to the amendments before us, I urge noble Lords to look at the research reports on the Careers & Enterprise Company website, in particular one dated 23 June this year, Careers Leadership in Colleges. I also encourage noble Lords to find out more, perhaps locally, about the work done by the magnificent careers leaders in our schools and colleges across the country—particularly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, just reminded us, in the face of the Covid pandemic.
I welcome the mention of careers hubs in Amendment 84. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, has already set out the significant improvements, and the success that careers hubs are having. His amendment calls for the Secretary of State to ensure that all further education providers give enough access to the support offered by careers hubs. That should already be happening—careers hubs provide a central plank of the skills for jobs White Paper and are designed to bring together employers, schools and colleges, apprenticeship and training providers and others aligned with national skills and local jobs—but clearly there is some way to go, so the sentiment of Amendment 84 is absolutely right.
Noble Lords have mentioned the importance of the eight Gatsby benchmarks. The measurement that schools and colleges are doing against those Gatsby benchmarks is the reason why we are able to say that over the last five years, we have had the strong foundations and coherent careers strategy that we have not had before.
I listened with great interest to the speech by my noble friend Lord Baker. Although he has not met the current Education Minister, he met me several times when I was Education Secretary and I enjoyed our conversations very much. I absolutely understand the rationale behind his amendment. I would just draw attention to what he is proposing with Gatsby benchmark 7, which is about ensuring that schools and colleges make sure that there are encounters with further and higher education providers, including independent training providers. Schools and colleges are not able to show that they have achieved that Gatsby benchmark if they have not ensured that their students understand the full range of learning opportunities available to them, both academic and vocational routes to learning. Schools have to satisfy six criteria, including providing information on the full range of apprenticeships, encounters with further and higher education, including independent training providers, and university visits. My noble friend might say that if colleges and schools are aiming for that Gatsby benchmark, Ministers should accept his amendment, which would enable them to fulfil it. I will listen to with great interest to the Minister’s response.
My noble friend Lord Baker also rightly drew attention to the Department for Education’s very recently updated statutory careers guidance that it has just issued, drawing attention to schools’ and colleges’ legal requirement to provide an access duty, commonly known as the Baker clause, and to make sure that they have put arrangements in place to comply fully with the law, but also with the Ofsted school inspection handbook. Ofsted has made it a legal requirement to comment on the careers guidance at the further education colleges that are at the heart of the Bill.
Lastly, although we are talking about careers advice and guidance in education settings, we should never forget that some of the most influential people in helping young people to find their future inspiration are the adults around them—parents, families, carers and others. Who knows? For some, it may even be a visit to Westminster that leads them to decide that a career in politics is for them.
There are undoubtedly valid points in all these amendments and I hope the Minister will reflect on them. However, I also hope that noble Lords will appreciate that much is now working in careers provision in England, thanks to the consistent approach over recent years. The need now is to keep up the momentum and to ensure that any extra asks of the careers system are rooted in evidence.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes and to hear of her practical support for career hubs.
I support those who have emphasised the importance of careers guidance in schools and colleges, particularly technical options and employer engagement. These are one of the issues that I always mention when I do Speakers for Schools. I make a point of visiting the arts, crafts, music, photography and other non-academic facilities because the creative sector is hugely important to individuals and to UK success.
The issue is particularly difficult for those who do not have parents who know much about career options. You can find yourself on the wrong path unless you talk early on to a knowledgeable adviser. Funnily enough, I know this from my own experience. Having been to Oxford University, I wanted to set up a landscape gardening business but discovered that I would have to go back to an educational institution to fill the science gaps in my convent education before I could do the necessary training. Eventually I joined the Civil Service instead.
Many people less fortunate than me fall through gaps in the education system. So I should add that I very much endorse the thrust of what my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke of Nottingham said earlier, in a brilliant speech, about the need to find a way of helping those who missed out, particularly at levels 2 and 3—some of them no doubt because they did not receive careers advice at the right stage of life.
I am not sure that the answer to the problem is yet another strategy, as proposed in Amendment 83. We just need Ministers to require all pupils to be given careers advice—for example, a minimum of twice in schools, once before they start GCSEs and once before A-levels or, in either case, the equivalent. Technical colleges and universities should also be required to have career hubs of some kind, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, has argued. Visits from businesspeople and other role models should be positively encouraged as part of a rich curriculum. Such a system might also require some extra funding.
I look forward to hearing the Minister’s plans. I will listen carefully to her responses to the various options, including the mechanisms that would be needed for enforcement, particularly the idea of a statutory duty that was put forward by my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking, who has given us a lifetime of educational innovation and achievement, for which are most thankful.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Baroness’s remark that she wanted to become a landscape gardener but ended us as a civil servant could make the brilliant first sentence of an autobiography, with us all intrigued as to how the intent to become the one ended up in the more humdrum reality of the other. I only hope that, maybe by utilising all the opportunities of lifelong or lifetime learning, she is able to indulge her passion. She has great artistic genius and this may be the moment when she could set up a new enterprise.
There are two issues here. The first is the careers guidance to students in schools and colleges about what should happen after they leave that institution. The second is the more specific issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, of advertising options to students in secondary schools for moving to alternative providers, including between the ages of 11 and 16—when they might be better served by, for example, one of the noble Lord’s university technical colleges—and seeing that that advice is made available to them.
We need to accept that, as is the experience of all of us in the House, careers advice and guidance has never been done well. The truth is that schools with a more academic bent—which I am glad to say is now most schools, but even until quite recently, they were in the minority—have always been pretty good at giving advice and guidance on universities. That is because teachers are graduates and know about universities, and schools are judged on the university destinations of their more able students. However, those schools have traditionally been poor or worse at providing options for technical and further education. That is partly because they are not incentivised to do so, since public authorities and the inspectorate mostly do not notice whether they do or not, but also because teachers by definition have very little experience of these areas. There are almost no teachers who themselves have done apprenticeships or gone on to further education.
So we need to accept that this has never been well done. I suppose that in all areas of policy there is golden-ageism—“30 years ago it was done brilliantly and it has all degenerated since”—but we must accept that the old-style careers service was not great. It did not turn up in most schools, and when it did it was pretty haphazard. It was not regarded as a high priority by local authorities, and schools’ engagement with it was generally a low priority too.
The various incarnations of the careers service—up to and including the Careers & Enterprise Company, which came partly from the wholesale privatisation of the old careers service and the requirement that it be disbanded, which was a draconian step that I would never have taken—have not led to great careers guidance in schools. All those who do good work in this area should be applauded, and the Gatsby benchmarks are great. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and the Careers & Enterprise Company, which I hear some good accounts of and some accounts that it barely infringes on the work of schools at all, are to be encouraged. However, there is a systemic problem that we have never properly addressed, which is how we ensure that within each institution there is a facility—which in my experience always means a person—responsible for delivering careers guidance, including technical education guidance.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I start with the areas where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and principally join in his praises for Sir Kevin Satchwell, a truly extraordinary, outstanding head; there are only ever a very few people like him in the system. The more we can listen to and learn by him the better. I certainly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that the core to getting careers education right is to have someone strong in each school charged with that responsibility. The focus of parents’ interest in schools is: where am I sending my child in life? What is their future? Where will they end up? What am I equipping them to be able to do? University is just a stepping-stone; it is the quality of insight and advice available in school that is really important, as is the status given to that within the school. Taking an interest in a pupil’s career has to be a high-status activity—up there with sport in some schools and mathematics in others. It is just as important. The people doing it should be painted wearing just as much purple as their academic colleagues.
This is something that ought perhaps to be secured by making it clear that Ofsted will take a real interest in the quality of the advice being provided in schools. None the less, looking at the history of careers advice, something has always been greatly lacking, because, unless they have had an extraordinarily broad career, someone working in a school has access only to a pretty partial view of what is going on in the world; certainly not a broad view of what areas are developing and how things are changing. It would be good to use the opportunity of this Bill. I hope that others will agree on an amendment for Report that puts careers advice and guidance right at the centre of this process.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, as furlough ends, no community will be untouched by unemployment. It is vital, therefore, that a joined up, place-based employment, skills and careers system offers adults and young people the recovery they deserve by providing access to quality education and training opportunities. We know that all FE colleges and sixth-form colleges have been required to secure access to independent careers guidance since 2013. However, the quality of careers advice has been subject to frequent criticism and reforms have been made since that time including, as mentioned, the establishment of the National Careers Service and the government quango the Careers & Enterprise Company.
In 2019, the Local Government Association called on the Government to
“end the patchwork of careers activity in England”,
and hand funding and control of employment schemes to local authorities, as they were responsible for providing a careers service prior to the Education Act 2011. It fell on deaf ears. In 2019, the Augar review of post-18 education stated that it believed secondary school careers support to be “still underfunded” and recommended that every secondary school become part of a careers hub run by the Careers & Enterprise Company to work with schools. My noble friend Lord Adonis has taken that idea much further and talked about individuals within schools. I was very lucky to work for 20 years with an inspirational careers teacher called Helen Lima about whom, in our last inspection, an Estyn inspector said, “That is the best careers lesson I have ever seen”. So we were able to give the best hands-on, quality careers advice to our pupils.
My first question for the Minister is: why are schools not already allowing a range of providers to have access to young people as part of their careers education? The Government introduced something similar to this a few years ago in an earlier amendment to the Technical and Further Education Act 2017, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who got the Government to accept his new clause as an amendment. However, having to bring this back again clearly demonstrates that it has not worked in practice, and that is why we caution so assiduously about so many parts of this unrefined Bill.
Many assurances have already been given by Ministers on previous days in responses to proposed amendments, saying that we should not be probing about this and seeking to improve the glaring deficits that can be changed only by further legislation. However, let us pause and look at what happened here with careers education. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has had to revisit his earlier work from four years ago because, unless instructions are on a statutory footing, advice will be ignored.
This clause mandates schools and colleges to give training providers the opportunity to talk to students of certain ages about technical qualifications and apprenticeships. As mentioned by my noble friend Lord Adonis, UTCs have this is problem because they only start recruiting at the age of 14.
In a report published in May this year, the universities admissions service warned that one-third of students are not told about apprenticeships, despite this being a legal requirement for schools. It claimed that only around half of those currently studying in FE colleges receive their entitlement. A survey by UCAS found that three-quarters of students said that it was “easy to find information” about higher education, compared to only a quarter who said the same about apprenticeships. Is this acting in the students’ best interests? I think not.
The UCAS report states:
“While most people appreciate that apprenticeships are there as an option, they are not sure either how to get information … or indeed where they can lead.”
Oli de Botton, the chief executive of the Government’s careers quango, the Careers & Enterprise Company, told the AELP conference recently that it was
“true historically that there hasn’t been enough access for ITPs or enough information about apprenticeships and technical routes for young people”.
The eight Gatsby benchmarks have been mentioned by several noble Lords. The first is “A stable careers programme”. Despite assurances, I believe that we are some way off this stability.
On 16 June 2021, in the other place, the Member for Workington presented his Private Member’s Bill, the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill, which would extend the duty to provide careers guidance in schools. Mr Jenkinson stated that the Bill would extend the requirements to provide careers guidance to children in year 7 and would also implement the proposals in the skills White Paper.
Therefore, the key here is to ensure that the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and others in the Bill are as good as they can be after proper and considered scrutiny by Her Majesty’s Opposition. The key is also to ensure that the Government take full account of past mistakes when legislating in this area, ensure that it is properly put into practice this time and act in the best interests of students, instead of an ideology that serves little purpose or is not rooted in the reality of actual practice in education.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, the Government strongly believe that young people and adults at all stages of their careers need to be equipped to make informed choices and able to gain the qualifications they need to progress in their chosen field. That is why we already have a legal framework in place that requires schools and colleges to provide independent careers guidance to all 12 to 18 year-olds.
My noble friend Lord Baker’s amendment, which led to the commencement of the Baker clause in 2018, referred to by several noble Lords, also means that schools now have a statutory duty to provide opportunities for pupils to meet apprenticeship providers and learn about technical education options.
We are investing over £100 million in 2021-22 in careers provision. This includes funding for the National Careers Service to provide careers guidance to people of all ages, and funding for the Careers & Enterprise Company, to support schools and colleges to meet the Gatsby benchmarks, the Government’s framework for young people’s careers guidance.
I turn first to Amendment 78, so well introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on behalf of his noble friend. Section 125 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 already requires Ofsted to consider the quality of the careers offer at further education colleges when conducting standard inspections. Ofsted also comments on it in the inspection report. This applies to all 16 to 18 year-olds as well as students aged 19 to 25 for whom an education, health and care plan is maintained and who attend institutions in the further education sector.
Ofsted’s grade descriptors set out an expectation that a good FE and skills provider will provide high-quality, up-to-date and locally relevant careers guidance and unbiased information about potential next steps to everyone.
Local skills improvement plans will provide a source of independent information to strengthen Ofsted’s monitoring and inspection of providers’ performance and outcomes, including their contribution to meeting the skills needs of the local area. FE colleges will be able to take the plans into account when delivering high-quality careers guidance. We will encourage careers leaders in colleges to interpret data on emerging and changing skills needs for their students.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, asked about the reverse interaction, with careers leaders in colleges being able to input into the local skills improvement plans. We will explore that through the trailblazers, as we discussed in earlier parts of the Bill, and, depending on what we learn from that process, it may be best placed in the statutory guidance that will be put in place to guide the development of LSIPs.
My noble friend Lord Baker’s Amendment 82 seeks to make it a duty for schools to allow access to alternative education providers. As my noble friend set out, we are committed to implementing and strengthening the Baker clause, which is already in place, so that all pupils receive information about apprenticeships and technical education qualifications.
In the Skills for Jobs White Paper, we announced a three-point plan to strengthen the clause. First, we are introducing a new minimum requirement, covering
“who is to be given access to which pupils and when”.
Secondly, we are introducing
“tougher formal action against non-compliance”.
Thirdly, “government-funded careers support” for schools will be made conditional on complying with the Baker clause. We want to make sure that any changes that we make are the right ones, which is why the department plans to consult on proposals to strengthen the legislation, with the intention of then introducing secondary legislation.
I do not think that now is the right time to introduce new primary legislation here, when we are still working to strengthen and ensure compliance with the first Baker clause and have a legislative route by which we can do so. I would love to meet my noble friend to discover more about this; however, I go on maternity leave on Thursday, so I might have to make provision for officials to reach out to the noble Lord to discuss our new proposals and make sure that, ahead of Report, we have had full engagement with him on what our plans are.
Amendment 83 from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, seeks to ensure that there is always an up-to-date careers strategy in England. The Government have already taken steps towards this—for example, in the Skills for Jobs White Paper, we announced measures to deliver our long-term vision of a high-functioning national careers system. Professor Sir John Holman has been appointed as the independent strategic adviser on careers guidance. He is advising on greater local and national alignment between the National Careers Service and the Careers & Enterprise Company and will advise on the development of a cohesive careers system for the long term. I am afraid I do not have an update for the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and other noble Lords on Sir John’s work at this time. However, we continue to make progress on delivering our careers commitments.
This leads me to Amendment 84, which seeks to ensure that “all further education providers” in England can access careers hubs. In the same skills White Paper, we confirmed our ambition to extend access to careers hubs to all secondary schools and colleges in England, including special schools and alternative provision. This year, we expect to increase the number of schools and colleges in careers hubs by 1,050, taking the total to at least 3,300.
This has been an important discussion on the provision of careers guidance and advice in our education system. The Government are in the middle of delivering some wide-ranging reforms in this area and, as noble Lords have noted, delivery is really the name of the game on a lot of these measures. I therefore hope that noble Lords are reassured that the Government are taking steps towards this, that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is able to withdraw the amendment on behalf of his noble friend, and that other noble Lords will not feel the need to move their amendments when they are reached.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Barker) (LD)
I have received notice from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who wishes to speak after the Minister.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, is the noble Baroness able to give us any information about the provision of apprenticeship options through UCAS? I appreciate that she may not have that information available, so could she write to Members of the Committee about it? There is quite an important issue about actual availability and pathways for young people going through vocational and technical education routes.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I am aware that that was one option being looked at to improve the way that young people can navigate their next steps, post school. I do not have the specific outcome of that investigation to hand, so I will happily write to the Committee on that matter.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this has been an interesting debate and one which brought, I am afraid, horrible reminders for me about the situation on special educational needs. Something should happen, and we have done something that should correct it, but it has not. The noble Lord took us through the appeals process. I felt that most pupils would have left school by the time it had finished, which does not give a parent or the person driving it that much incentive to follow it through, to be perfectly honest.
Will the Minister take on board the intentions behind this, because at the moment it is not working? We do not have that breadth of knowledge going in to inform pupils and parents about the options. We just do not have it and, although it might be slightly better under this direction of travel—the Minister said “In a little while”—there will still be lots of holes, judging by the past record. We are going into a culture that does not want to change because it is quite comfy with where it is, thanks very much. It quite likes getting people X grades and on to X institutions, then forgetting about it.
If we are talking in the Bill about giving a broader aspect to what people can get out of this—I come back to levels 4 and 5, the underplayed bit of the education system—we are going to have to educate pupils and teachers, and everybody else, that they have something that can give them a career pathway that may well be more rewarding than, for instance, higher education. It has to go a lot wider than apprenticeships; apprenticeships have been the silver bullet that has successfully missed the mark. We have even run out of ammunition because we are not getting people there. We have got to do better.
If I had to choose a favourite from this little pack of amendments, I would probably run with the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Baker. With his level of experience on this, I do not suppose that is any surprise to anybody. I would suggest that we will have to look at this in further detail on Report. There is no disagreement here about the fact that more work needs to be done. There is disagreement only about what progress and what weight has to be put behind the process of change. Bearing that in mind, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 78.
“Credit transfer arrangements
(1) The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision to facilitate credit transfer arrangements to allow students to move between education providers.(2) Regulations under this section are to be made by statutory instrument, and a statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment allows the Secretary of State to facilitate credit transfer arrangements to allow students to move between education providers.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, credit transfer relates to the assessment and recognition of prior qualifications and credit by institutions and their transferability between institutions. Currently, they make their own assessments of a student’s previous study by comparing it with their own curriculum and awarding credit. Credit is common but not universal in the UK. Not all higher education institutions are modular or make extensive use of credit; the exceptions, perhaps unsurprisingly, include some high-profile universities. Even so, thanks to the credit framework, degrees from these institutions can be confirmed as similar in overall size and form—if not necessarily in content or learning approach—to the sector standard, with at least a quarter being at the highest level of learning for that degree. This is why a permissive approach was adopted in the credit framework for England, which describes rather than prescribes how credit can be used.
There are already national frameworks for credit in the UK. The national credit transfer system covers accredited qualification in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It comprises all eight levels—nine, including entry level—from secondary education to vocational and higher education qualifications, with every level consisting of qualifications of similar difficulty. The regulated qualifications framework includes qualifications which have been accredited by: Ofqual in England; the Council for the Curriculum Examinations and Assessment in Northern Ireland; and the Department for Children, Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills in Wales. In these three countries, higher education qualifications validated by universities and other HE institutions are covered by the framework for higher education qualifications, which sits beside the RQF.
Scotland has its own credit transfer system, which is known as the Scottish credit and qualifications framework. It covers all qualification levels in Scotland; unlike other systems, the one used in Scotland has 12 levels. In terms of strengthening pathways between further education and higher education, Scotland has an effective system of articulation, where students who gain sub-degree qualifications in college progress to degree-level study at university, and go straight into the second or third year in recognition of their prior learning.
The UK Government consulted on this in 2016, seeking to gauge demand from students for more switching between universities and degree courses. One result of the consultation that noble Lords may recall was the legislation on accelerated degrees, introduced when the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, was the Universities Minister. Since 2019, the OfS has had a statutory duty to monitor and report on the prevalence of student transfers and to encourage the development of such arrangements. This was set out in the Higher Education and Research Act.
Our Amendment 79 would allow the Secretary of State to facilitate credit transfer arrangements to allow students to move between education providers to ensure consistency. As more flexibility is introduced into the education system, particularly modular funding, can the Minister say what frameworks and incentives the Government intend to introduce to ensure that lifelong learning has what might be termed a “common currency”? Given that England lacks an integrated credit and qualifications framework, how might developing one be balanced against institutional autonomy in curriculum design?
The lifelong loan entitlement implies that people will want to adopt a “hop on, hop off” approach to their learning throughout life, which makes it essential that all learning counts for something. I would like to probe what steps the Government are taking, or intend to take, to consult on this. I understand that the Cabinet Office was considering this last year. I am not clear why it was the Cabinet Office, rather than the DfE, but can the Minister also clarify the Government’s intentions there? Do they envisage a UK-wide approach in the shape of a universal credit transfer system? As well as supporting credit transfer within higher education, what are the implications of supporting it between further education and higher education?
A universal credit transfer system would have significant benefits to many students, especially from a widening participation perspective. It would help them to study flexibly by making it easier to break study into bite-size chunks, bank that credit and top it up elsewhere at some point in future. Such a system would certainly support lifelong learning, giving students confidence that they could pause their studies and/or change provider if they needed to, for whatever reason. It would also incentivise innovative models of provision that could be better tailored to students’ needs. An example of this would be the Open University’s OpenPlus programme, where students initially study at one institution before completing their studies at another.
The benefits of credit transfer are many, while other developments could follow the establishment of an effective and accessible scheme. For instance, there could be guarantees that students would be able to progress from a higher technical qualification to a degree course in a similar subject without having to start again from scratch. This is the articulation method, mentioned earlier with respect to Scotland. Students could also be assured of being able to exit easily from institutions that are not providing good value for money, without having to go back to square one, which would be a powerful disincentive.
Any future methods of allowing students to use credit flexibly need to enable transferability across the UK and internationally. The international context is important, because international perceptions of a coherent UK sector are influential in attracting international students, academics and researchers to the UK and in exporting services through transnational education. There are similar advantages in retaining alignment with European and other international frameworks. Were that to be lost through quality being diluted following the progress of this Bill, it would be damaging to the higher education sector. I will be interested to hear the Government’s intentions with regard to maintaining a UK-wide approach, not least because of the perception that the shape of the new system that emerges will project to those beyond our shores.
It is important to move beyond the impression that leaving a higher education institution without completing a full degree is an indicator of failure, either for the student or the institution. The form that this Bill eventually takes will decide the extent to which people can develop their skills with confidence, at a time and a place convenient to them and their family. I look forward to hearing the Minister articulate—in another meaning of that word—her Government’s ambitions in that regard and describing what credit and qualifications framework they intend to have in place, hopefully before 2025, to support the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement. I beg to move.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Watson has made a compelling argument for enhanced, nationally recognised and organised credit transfer arrangements. I do not want to repeat the points he made except to note that, in the context of the move towards more degree-level apprenticeships, the issue of credit transfer becomes particularly important because many, indeed, probably the generality of students starting out on apprenticeship programmes leading to degree-level qualifications will start in further education colleges.
Many of these have not conventionally offered higher education but are good apprenticeship education providers and will start providing the level 3 and 4 education which can lead to degree-level apprenticeship programmes. If we want to encourage more students through the apprenticeship route and for them to regard this as something they can progress to degree level, the issue of credit transfer is going to become a still more significant one in the education system in future years. The points my noble friend made are especially compelling.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, this amendment seems such a good thing, but I really doubt whether all the administration it involves is actually necessary or desirable. Governments are not always very keen on looking at what happened in the past, whether it succeeded and the reasons why not if it did not. Of course, that is never a reason not to try again, but it does seem pointless to spend time and money re-enacting things for which the criteria have not changed. This is one of the reasons I deplore the crash introduction of T-levels with no regard for other vocational initiatives—I am thinking of diplomas in particular— that were introduced unsuccessfully without consideration of past mistakes. I am afraid I do have quite a long memory of such things.
In the olden days of polytechnics, all accreditation was carried out by CNAA, the Council for National Academic Awards. In theory it should have been a very simple matter for students to transfer credits between organisations, as obviously there was a level playing field for credits. In practice, very few students ever transferred from one institution to another, and the mechanisms for doing so were by no means straightforward.
In 1992, polytechnics disappeared and were reincarnated as universities. For some this was not a great advantage: Oxford and Hatfield polytechnics, for instance, had tremendous names and becoming universities was certainly not initially a help to their well-earned reputations.
I was working for City & Guilds in the early days of national vocational qualifications in the 1980s. The Government gave permission for a large number of awarding organisations—some with pretty dubious credentials—to award NVQs. All awarding organisations had to agree to recognise any units awarded by any awarding organisation. City & Guilds, as the premier vocational awarding organisation, was not delighted by this, but conformed by spending a great deal of time and money ensuring that its highly protected accreditation mechanisms could accommodate units from another organisation. In practice, this arduous work proved largely unnecessary. There were few, if any, requests to transfer between awarding bodies.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Noble Lord, Lord Watson, for tabling this amendment and have great sympathy with its purpose. The Government know that many learners need more flexible access to courses helping them to train, upskill or retrain alongside work, family and personal commitments, as both their circumstances and the economy change. We also recognise that the current lack of a systematic and widely used practice for building up credit across different providers is a key barrier to flexible lifelong learning.
The Bill will deliver that flexibility, underpinning the Prime Minister’s lifetime skills guarantee. This is part of our blueprint for a post-16 education system that will seek to ensure that everyone, no matter where they live or their background, can gain the skills they need to progress at any stage of their lives. We want people to be able to build up learning over their lifetime and have a real choice in how, where and when they study to acquire new life-changing skills. In particular, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, outlined, this will hopefully lead to an expansion of provision within further education colleges and other providers.
To enable flexibility, learners must, where appropriate, be able to accumulate and transfer credits between providers to build up to meaningful qualifications over time. The Bill and the government amendments tabled on the LLE provide the building blocks of a modular and potentially credit-based loan funding and fee limit system. It is precisely defining what a module is that will ensure consistency across the system.
We are working closely with the sector to understand current incentives and obstacles to credit transfer and recognition. Obviously, the system is not simple or straightforward, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, outlined. We intend to consult on the scope and policy of the lifelong loan entitlement. We will examine how to support easier and more frequent credit transfer between providers, working towards well-integrated and aligned higher and further education provision, with flexibility that enables students to move between settings to suit their needs.
It is important that we consult and engage closely on this to ensure that we build a system that works. The consultation will be later this year and it is important we get the detail right. Although higher education is a devolved matter, we are of course engaging with the devolved Administrations. It is important that any system in England provides consistency and works alongside the other three nations. We must not pre-determine the outcome of any consultation and pin the Government to a path that the sector and learners may tell us in consultation is not what is needed. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, will feel comfortable withdrawing his amendment.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I am not comfortable withdrawing my amendment, as the Minister suggests. The amendment has been rather too easily dismissed by the Minister and by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I recognise the experience of the noble Baroness with City & Guilds, but I also recognise her experience as a Minister in the coalition Government—and that sounded very much like a ministerial speech. She was drawing on her experience of those years when she counselled against legislating in this respect.
There is a greater need to give people confidence when they are trying to provide what the Minister called building blocks for a degree or qualification, so they have a guarantee that there is somebody whom they can call on to make sure that they can use those effectively. I noticed that my noble friend Lord Adonis made the point about the degree apprenticeships. Many of us are a bit dubious about degree apprenticeships, but clearly they will have a role in this. He drew the line, and I think he was drawing the dots from a practical apprenticeship and moving it on bit by bit, perhaps banking some of the experience to go to do something else—perhaps raise a family—and then come back to it, ultimately with a degree. That is very important.
The way in which the Minister says that the Government will consult, as I understand it, meant only that they would consult on the scope of the lifelong loan entitlement. There has to be something specific on credit transfer. Like other noble Lords, I have had briefings from organisations in the sector which are very concerned and want to make sure that there is something of a solid nature on which they can build in future. I heard no mention of the international aspect, which was certainly raised with me by the QAA. It is concerned about the international reputation if we do not have a UK-wide structure that people in other countries can look at, understand and then have the confidence to come and use.
The Minister was saying that this was a bit premature and talked about another consultation. We will be inundated by consultations as a result of the Bill. As an aside, let me say that the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, mentioned earlier a consultation that concluded in September, and we have a consultation on initial teacher training in schools which concludes in August. When we have consultations, can we please not have them over the summer holidays? It may help officials, but it does not help those seeking to put together a response to consultation and it surely dilutes the amount of response received.
I hear what the Minister says, but I am not convinced. I shall come back on Report to try to tease out some of the arguments a bit further and invite her to respond in a bit more detail to the points that I put after she has had her chance, with her Ovaltine this evening and a copy of Hansard by her side, to consider them in greater detail.
Lord Touhig
“16 to 19 Academies: designation
(1) The Secretary of State may make an order under section 69(3) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 (relating to the designation of foundation or voluntary schools as having a religious character) by virtue of section 124B(1) of that Act in respect of a 16 to 19 Academy as if it were an independent school.(2) Any 16 to 19 Academy so designated is a school. (3) In section 4(1B) of the Education Act 1996, after “16 to 19 Academy” insert “, other than a 16 to 19 Academy designated by an order made under section 69(3) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment aims to allow sixth form college corporations with a religious character to convert to Academies without losing their religious character.
Lord Touhig (Lab) [V]
My Lords, this is very much a probing amendment, allowing me to highlight a particular unintended consequence in existing legislation and allowing the Minister the opportunity to give what I hope is an encouraging response.
Representatives of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference have been working the Minister’s officials on this issue for some considerable time in anticipation that there would be some education legislation going through Parliament where an amendment can be made to resolve the problem that I will now outline. As things stand today, Catholic sixth-form colleges benefit from several protections set out in the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 relating to issues such as governance, collective worship, religious education and many others. These protections are vital for maintaining the Catholic ethos of the colleges and provide a choice for those who wish to be educated in a religious setting.
Any sixth-form college can become a 16 to 19 academy. However, the definition of “school” in the Education Act 1996, as amended by the Education Act 2011, excludes 16 to 19 academies, which means that they are currently ineligible for the protections and freedoms needed to remain Catholic. If a Catholic sixth-form college were to become a 16 to 19 academy, it would therefore lose those protections and freedoms.
Catholic dioceses across England that oversee schools and colleges have strategies to bring the Catholic community together by creating families of schools within multi-academy trusts. This supports the schools to work in partnership and share resources. Many other sixth-form colleges around the country have now converted and are benefiting from the advantages of academy status, and the 14 Catholic sixth-form colleges across England wish to do the same. Without being able to become academies, the Catholic sixth-form colleges are isolated from the opportunities of joining a multi-academy trust. Allow me to quote Danny Pearson, principal of Aquinas College in Stockport and chair of the Association of Catholic Sixth Form Colleges:
“We are disappointed that Catholic Colleges are unable to take part in the school improvement and systems leadership processes that the Academy system champions. Many of our settings are in areas of high deprivation and Catholic colleges do much for social mobility. As leading performers within our sector, we currently cannot use our expertise for the benefit of our communities. As a matter of fairness, equity and parity across our education system it is important that measures are quickly taken to allow Catholic sixth-form colleges to both maintain the statutory protections they currently hold while being able to become academies if they so wish.”
This amendment to the Bill would empower the Secretary of State to allow sixth-form college corporations to convert to academies without losing their current statutory protections. This will guarantee the religious character of the Catholic sixth-form colleges when they convert, and enable dioceses to include these new sixth-form academies within their strategic planning of Catholic multi-academy trusts.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, this issue goes back some time. When I was a Minister, there was an issue about whether voluntary-aided schools—of which a high proportion are Catholic, as my noble friend says—could maintain the protections afforded to them in terms of their designated religious character and appointment of governors with a religious background and associations, and so on, as they transfer to academy status. The case he makes is overwhelmingly powerful. At the time there was also the issue of whether we would allow sixth-form academies at all because, in the original academy conception, until there was a change in the law, that was not possible. Now sixth-form academies are possible and, as my noble friend said, there are quite a few of them. Indeed, there is one just 200 yards from your Lordships’ House, Harris Westminster, a sixth-form academy sponsored by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Peckham, and Westminster School. It is an outstandingly successful institution, right by St James’s Park station. Noble Lords will see the students going backwards and forwards every day. It is excellent and exactly the kind of institution that we want to encourage more of, so it seems perverse that it is not possible for a Catholic promotor, including promoters of existing sixth-form colleges, to take advantage of the status.
As my noble friend says, encouraging sixth-form colleges—both the Catholic Church and the Church of England have their own sixth-form colleges; the Church of England is of course a major educational promoter in its own right—to become part of multi-academy trusts seems a very worthwhile step. This seems a straightforwardly technical issue, which perhaps the Minister can resolve with the stroke of a pen.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I briefly add my support to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, which would ensure that any conversion to academy does not mean abandoning the religious affiliation of any colleges. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, this issue goes back a long way. He mentions only Catholic schools, but I presume this would apply to other faith groups as well.
If we were starting from scratch, we might well decide to divorce education from religion, as many other countries do—the French seem to manage this quite successfully—but that is not where we are. Churches and other faith organisations have long played a very significant part in the lives of our students, to the very great advantage of young people and the country.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I support Amendment 86 in the name of my noble friend Lord Touhig, which would grant the Secretary of State the power to allow sixth-form college corporations to convert to academies without losing their current statutory protections. It would secure the religious character of the Catholic sixth-form college when it converts and therefore enable dioceses to include these new sixth-form academies within their strategic planning of Catholic multi-academy trusts. It will be on very few occasions during the passage of this Bill that I will support the Secretary of State taking back power and centralising control, but this is one of those rare occasions.
The immense change in the education landscape brought about in the English education system by the Academies Act 2010 has required all schools and colleges to consider their future with the Government’s intention to move towards a fully academised system. We have no academies in Wales; we have comprehensive schools run by local authorities. I look forward immensely to the introduction of the dynamic new curriculum—the four areas of learning developed by teachers being introduced to all schools in Wales this September. However, we are talking about England.
While schools and FE colleges can become academies, the 14 Catholic sixth-form colleges in England are prohibited by the current legislation from planning strategically to secure their future. This is a result of the earlier academies legislation, as other noble Lords have mentioned, which failed at the time to address the unique legal structure of these 14 colleges. This amendment would grant Catholic sixth-form colleges the same academy opportunities that all other schools and colleges currently have to strategically plan their future. It is a good example of the unintended consequences of a Bill that is inadequately prepared to work in practice once enacted.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, for bringing forward his amendment. Although it is always a pleasure to stand at the Dispatch Box on behalf of the Government, it is a double pleasure when—for I think the only occasion in the Bill—the issue falls within my ministerial responsibility. It is a pleasure to speak to it. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, made reference to Harris Sixth Form; my old sixth-form sadly closed but was reopened a few years later as a 16-19 academy called Harington school, which is an outstanding school in Rutland.
There has been a really vibrant place in the system for sixth-form academies, but there has also been the situation which the amendment seeks to address: sixth-form colleges with a religious designation, if they were to convert to academies, would not retain that designation and would lose some of their religious character and associated freedoms. The Government are committed to supporting existing sixth-form colleges to convert to academy status. I am pleased that a significant proportion of sixth-form colleges have already taken this step and have made a strong contribution to strengthening the academies sector. It was a pleasure to meet Bill Watkin and James Kewin of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, who mentioned the situation with the other section of sixth-form colleges and expressed their desire to look at academisation.
We recognise that there are currently barriers preventing sixth-form colleges with a religious character from converting to academies. This is because it is not presently legally possible for 16-19 academies to have a religious designation, which is of course necessary for Catholic sixth-form colleges in order to retain their religious character around collective worship, RE, recruitment of staff and so on, as the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, outlined. At present, any sixth-form college with a religious character converting to an academy would lose that designation.
We remain keen to take action to facilitate all sixth-form colleges, including those with a designated religious character, to convert to academies. I know that existing Catholic designated sixth-form colleges are keen to join Catholic multi-academy trusts, and I am sure they would make an excellent contribution. We have received further communication from Bishop Marcus Stock, who is the lead Catholic bishop on education and supports the principle of allowing these Catholic sixth-form colleges to become academies. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, outlined, if there is any change in the law, it would ensure that other faith groups that establish 16-19 academies can designate them as having a religious character appropriate to them.
The Secretary of State for Education made clear, when speaking in the other place, that we would look at all legislative opportunities to see how this can best be done. We are committed to making this happen at the earliest opportunity. Sadly, however the amendment as drafted could have undesired effects, as it provides that any 16-19 academy so designated is a school in law. This will create legal uncertainty as to the status of 16-19 academies, which are expressly defined in legislation as not schools. A new power would be required to achieve what the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, wants from his amendment.
However, we none the less want to facilitate access to academy status for all sixth-form colleges that wish to convert by enabling the religious designation of 16-19 academies. While this amendment is not the vehicle for it, we remain supportive of the principle. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, feels able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Touhig (Lab) [V]
I have observed the contributions of Members on a host of amendments in these last hours and pay tribute to everyone in the Committee for their hard work and commitment in making this a better Bill. I thank my noble friends Lord Adonis and Lady Wilcox, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for their reasoned, informed and encouraging support. I am most grateful.
I hope the Minister might have something more to say as the Bill progresses. I assure her that, if she does, she will be on my Christmas card list. I await further developments and look forward to working with her and her officials to achieve what we all want from this legislation. I beg leave to withdraw.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Barker) (LD)
My Lords, we now come to the group consisting of Amendment 87.
Amendment 87
Lord Addington
“Review of Kickstart scheme
(1) The Secretary of State must review the operation of the Kickstart scheme.(2) The review under subsection (1) must consider—(a) extending the lifetime of the current scheme; and(b) extending the criteria of those eligible to benefit from the scheme beyond those receiving universal credit.”
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, once again I find myself stepping into the shoes of my noble friend Lord Storey. Regardless of how comfortable those shoes are, I will do my best. This is something where we are saying that the Government have done something pretty well and asking if they will carry on doing it—that is the essence of what is in front of me. The Kickstart scheme seems to have started well and at the right time because, when any job market goes into a state of convulsion, the people who are shed are the young and less qualified. You take a chance on people coming into the job market, but you might not want to take quite that degree of chance.
Kickstart seems to have done well. It is not perfect, but it would surprise nobody who has been looking at this for any length of time that, when a new government scheme comes in, smaller firms have trouble accessing it. We would expect that, to be honest. Things like this are smoothed out by planning them, looking at them and making sure they go on. If the Government are not prepared to do that, we need an explanation of why because, with the job market in flux, as I said before, we will need things like this to get people involved. If the Government do not like what they are seeing in this scheme, they should tell us why. It was supposed to end in December, but I think we have 150 jobs promised, from the information I have. The CBI has come out and said that it is a good scheme which it likes, and others have said that before. So why are the Government not taking that on board and improving it? We could use it for a little longer.
The amendment itself basically just calls for the Secretary of State to review and consider the Kickstart scheme:
“The review under subsection (1) must consider … extending the lifetime of the current scheme; and … extending the criteria of those eligible to benefit from the scheme beyond those receiving universal credit.”
The Government had a good idea and did some good work. It seems to be working, so can they now build upon it, not stop it? That is essentially what this is about. I beg to move.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I broadly support Amendment 87, although I will probe rather more on what we could get out of Kickstart moving forward and what some of the issues are. I started off as quite an enthusiast for KickStart, but for me it has failed to live up to its promise. However, there is a chance that by reviewing it, it could be made more positive and make a positive contribution to this Bill. That is why I am keen on the amendment. If the last time I spoke regarding the Bill I worried out loud about the dangers of too short-term an approach to skills and training and too much power being given to employers to define what skills are needed, conversely I now note that sometimes, short-term and immediate issues, from the threat of mass youth unemployment to skills shortages in the here and now, require a degree of urgency and a more central role for employers. Sadly, Kickstart has slightly missed out on this and does neither.
To remind ourselves, the challenges facing young people in the labour market in the here and now have been exacerbated by Covid-19. Policy decisions have effectively closed down whole sectors in which young workers are overrepresented. The highest job losses have been in accommodation and food, wholesale and retail, and arts and entertainment—the three industries with the highest percentage of young people in the workforce. We must recognise that the non-Covid collateral damage of lockdown is indeed young people’s job prospects. In that sense, Kickstart should have been a godsend, but it is rather misnamed. It sounds urgent and dynamic, but the take-up has been sluggish. Despite the promise of a quarter of a million new jobs for the young and claims of 195,000 jobs approved, fewer than 20,000 people have started jobs created by the scheme, and even with scrapping the ludicrous requirement for employers to create 30-plus opportunities, forcing the SMEs into a bureaucratic labyrinth of those gateways, it has not really speeded things up enough.
I would like a review of this because there is still too much red tape. To quote a couple of employers, they are keen to avail themselves of this scheme, but it has been “like pulling teeth” and “extremely frustrating”. They say that the application process is lengthy with a lot of paperwork and an extremely saturated line of communication. I have not given up on Kickstart and I am glad to see, as the noble Lord just mentioned, that the CBI seems to be united with the TUC and a lot of business federations in still seeing Kickstart as useful, but it needs some time. As the amendment argues, I am mystified as to why this scheme would end in December 2021, since it is only just kicking in.
The DWP says that the hiring process will be ramped up as lockdown unwinds, unlocking key sectors, but as unlocking has been constantly delayed, only starting today and even then hesitantly, if the Government close Kickstart in December, they are giving it less than half a year to have any real effect. That is important. The amendment also tries to free up Kickstart and not confine it to those in receipt of universal credit. This is an important point, for a number of reasons. The young, most in need of work and training related to employment progress, are often working, but they might be on zero-hours contracts or picking up part-time work stacking shelves. Therefore, the initiative should not exclude them from Kickstart. We also know from the latest furlough data that the young are more likely to be furloughed. Realistically, when furlough ends, many could be jobless. Why insist on them having a six-month gap on universal credit before letting them access Kickstart for their job prospects?
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I am a believer in the value of the Kickstart scheme and would like to see it extended in the manner suggested by Amendment 87, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Storey—Lord Storey-cum-Addington—and Lord Shipley, following a review of its operation and experience to date.
My own former employability training business was involved some years ago in the delivery of the Labour Government’s Future Jobs Fund, which, like Kickstart, enabled employers to take on young people for six months, with their salary paid by the Government. Many of the young people involved had never worked before and faced significant challenges in entering the job market, including lack of work-readiness and employability skills, poor educational attainment, lack of funds for travel or even suitable clothing, chaotic lifestyles, lack of aspiration, substance abuse, and records of offending and imprisonment. A period of six months’ employment, with employers willing to make initial allowances for their circumstances and much personal support from the organisations delivering the programme—including Barnardo’s and Nacro, by which we were contracted—was enough for many of them to acquire the skills and behaviours needed to become reliable and useful employees, often with those same employers they had been with for six months. This is not a low-cost approach and not for everyone, but I believe it is an effective way of enabling many young people in these specific circumstances to make a successful transition into work.
Kickstart has got off to a rather bumpy start, as we have heard from other noble Lords, with delays and difficulties both in employers being accepted on to the programme—initially through the gateway process, which has fortunately been removed, but there are still quite a few hurdles to get over—and, more particularly, in recruiting candidates through the rules of the Jobcentre Plus scheme. But I believe it offers the right approach for the young people in the target group I have described. I hope the Minister can tell us what plans the Government have to review the scheme so far and to consider whether, and in what form, it might be further extended to perhaps meet the specific needs of the most challenging young people within the overall skills system created by the Bill.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I too am a fan of Kickstart, and I hope that the Government will consolidate and build on it. A review, as proposed in this amendment, seems a timely suggestion. I support a lot of what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, said, and I would add only two emphases. First, there are certainly some occasions when a Kickstart six-month placement ought to be combined with a course of training. For instance, if we employed Kickstarters to do environmental work, it would not do them much good if they had not achieved their chainsaw certification and other necessary qualifications to enable them to continue in the industry. Sometimes the Kickstart placement ought to be bundled in with training, and that ought to be made easy.
Secondly, £1,500 for looking after a Kickstarter is really not much. You have to have spare employee time substantially beyond that value to make good use of a Kickstarter and to give them a really good experience. I hope the Government will review people’s experience on that front and consider what it would take to really recompense employers—particularly small employers, who often do not have a lot of spare capacity—for the effort they are making, day to day, looking after a Kickstarter.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, all three noble Lords who have spoken, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, have made pertinent points. I will make a suggestion and ask a question. Unusually, the House has it within its powers to cause an inquiry into Kickstart, because a Select Committee is currently proceeding on youth unemployment. Indeed, my understanding is that it is being chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who is a colleague of the noble Lord, Lord Addington. May I therefore suggest that he asks his noble friend to ensure that that Select Committee examines Kickstart and makes recommendations to the House on its future, which of course will carry weight with both the House and the Government? My question for the Minister is this. I assume that an independent evaluation of Kickstart is taking place. Can she confirm whether that is the case? If not, obviously it is desirable that one should.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to signify our support for Amendment 87 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Shipley, because a review of the Kickstart scheme is certainly necessary. I regret to say that I cannot endorse the view of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, in introducing this group, that the scheme seems to have done well. More than nine months after its launch, it has so far failed to have any meaningful impact.
The Kickstart Scheme provides funding for employers to create new job placements for 16 to 24 year-olds on universal credit who are deemed to be at risk of long-term unemployment. Employers can apply for funding to cover 100% of the national minimum wage for 25 hours a week for a total of six months, as well as employer national insurance contributions and automatic enrolment contributions. However, in a Written Parliamentary Answer in June, the DWP Minister Mims Davies stated that the scheme had helped only 20,000 people into work since its introduction last September.
On 16 June I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Penn—I am sure she remembers it will—in an Oral Question what action the Government would take to overhaul the Kickstart Scheme, not just by widening access but by beginning the drive towards equalising its impact on black, Asian and minority ethnic communities and women. In response, she told me that the scheme had been adapted and improved in a number of ways to improve take-up, although all that she mentioned was that in February, the 30-vacancy threshold for a direct application to Kickstart had been removed. She went on to say:
“The figures I have show that there are more than 140,000 approved vacancies under the Kickstart scheme. We hope that take-up will improve as it goes on in delivery.”—[Official Report, 16/6/21; col. 1893.]
I fear that more than hope is needed.
Is the Minister aware of the report from the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House published in December 2020? My noble friend Lord Adonis just suggested that the committee sitting at the moment might produce a report on Kickstart. Just seven months ago, a committee did just that, and recommended that access to Kickstart should not be limited to people who have been on universal credit for six months. My caution to my noble friend is that that committee’s recommendation was not given much weight. The effect of the six-month rule is that a young person who loses her or his job has to wait for as long as nine months before they have the chance of training. Surely that cannot make sense and it must be demoralising for young people. Local authorities and other civil society partners should be able to refer young people who are not on benefits to the scheme.
The charity Mencap told the Economic Affairs Committee hearing that making only young people on universal credit eligible had excluded many with a learning disability, who are still claiming legacy benefits and who are unlikely to move to universal credit in the near future. The Learning and Work Institute said that the scheme should be
“open to young people, including apprentices made redundant, not on benefits”
and that
“partners, such as local authorities, should be able to refer young people in this group to Kickstart”
also.
As I said earlier, it seems that the committee’s recommendations fell on deaf ears, but one step that the Government should certainly take is to build a link between Kickstart and apprenticeships. One means of doing so would be to encourage Kickstart employers, perhaps with incentives, to offer apprenticeships for those completing their Kickstart placement—this may have been what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, was suggesting in describing a link between Kickstart and more permanent employment. That would have the extra benefit of increasing the number of apprenticeships, which, as we know, have reduced sharply since the introduction of the levy in 2017.
Perhaps the Minister can update noble Lords on the approved vacancies and say how many of the 140,000 that she quoted in answer to my Oral Question a month ago have since been filled. Whether or not she is able to do so, one thing she cannot rationally do today is to deny that the Kickstart scheme is in need of, well, a kick start—the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, rather stole my thunder with that line. The review must begin as a matter of urgency. I look forward to hearing that, despite this amendment being withdrawn, the Government intend to do as it suggests.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, the Kickstart scheme was created and deployed rapidly to provide urgent jobs for young people to support their long-term work prospects. Kickstart will help to reduce the long-term effects of unemployment caused by the pandemic.
To be effective, the scheme must be targeted. It is for that reason that Kickstart funds the creation of jobs for people aged 16 to 24 on universal credit and at risk of long-term unemployment. Through Kickstart, these young people have the chance to build confidence and skills in the workplace and gain experience that will improve their chances of progressing to find long-term, sustainable work.
Turning to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I should point out that, as with other grant funding schemes, the Kickstart scheme is not cited in legislation but exists pursuant to the powers of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions under Section 2 of the Employment and Training Act 1973. The amendment would not therefore be appropriate as it seeks to make legislative amendments to something not named or referenced in legislation. However, I understand that the point of the amendment is perhaps rather more probing and, in fact, encouraging from some noble Lords; I will seek to address their points about the Kickstart scheme in my response.
I assure the noble Lord, Lord Addington, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and others that the Department for Work and Pensions already keeps the Kickstart scheme under review. It continues to deliver Kickstart jobs to the young people who need them most. However, I am afraid that I must disappoint noble Lords because, at present, there are no plans either to expand Kickstart outside the current eligibility criteria or to expand the length of the scheme.
As I said, Kickstart was designed as a response to the impact of the pandemic and the economic restrictions put in place at the time. As we are phasing out those restrictions, we will transition to a new phase in our response. However, let me say to noble Lords that the Kickstart scheme will run until December; that is the last date for placements on the scheme, which run for a further six months into 2022. After the winding down of the Kickstart scheme at that point, a range of support will continue to be on offer for all young people, including those claiming jobseeker’s allowance or universal credit. This support offer involves placements on the sector-based work academy programme.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to apprenticeships. Although we do not plan to link Kickstart and apprenticeships formally, he will be aware of the incentive payments that we have put in place during the pandemic to encourage employers to take on young people through the routes of traineeships, work experience, mentoring circles, basic skills training and skills boot camps, in addition to locally available support.
Young people aged between 18 and 24 in the intensive work search regime of universal credit are able to access the DWP youth offer, which offers them wraparound support through the 13-week youth employment programme and is complemented by joined-up local delivery through our youth hubs and specialist youth employability coaches. As some noble Lords will know, we have recruited an additional 13,500 DWP work coaches and established more than 140 youth hubs across England, Scotland and Wales.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, spoke about some young people most in need of employment progression perhaps not being in receipt of universal credit and not qualifying for this programme. She is right: Kickstart is focused not on those who might need progression but on those who are unemployed and at risk of long-term unemployment. We will not seek to amend its criteria in that way.
To the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, the Department for Work and Pensions will monitor and evaluate the Kickstart scheme throughout and after its implementation, and will continue to evaluate the longer-term outcomes for Kickstart participants after they have completed their six-month placements. The Department for Work and Pensions will publish the findings of that evaluation once it is complete.
The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked for more support for employers to take on Kickstarters. The £1,700 is in addition to paying the salary of the Kickstarter for the duration of their placement. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to, we have had great employer engagement in providing these opportunities. My understanding is that 145,000 jobs are currently available. To update the statistic that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, had for the number of young people who have started on Kickstart, as of 30 June that has reached 40,000—so that is a significant ramp-up in delivery. On average we currently have 500 starts to Kickstart jobs per working day. Noble Lords were right to point out that we had to make some improvements to how the scheme ran, but it is now running at a faster and better pace and delivering that support to young people.
Although I am afraid I cannot say that we will extend the duration of the Kickstart scheme or change its eligibility, as I said, we keep it under review at the Department for Work and Pensions. A longer-term evaluation of that scheme will also be undertaken. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is able to withdraw the amendment on behalf of his noble friend.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I am trying to sum up what has been said. Apart from anything else, “Storey-cum-Addington” from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, sounds like a small village in a not very distinguished novel. We will let that one go.
It is a very odd thing. The Government put huge effort into a scheme and there seem to be some signs of hope. I am not sure whether I am much less enthusiastic about the Government, what progress they have made and the promise of jobs than the noble Lord, Lord Watson, so I am being much more optimistic. We can possibly discuss that later.
The Government have said they are keeping things under review. I cannot remember the number of things the Government keep under review. Just about everything is kept under review for a period, officially, so saying they are doing that does not really answer the general thrust of the amendment. Are they going to take it, look at it, study it and develop it, or are they going to say, “We’ll have a look at it sometime, maybe never, and remember that it’s in the archive”? That is the real difference here.
I appreciate that the amendment may well be defective because apparently this is done by regulation, which is in the gift of the Secretary of State—fair enough.
As for the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, suggesting that my noble friend include it in his review, that would not really address the point, would it? Apart from anything else, a committee of the House would quite rightly have my head if I told it what it was supposed to be doing. It having a look at this and making some small assessment for a report that will come out in a period of time would go right beside the Government’s long-term review of something.
If the Government are seriously going to learn about this, take it on board and take some action, I will be surprised but glad. Under those caveats, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)
We now come to Amendment 88. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 88
Lord Willetts
“The Student Loans Company communication with graduates
(1) The Secretary of State must by regulations provide that the Student Loans Company must—(a) provide universities with anonymised information about their graduates’ incomes;(b) facilitate universities’ communication through the Student Loans Company with their graduates without passing any personal data to any university, unless a graduate has specifically opted out; and(c) facilitate National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) communication through the Student Loans Company with graduates at the earlier of—(i) the two years preceding the predicted completion of their graduate repayments, or(ii) between the 28th and 30th year of their graduate repayments without passing any personal data to NEST,unless a graduate has specifically opted out. (2) Regulations under this section are to be made by statutory instrument, and a statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment enables universities to use the SLC to communicate with their graduates to encourage greater uptake of lifelong learning opportunities. Anonymised SLC data about graduates’ earnings may also be provided to universities to enable them to improve graduate outcomes. It also could nudge graduates into greater pensions investment through NEST.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
My Lords, the background to this amendment is that the Student Loans Company has close contact with many graduates, which provides an opportunity to fulfil some of the Government’s objectives that lie behind the Bill. I indicate in the amendment three possible uses of that information.
The first is to give information back to the universities about how their graduates are doing. Everyone wants to see graduates doing well, but evidence is often cited about the difficulties that some graduates from some universities are having. The more information that is fed back to universities about the performance of their graduates—properly protected and anonymised, of course, with any confidentiality requirements that are necessary—the more that universities will have to shoulder their responsibility to do better.
That is communication back to universities, but—secondly—I also think there is a fantastic opportunity for the Student Loans Company to be a kind of post office, enabling universities to communicate with their graduates. That is surprisingly hard at the moment. Very few universities have anything like a database of their graduates, and most lose contact with most of them. But there are good reasons why universities should be able to communicate with their graduates, and it would be fantastic if our universities could match the performance of the American universities in communicating with them. I hope it is not too frivolous if I cite the American remark that “If only Osama bin Laden had been to Harvard, the Americans would have found him within a fortnight”. They are very good at tracking down their graduates, but we do not do that.
A particular reason why it would be great if universities could communicate with their graduates is to enable the universities to offer them lifelong learning opportunities, a cause that is rightly close to Ministers’ hearts. I make it clear that this post office function would not require the universities being given actual email addresses or other data; they would simply provide a message to the Student Loans Company that the company would then communicate to their graduates. There would of course need to be some process for agreeing that the messages were appropriate and approved of.
Still, imagine a university that said, “We completely take to heart Ministers’ strictures. We are very worried that too many of our graduates are not earning what they may have hoped to earn. Here is a message that we would like to send to all our graduates earning less than the following amount of money saying, ‘If you get in touch with us, we will investigate what we can do to provide you with extra skills and training so that you can boost your earnings.’” That kind of engagement with graduates over their working lives should be part of a university offer, and the lack of university information to enable them to communicate with their graduates is a barrier to that.
The third purpose identified in my amendment is rather beyond the scope of education but fulfils another purpose for which there is strong cross-party support. Auto-enrolment in pensions is a great British success, and it is a policy that all parties in their time in government have supported. The problem with auto-enrolment is that the amount of money that people are actually building up in their personal pension pots is very modest. If you look at the opportunities to get people to save more, you see that one opportunity is that, as people advance through their careers and perhaps begin to earn a bit more, they might be able to save more. A crucial moment is when they stop paying back the cost of their higher education, when their graduate repayments cease. I think it would be a reasonable use of public policy—again, without any data actually being handed on—for NEST, the body that currently auto-enrols people in pensions, to be able to communicate through the Student Loans Company to graduates when they are reaching a point when they are likely to have finished repaying their loans, saying, “You have been used to paying 9% of your earnings to pay back your loan. Before you start blowing the money on other things, here is a simple mechanism whereby you can divert it in future into a pensions pot.”
I see these as three practical ways where improved communication with graduates, both by universities and by a government body backing auto-enrolment, could harness a resource without harm to anyone and with proper protections for confidentiality. I very much hope that Ministers will look at this sympathetically. I beg to move.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, as ever from the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, these are excellent suggestions and I strongly commend them to the Government.
I would just like to add to his second proposal, which is to
“facilitate universities’ communication through the Student Loans Company with their graduates without passing any personal data”.
He said that this was so that universities could market to the graduates what the universities can do for them, which is excellent in respect of lifelong learning. However, equally valuable is marketing to the graduates what they can do for the universities, in particular what mentoring opportunities they can provide for current students.
As noble Lords know, students from better-off backgrounds, particularly those who have gone to schools with strong university and graduate traditions, provide a dense web of networks, employment opportunities, advice on employment destinations and so on. Graduates who are not endowed with those advantages, even while they are at university, do not have the benefits of such developed networks. Graduates could be engaged much more systematically in providing mentoring opportunities, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, says, at the point at which universities generally lose contact with their graduates, which is often quite soon after graduation, though the more years that pass, the more they lose contact. When graduates are 10, 15 or 20 years out of university, they are reaching senior positions in their professions and are often in quite niche organisations, such as voluntary organisations. Advertising to them the opportunity to mentor students, which, in my experience, graduates are very willing to do, could be a real and significant benefit to existing students.
Like other noble Lords, I am often contacted by students, just by virtue of the fact that they know who I am, asking for mentoring opportunities and seeking advice. There are very few of us who would not provide that as a matter of course, and I think the same would be true of graduates. If they were harnessed in a systematic way, which this would make possible, it could be transformational for the life chances and career destinations of graduates, particularly those who do not come from graduate families or from schools with lots of graduate connections.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I thoroughly support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Willetts and the addendum to it by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.
The Student Loans Company is a real treasure trove of opportunity. The long-term relationship it has with graduates is a way of improving our university system over time, improving the lives of the graduates themselves and—my particular interest—improving the decisions taken by potential students as to which courses they should pay attention to.
I would go a bit further than my noble friend Lord Willetts and encourage the feedback to universities from the Student Loans Company to include something that puts some context into the raw earnings figure. Earnings can be a very one-dimensional view of what is happening to alumni. Not everything—not every decision or judgment as to the quality of a course—should be based, let alone entirely so, on the earnings profile of its graduates. You want something much more than that, which is why I absolutely support what my noble friend proposes in the second part of his amendment, in contract with graduates.
As he says, it is really difficult to get universities to tell you what their graduates are up to. I am somewhat relieved to discover that that is because they do not know. This is a vital piece of information for prospective students: if you are going to judge what you should invest upwards of £50,000 and three years of your life in, you want to know what it leads to. Very few historians end up as historians. Few physicists end up as physicists. People go off in lots of different directions, but the skills and the understandings that you have gained as part of your university degree absolutely help shape what you go on to.
To know which courses—even the very academic ones—lead to people becoming professional writers, say, is a really valuable piece of information if that is the direction that you want to take. You have to go back a decade or so to the Next Gen. report from Ian Livingstone, which looked at university courses that had “computer games” in the title, to see his analysis that 85% of those courses produced graduates that the industry would not hire because the courses had been designed not with the industry in mind but just in terms of catching the attention of students. We owe our students better than that.
The real source of information that they ought to be able to see through to is: where do students go on to, where does this lead to and perhaps, beyond that, are they happy? Are the alumni pleased with where life has taken them since university? Do they look back on their courses with pleasure? Coming back to the first part of the noble Lord’s amendment—do they have insights about the courses that they were on that ought to be fed back to the universities so that they can improve their offering?
There is as much potential for the nation in this as there is in the national health data. We are taking, mining and using that seriously, professionally and carefully, and we are setting about that in government and in the legislation to come. We absolutely ought to be doing that in the case of the Student Loans Company.
My noble friend is quite right that there is a lot of value to be offered in return. It took Oxford 40 years to realise that perhaps someone who had spent three years of their life studying physics was interested in physics—and, therefore, if it combined its “Please will you give us some money?” letters with an opportunity to keep up with the latest trends in physics, it might have more success. That should absolutely be extended to looking for opportunities for career support and for ways in which the learning and understanding of the university can be accessed again to make it a lifelong relationship. We need to build that sort of lifelong relationship into learning providers around apprenticeships as well. There is a lot of value for a person in having somewhere that they can turn to in order to refresh their skills and understand what opportunities now lie open to them.
I also very much approve of what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said about mentoring. This is difficult—it is a very tricky relationship—so I would not like to pitch anyone into mentoring without giving them some training first. However, if you have been trained and if you are supported, neither of which come free, it can be a very rewarding experience for both sides—but it needs to be done well. We ought to look at it being done cross-university. It does not seem to me that all the experiences of Oxford graduates ought to be confined to young people at Oxford; we ought to be able to spread these things around a bit to have wider access than that when we are designing the scheme.
However, if we do it with one of the professional mentoring companies, I think we would get something like that, because the focus will very much be on how to help the uncertain and disadvantaged, rather than just compounding the advantage of those who know already what a good thing mentoring can be. So, altogether, this is a really worthwhile amendment. I hope that the Government will take it seriously, and I look forward to my noble friend’s response.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I am always loath to take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who generally is a very good thing, but on this amendment I express long-felt reservations that universities should not be rated on the earnings of their graduates. Indeed, they should not really be concerned about the earnings of their graduates.
This is partly because I graduated from Oxford at 21 and immediately married a fellow student and RAF officer, which I never regretted. But we moved 24 times in the next 30 years, so it was impossible for me to have a career. I drifted into teaching, but I could not find any school to employ me. The minute any of them got a whiff that I might be an RAF wife, they lost interest—which was quite often. So I worked as a clerical officer, a filing clerk and a copy typist. That was the real low point of my career, but I was paid six bob an hour and it kept the wolf from the door.
We never had much money. My husband was promoted through nine ranks, each time at the earliest opportunity, but somehow the increased social commitments always took account of the pay rise. When I finally found a proper job, he lost his, when he was told at the 11th hour that it was utterly unacceptable for a commander-in-chief to have a working wife. When he refused to accept this last-minute and pointless condition, his appointment and career were cancelled overnight and a message hurriedly sent up the line to say that this ideal officer, it transpired, was totally unfit for high command because his wife had a job. So that did not go too well.
But I would hate Oxford to think I was a complete waste of space because I could not earn money. I did copious amounts of voluntary work as a mother, an RAF wife, a welfare counsellor, a CAB adviser—even a reluctant unpaid organist, and anything else that would have me. One of my contemporaries went into the Church and has always had a low salary—but why should Oxford be penalised for a wonderful woman vicar?
My mother was awarded a First from Cambridge in the 1930s, but was never allowed to graduate, because it took Cambridge until 1948 to acknowledge its women students as undergraduates. She had to give up her Civil Service job as soon as she was married—so was her degree a waste of space too? My daughter went to teach in Lesotho when she graduated and was paid £5 a week. Should Cambridge have been penalised because of her lack of income?
Women still bear the lion’s share of caring for children, parents and others, and still generally have lower incomes than men, but the amount they contribute to society is no less—some might argue considerably more—so why take it out on universities? Please can we disassociate high earnings from worthwhile degrees? Today’s women have a much better chance of combining family and career, which was impossible for my mother and pretty impossible for my generation—certainly for diplomatic and military wives. But many of us have contributed to society in non-financial and non-quantifiable ways. I hope that universities might value and be valued for that, and not be penalised on our account. Many graduates choose to try to make the world a better place, rather than earn shedloads of money.
On universities not communing with graduates, I would argue that universities are increasingly doing their level best to get hold of their graduates. I would like to think it is because they are genuinely interested in their welfare—and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, mentioned that they could contribute by tutoring and so on, which is good—but I have a feeling that they mainly want to get hold of their graduates to tap them for money.
This amendment is multifaceted, but I regret the suggestion that universities should be recognised for the earnings that their graduates manage to find in life. I do not think that should be the case.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for introducing this amendment and all the noble Lords who have spoken. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for sharing her experiences just then—horrific though one of them was. I am sure Oxford is duly proud of her now, and so it should be. Like her, I am not sure who should be blamed for my career—the institution where I did my first degree, the one that offered me a mid-career MBA or the one where I did my more recent theological training. Anyway, none of them can be suitably blamed.
In general, I am a big fan of data—any data, but especially robust data at scale. I like it being used to inform policy-making and am happy for it to be there as part of a feedback loop. So anything that can help universities get a richer picture of what happens to their graduates after they leave is probably a good thing—but that does not necessarily mean I want a straight line from that to the way the Government fund or regulate them.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I shall first resist the temptation to respond to the noble Baroness’s comment that she has been in opposition too long. I pay tribute to all noble Lords who have outlined the role of the Student Loans Company. It has no statutory functions of its own but exists as the student loan delivery arm of the Secretary of State, exercising powers delegated by him or her. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, is correct that my noble friend Lord Willetts is suggesting a fundamental change of role for the Student Loans Company, whether as a post box, a communications agent or a marketing agent. While I thank my noble friend for his amendment, I do not believe it is necessary or wise.
The Government already publish a wide range of data, including earnings information by higher education provider and subject of study up to five years post graduation. It comes from the longitudinal education outcomes database, commonly known as LEO. The database has a wider coverage than the Student Loans Company, as it considers all graduates rather than just those who take out a student loan. Secure access to this data is granted to accredited researchers through the Office for National Statistics, to answer research questions. So while HE providers, although they do some of the best research themselves, cannot access LEO data to look at individual graduate outcomes, the data that is already published is sufficient to meet those research needs. On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the LEO database holds data by subject, provider, gender and region—so it does provide good access.
In relation to the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, obviously the data that I have outlined is only one factor in the value of a higher-education qualification. I hope that all noble Lords will agree that we see the value immensely of her education, and the roles that some people undertake for very modest salaries are incredibly valuable. We have seen that a lot during the pandemic.
The second part of my noble friend’s amendment includes a duty to facilitate universities’ communication with their graduates through the Student Loans Company, without passing on any personal data, unless a graduate has specifically opted out. I noticed the Member’s explanatory statement states:
“This amendment enables universities to use the SLC to communicate with their graduates to encourage greater uptake of lifelong learning opportunities.”
As I have outlined, the SLC is not really there to be used by the universities. It is there for the students and to ensure that there is proper finance. The Student Loans Company should hold data only on students who own or are repaying a loan, so not all graduates are captured. Again, the onus is on the graduate to ensure that the Student Loans Company has their most recent contact data after they complete their studies. It will not surprise noble Lords that, unfortunately, not all graduates do this.
To answer my noble friend’s question, are we really looking now to place a duty on SLC to chase down the graduates for contact information when it does not have it? Such a system, as outlined in the amendment, to facilitate communication between the universities and the Student Loans Company, unfortunately would incur up-front and ongoing costs, plus potential data implications, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, highlighted. The roles suggested would involve a considerable burden on the Student Loans Company. It is best left to universities to reach out to their alumni directly through existing communication channels. As I mentioned in relation to the Member’s explanatory statement, if the Student Loans Company were to take on a role of communicating about lifelong loan entitlements, would it be after just one university, or three institutions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, outlined? This is a considerable administrative, communication or marketing task that we would be asking of the SLC.
The final part of the amendment proposes facilitating the National Employment Savings Trust to communicate through the Student Loans Company, effectively encouraging students to consider saving into the NEST pension scheme once they get towards paying off their student loans. Automatic enrolment has achieved a quiet revolution through getting employees into the habit of pension savings, reversing the previous decline in workplace pension participation seen in the decade before the start of the reforms. As my noble friend Lord Willetts mentioned, it has succeeded in transforming pension saving for millions of workers. Since 2012, workplace pension participation rates for eligible employees aged 22 to 29 increased from 35% to 86% in 2019.
While encouraging graduates to work towards future financial resilience is right, the Government do not agree that this amendment is the right means to do so. A graduate or postgraduate would not be able to join the NEST pension scheme directly. NEST was established to support automatic enrolment and operates under a public service obligation to accept any employer who wishes to use the scheme to meet their automatic enrolment duties. Given that NEST is a workplace pension scheme, this means that most people typically would join through their employer but, in some cases such as self-employment, people can enrol themselves. In addition to operating under a public service obligation, NEST also receives a government loan to cover its running costs. This amendment would be seen as giving NEST an unfair advantage in a competitive pensions market. I am sorry to inform my noble friend Lord Willetts that this too would not be possible.
I have to say that I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, that this would also take away from the core role. Like any organisation, the Student Loans Company has a limit on what it can deliver at any one time and there is already an ambitious reform programme, including the delivery of the lifelong loan entitlement, which I assure noble Lords will keep all those employees, mainly in Darlington, very busy over the next few years.
Laudable though the aims of this amendment are, the Government’s position is that changing the role of the SLC is not the vehicle to deliver this. It is unfortunately not a treasure trove, as my noble friend Lord Lucas outlined. I thank my noble friend Lord Willetts for his amendment but hope that, having considered these points, he will withdraw it.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for a very interesting debate. I particularly agree, of course, with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and my noble friend Lord Lucas. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, that—although it was fascinating to hear her personal biography, which is indeed a reminder that there is more to universities than subsequent earnings—there is nothing in this amendment that says that is the be-all and end-all of universities. It simply recognises that we have this organisation, the Student Loans Company, in place and that we have a problem, which I very much regret was not acknowledged by the Minister: most universities have no means of communicating with most of their graduates. That is a real barrier to the Government’s own objective of promoting lifelong learning, although there are other objectives as well and the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, about mentoring seemed to me very relevant.
Meanwhile, a separate government agency is communicating with graduates—namely, the Student Loans Company. Of course it is correct that, at the moment, it is simply collecting money from them, but I do not see why that is not also an opportunity to do something additional. I am very much aware of the practical operational problems of the Student Loans Company, having wrestled with them myself for several years, but this request would be under ministerial guidance; Ministers and the Department for Education, together with the Student Loans Company, would have the ultimate say on what messages were communicated. It seems to me that the Minister is in danger of missing out on a really important opportunity to achieve one of her own objectives.
This is the kind of debate that we might have had about NHS data 15 or 20 years ago, when some Health Minister turned out to say, “No, it wouldn’t be acceptable for hospitals to communicate with people who have had appointments or been at the hospital”. The fact is that data and communication matter. We have to be imaginative in harnessing the opportunities that we have to communicate.
I very much regret the Minister’s approach. I will, of course, withdraw my amendment now, but I hope it might be possible to consider further ways in which some version of this thoroughly innocuous amendment can be used to achieve an objective that is shared across the House. It should be done only within the capacities of the Student Loans Company, and only for purposes of which Ministers approve but I think that, if Ministers do not take this chance, there will be a moment in the future when they say, “Why on earth didn’t we do this? It would have been so useful”. We could be providing universities with more information about their graduates; we could be enabling graduates to have more information about what their universities can do for them and what they can do for their university. In the light of the debate so far, however, I beg leave to withdraw this specific amendment now.
The Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)
We now come to Amendment 89A. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 89A
Lord Willetts
“Access to learner data for research
(1) Key learner data must be shared for research purposes, including longitudinal studies, in accordance with Part 5, Chapter 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, or equivalent legislation concerning data not covered by the 2017 Act.(2) What constitutes “key learner data” must be reasonably defined by researchers on a case-by-case basis and may be taken to include, but not be confined to, graduates’ employment and income data. (3) Organisations controlling key learner data must take all reasonable endeavours to make the data available for research in line with subsection (1).”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that administrative data is available for research and longitudinal studies that will inform, and improve, public policymaking.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
I will refer to this amendment briefly as well, although it overlaps to some extent with the debate that we have just had. I begin by declaring some specific interests. I am on the board of UKRI, the public agency responsible for funding social science research and administrative data, and I am the president of a think tank, the Resolution Foundation, which has an interest in using and accessing research data.
The background to this is the battle on LEO data, which has already been referred to. I assure the Minister that I am very proud of having fought long and hard to get the LEO data made available—incidentally, in the course of it, overcoming objections rather similar to the ones she just made to my previous amendment. After battles with HMRC, we got LEO data, and it has improved the debate on universities—although, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said in our previous debate, we should never think that earnings data are the be-all and end-all.
After long and difficult battles with HMRC, that data was made available to a small group of accredited researchers, and is now analysed closely by, above all, the Institute for Fiscal Studies. However, a lot of weight is placed on the LEO data, and there are other datasets about learner outcomes, not all of which are covered by the Digital Economy Act. I am worried that the debate on graduate outcomes is in the hands of a very small number of researchers with access to the LEO data. Researchers as a whole find it difficult to access data not covered by the Digital Economy Act. For example, health data is not covered by it. It would be very interesting to know—there is a lively debate about this—the extent to which going to university boosts health outcomes and life expectancy, for example.
Of course there must be rigorous standards for the researchers accessing such data: confidentiality, anonymity and a whole host of other requirements all need to be in place. However, we would have a better-quality and more wide-ranging debate about higher education if there were a wide range of perspectives informed by a wider range of empirical data about what is actually happening. After I successfully fought for the LEO data, I never expected that it would become the be-all and end-all. I see it as part of a much wider set of data types and a much wider range of researchers, properly regulated, analysing what happens in education.
The parallel with the previous amendment is that data matters. This Government are bold on science and technology. They understand the importance of data in good public policy. The DfE is not the worst offender when it comes to providing researchers with access to data, but there are certainly clear constraints at the moment on that access, going way beyond the necessary requirements of confidentiality and anonymity. I hope that, in the light of that, the Minister will consider undertaking that there should be a greater range of researchers with greater access to key learner data, so that we can all debate it with more information at our disposal. That is why I move the amendment.
The Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)
My Lords, the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare, Lord Adonis and Lord Lucas, have withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
Ah, a lot earlier than expected, but thank you, Lord Deputy Chairman. As with the previous amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, this recalls debates in which both he and I participated four years’ ago on what was then the Higher Education and Research Bill. This amendment in particular evokes the many considered by your Lordships’ House on the teaching excellence framework. As an aside, I say that the Bill we are considering today has about 100 amendments being discussed over four Committee days. We are fortunate, because in 2017 the Higher Education and Research Bill had more than 500 amendments tabled to it over seven Committee days, most finishing very late into the evening—happy days.
I believe that the connection I drew with the TEF—which has as its full title the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework—is relevant, because both the TEF and the key learner data, which this amendment suggests should be collected, is the same in respect of graduates’ employment and income data. In 2017, I believed that TEF was both intrusive and—not entirely, but largely—irrelevant. I hold the same view about the key learner data. I do not believe the data mentioned in the amendment is key, although it would be for researchers to define it in any way that they saw fit, were this to be adopted. That seems to be much too open-ended, potentially covering subjects that appeal to the imagination of any underemployed researcher.
The amendment states:
“What constitutes ‘key learner data’ must be reasonably defined”.
Who would decide what is reasonable? As far as I can see, the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, did not say what, apart from graduates’ employment and income data, it might involve—would it include a person’s socioeconomic background, whether they were state or privately educated, an undergraduate or postgraduate, or a mature student, or maybe even their ethnicity? I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, aims to increase the number of researchers with access to information on graduates, and I support that, but who would act as the gatekeeper? If I did not know and very much respect the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, I would say that he might even be making a rather fanciful suggestion. That said, I do not see the merit that he sees in this amendment and, notwithstanding his opening remarks and explanation to noble Lords, I am unable to signify our support.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Willetts for tabling this amendment. Like my noble friend, the Department for Education is fully committed to facilitating external research and recognises its valuable contribution to the evidence base surrounding the education and skills system in England.
The intended purpose of this amendment, as set out by my noble friend—namely, to ensure that administrative data about learners is available for research and longitudinal studies in the public interest—is something that the department fully supports. However, public authorities, including the department, are already able to disclose information for research purposes under Chapter 5 of Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, as my noble friend referenced. For example, in line with the National Data Strategy, the department is already working with partners such as Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Higher Education Statistics Agency and the Office for National Statistics. Here the Act is being used to give researchers access to education data linked to benefits, employment and earnings in a de-identified manner via the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service. This data, referred to as LEO—as my noble friend the Minister has already said—was opened for applications on 7 July this year. This example is one of almost 500 shares of departmental data using existing gateways which were live at the end of March 2021. As part of our commitment to transparency, details of all live shares are published quarterly on GOV.UK.
Given that the department and other public authorities are therefore already able to and do actively share data for research in the public interest, I hope that my noble friend is reassured that this amendment is not necessary and is able to withdraw it.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
I am grateful to the Opposition Front Bench and the Minister for their interventions on my amendment. I was slightly surprised by the approach of the Opposition Front Bench on this occasion, because this is intended to inform debates on outcomes for higher education.
On the Minister’s point, first, the initiative on 7 July is very helpful for broadening access to LEO data. One of the aims of this amendment was to promote that broadening of access, so I am very grateful for what has happened. My one disagreement, if I may say so, with what she said is that, being very familiar with the Digital Economy Act 2017, which had a long gestation and undoubtedly has moved things forward a lot, I can say that the Digital Economy Act does not cover all sets of data that are relevant to educational outcomes. This amendment is therefore deliberately broader to enable, for example, health data to be used for educational research; clearly, as the Minister rightly said, with proper security to ensure protection of confidentiality, anonymity where appropriate, and suchlike.
I will of course withdraw the amendment today, but I hope that the Minister will accept that, if we can provide practical examples of any gaps in the current legal and regulatory framework which mean that we are falling short of the objective—the admirable objective she set out: that there should be proper access for all researchers to data relevant to researching learner outcomes—perhaps it might be possible to return to this issue at a later date.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Wednesday 21st July 2021
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-IV(Rev) Fourth marshalled list for Committee - (19 Jul 2021)
Lord Willetts
“Review of student loans
(1) The Secretary of State must review and update all the terms of—(a) student loans, and(b) graduate payments,every five years.(2) The outcome of the review under subsection (1) must be published within six months of its completion.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that there is a regular review of the student loan system so that can any problems can be identified and changes made.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
My Lords, I wish to move Amendment 90 in my name, which proposes a new clause to provide for the review and updating of the terms of higher education loans and repayments every five years. Before I briefly turn to that, I just say to the House and to the Minister that it is much appreciated that the Government have set aside four days for consideration of this important Bill in Committee. This is the last amendment I will move, so this is the right moment to thank the Minister for her engagement with the issues. I assure her that all the amendments I have brought forward are aimed at improving the Bill and helping the Government achieve their policy objectives.
I realise that there may well be a very understandable reaction to this amendment: that higher education finance is so difficult and controversial that the last thing we need is a provision to look at it every five years. But, in reality, because the system is so important in the public finances and so politically charged, it is being changed, and it has been changed, in an ad hoc way, from time to time. In this amendment, I have tried to provide a framework so that it can be reviewed and updated systematically, looking at the system and the interactions between its parts as a whole.
This proposed new clause would also tackle a belief—I think it is misconceived, but there are people who hold it—that somehow the system cannot be changed at all. The terms on which the Student Loans Company deals with students, and then graduates, makes it clear from the beginning that regulations for the terms of repayment can be amended from time to time. Of course, there are advocates of a graduate tax. This current repayment scheme is, in many ways, rather close to a graduate tax—a 9% tax on earnings above a certain threshold but with a cap on the total amount. A graduate tax would clearly come with adjustable rates, so this establishes the reality that the terms of the scheme can be adjusted and altered, and that this should be done with a proper systematic overview from time to time.
It would also enable the system to take account of legitimate political debate about the balance between the amount we expect graduates to pay back for the cost of their education and the amount we expect taxpayers to pay by virtue of writing off unpaid student loans. There is genuine and legitimate debate about what that balance should be. Different people of different political persuasions can take different views on what the balance is, and it is also affected by things such as the performance of graduate earnings. I do not think it is now breaking any confidences to say that, when we set the graduate repayment threshold of £21,000, when we brought in the £9,000 fees, it was based on a rather different forecast of graduate earnings than actually happened. So as earnings overall grew by less, the repayment threshold ended up being higher in real terms than had been envisaged. Those are the types of economic scenarios which Ministers rightly should be able to consider, and they should be able to change the system in the light of them.
In the last few years, we have had a range of ad hoc changes, of which the most significant—and, I have to say, I think the most egregious—was the one in 2017, with a very big increase in the graduate repayment threshold and, therefore, a sudden and large increase in the cost to taxpayers from loans that were being written off. It was introduced with no consultation and no wider consideration for the system as a whole. In fact, I have to say that it was a case study in the perils of policy-making by conference speech crisis, which is not a good way to decide how our higher education should be funded.
I very much hope that this approach—which provides that there should be an overall review every five years in which, clearly, the terms of the loan scheme can be looked at in the light of economic and political considerations—provides some kind of framework. The Augar review—a serious piece of work, a lot of which I agree with—is one example of how that could be done, and the Minister might cite it. But circumstances change; debates change. Rather than having a one-off specific exercise like that, I think that, every five years, being able to look at what has happened to the so-called RAB charge, loan repayments and graduate earnings, and adjusting the system in the light of public spending pressures and other issues, makes sense, and it does not stop people doing anything else.
There will be some people in this House who believe that the whole system should be swept away. That is their view, and nothing in this provision changes their capacity to do that if they bring in primary legislation. Equally, Ministers may still want to make changes, from time to time. But this just provides, rather as in the historic social security system, for a systematic overview every five years, with the opportunity to look at all the evidence and decide in a structured way how the system could be recalibrated. I think it legitimises the absolute necessity of keeping the scheme adjusted, and provides a framework for doing so, and I hope it will improve the quality of our ability to scrutinise and improve our higher education financing system as it goes forward. That is why I propose this new clause.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I must first apologise for my absence from this Committee on Monday, particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, whose amendments I had signed. It was entirely due to an administrative foul-up on my part.
I speak today in support of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, which in some ways reflects what is happening now in an ad hoc way. Back in 2018, Philip Augar was asked to review what was happening with student fees. In January, we had an interim response from the Government on that, but, according to the Guardian at the start of this month, we are going to get the Government’s full response soon—we are looking at a four or five-year time period, the same as is proposed in this amendment.
What we are hearing about the debate going on behind the scenes before we get that response is talk of tuition fee cuts, a cap on student numbers for certain courses and minimum qualifications, which are all designed to lower the cost to the Government of financing the student loan system. The fact is that, when tuition fees were set at £9,000 in 2012, the intention was to have inflationary increases at regular intervals. But since being raised to £9,250 in 2016, the fees have remained at that level while the real value has declined by 12%. It is notable in this context, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said, that this is an intensely political issue and decisions are very likely to be made in an ad hoc, highly political way.
It is interesting that apparently the report suggests that the Treasury is seeking to directly cut fees and increase repayments, while other parts of government favour more indirect means, such as minimum entry requirements and course caps. We really have to think about that latter approach in the context of the Bill we are debating now; it is focused on the need for more skills and education, yet we are expecting sometime soon a proposal from the Government that will squeeze down and reduce people’s access.
We have to look at where we are: more than £17 billion is being loaned to students each year. The value of outstanding loans has reached £160 billion, and this is expected to be £560 billion by the middle of this century, at 2020 prices. Some 75% of students will not repay their loans. That means half the people in a single generation going through life for 30 years with that weight resting on their shoulders. We are in a situation now where we are stressing the need for this review. Think about Covid; it descended on us and society changed enormously, and in this age of shocks, we do not know what changes will arrive in future.
The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, reflected that the Government would probably not welcome this amendment, because the issue of fees is so difficult and controversial. However, I agree with the noble Lord that this magnifies the need for a systematic, planned, guaranteed measure of review. We could even argue that it would make it easier for Ministers, because by being on the face of the Bill, it would be a review that had to happen, and it would be set in the government timetable.
The practical reality is that what we have now is a fantasy. These are called loans, but most of the money will never be paid back. We as a society need to reflect on the fact that education is a public good, and it should be paid for from general progressive taxation, not weighted on to the shoulders of individuals, in a system whereby those who earn the most can, by paying off their loans fast, repay the least. We need change. The amendment will not achieve that, but it would at least create a pause, a chance to think—indeed, a requirement to think—about what we are doing to our young people and their future.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for introducing his amendment, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her reflections—and for her courteous but quite unnecessary apology. The current arrangements for student loans are now quite complicated. A recent House of Commons Library brief gave a lovely timeline of all the changes from 1990, when the first loans were introduced for student support—then at just £420 a year. It then tracked the developments, as loans gradually replaced grants for maintenance, and there was a shift from mortgage-style loans to income-contingent repayment schemes. Then loans for fees started, and some maintenance grants came back.
The big shift came in 2012, when fees trebled and the current system was in put in place. The effect of this pattern showed up when I was chatting recently to a member of our small opposition staff team. She had compared notes with a couple of colleagues in the office, and realised that although the three of them had graduated not so many years apart, each had a different package of debt and repayments.
Part of the reason for the complexity is that the system has so many moving parts. A Government wanting to save money have a range of ways to do it. They can change the size of the original debt, as they did dramatically in 2012. They can change the repayment threshold, as they did in 2016, when they decided to stop tracking earnings and freeze the threshold until 2021—although that went down so badly that they changed it again, not just unfreezing the threshold but raising it to £25,000 from 2018. They can change the contribution period; indeed, Augar recommends raising it to 40 years. They can change the contribution rate. That is still 9% for undergraduate degrees, but loans for master’s programmes were introduced in 2016, and for PhDs in 2018. That rate could now go up to 15% of earnings above the threshold for postgrads. Or they could change the interest rates. Indeed, they are spoilt for choice here: they could change the rate while studying or the rate when repaying, or they could change one or both of the lower and upper thresholds. Each of those changes or combinations would have a different distributional effect.
I take it from his introduction that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, wants a periodic systematic review, and he made his case for that. But does his amendment mean that changes could be made only then? I suspect that the answer to that might affect the Government’s interest in the idea.
One benefit of the systematic approach would be the opportunity to ensure that factual information about the impact of changes to the system was gathered and disseminated. Does the Minister agree that work is needed to ensure that the student loans system is widely understood? After all, if Governments are to make changes to student finance, it is vital that it is not done by sleight of hand, or by banking on the HE version of a fiscal drag. It is crucial that the differential impact on people with different likely lifetime earnings is made crystal clear. After all, if the state is advancing £17 billion a year to higher education students in England and the value of outstanding loans is some £160 billion this year, the least the Government owe the country is transparency, and a good public debate. Does the Minister agree?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Willetts, and for his thanks. It is a pleasure to engage with noble Lords. This is my first piece of legislation in your Lordships’ House, and I hope that this is the shape of things to come in terms of the tone and the reaction to this legislation.
With £19.1 billion paid out in student loans in the financial year 2020-21, and further increases forecast for future years, it is essential that the Government keep careful control of the student finance system. It is also important that they retain the ability to review and make changes to the student finance system as and when needed, without the potential delays, or the focus on process, that a requirement for a review every five years could impose. I appreciate my noble friend’s comments, but inadvertently, a process may, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, outlined, become constraining, even if it was introduced with the best of intentions.
We must ensure that the system can remain responsive to the needs of the labour market and the wider economy, and thus continue to deliver good value for students and the taxpayer. We agree that, as the noble Baroness said, there is a need for transparency. A wide range of data on student loans and repayments are regularly produced and made publicly available, which enables the Government, and other interested parties, to monitor the student loans system. These include regular publications from the Student Loans Company and the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, outlined, the Government have updated the student loan offer in recent years, with the introduction of several new loan products, including loans to support postgraduate and doctoral study, and we will continue to make changes as and when necessary. Through the Bill, the Government are also introducing a lifelong loan entitlement that will open up new routes for people to retrain and upskill flexibly throughout their lives.
In relation to some of the questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, the fees cap of £9,250 is frozen for this year and the next academic year. She talked about the burden, and the responsibility, obviously, is to repay a loan, but 30 years is at the moment akin to many of the mortgage products available on the commercial market.
As the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, correctly predicted, I shall take this opportunity to remind noble Lords of the recommendations regarding higher education, including on student loans and graduate repayments, that were made by the independent panel appointed to provide input to the review of post-18 education and funding. The Government are carefully considering these recommendations before setting out a response to the review, along with the comprehensive spending review.
In conclusion, while I am sorry to disappoint my noble friend for the second time in recent days, I hope that my remarks have reassured him, as I know this has been an issue of concern to him for many years. I hope that he will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
I am grateful to the Minister for her courtesy, as always. I do not think my score on the amendments that I have tabled to the Bill has been very high—and I will, of course, withdraw this amendment. However, I hope that it will be possible to come back and consider this matter further.
I shall comment briefly on what has been said. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, came to this from her own perspective, which was interesting. I much appreciated the fact that she too made the case for some kind of structure involving a review every five years. I can assure the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the Minister, that there is nothing in the amendment that would stop specific changes at specific times. We have had a lot of those, and that may well carry on.
What I am trying to provide for is something more systematic every few years. I am trying to avoid the need for something like Augar—the setting up of a special inquiry—when it should just be natural that every five years we look at what has happened to graduate earnings, at how much of the graduate loan book is likely to be repaid, and at the terms of maintenance support, and we decide whether there should be any changes in the light of changing circumstances—or, indeed, changing political priorities. Providing that kind of health check on the system as a whole every five years would not deprive Ministers of power; it would actually provide an opportunity for a sensible wider public debate on a subject that is often seen as obscure and difficult but should not be because it is of such public interest.
As I said, I will not press the amendment to a vote today, but I hope that perhaps, over the summer, it might be possible to meet the Minister and consider with her not only this but some other amendments that I have tabled, in case we can find a way forward that takes account of the legitimate concerns that she has expressed. I also hope that she recognises that my amendments are aimed at improving the system in line with the Government’s own policy objectives.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Duncan of Springbank)
Does the Minister wish to respond?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
Just to say that I would be delighted to meet my noble friend at a convenient point.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 90A. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 90A
The Lord Bishop of Durham
“Universal credit conditions: receiving education
(1) In section 4 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012—(a) in subsection (1) omit paragraph (d), and(b) omit subsection (6).(2) The Secretary of State may by regulations made by statutory instrument make consequential provision.(3) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would remove the restriction that those “receiving education” cannot claim Universal Credit, which at present may impede some of the most disadvantaged from benefitting from learning opportunities. It is intended to probe how the Government plans to incentivise take-up of training programmes, and to elicit how cross-departmental working can be made more effective in transforming learning and skills.
The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]
My Lords, I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. On these Benches, we welcome the Bill as the first step in implementing the much more significant role that further education needs to play in transforming the lives and life chances of individuals, communities and wider society. Quite properly, the Bill is chiefly concerned with structural or technical issues. The House has done its usual, excellent and thorough job of exploring large numbers of those matters through the four days spent in Committee. The Bill deals with what one might call the supply side of provision by aiming to make it more responsive and adaptable to the needs of employers and the community, for example. Turning any vision into action is no easy thing and I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for an extremely helpful meeting, including on the issue of incentivising learners to take up the new opportunities that the Bill seeks to increase.
However, one of the crucial factors in radically increasing the take-up of the opportunities that should flow from such responsiveness is the provision of financial support for those who are unable to meet the costs of their studies because they are reliant on state benefits—for example, if they are unemployed. I therefore also support Amendments 92 to 98, all of which—although in different ways—aim at broadening the range and scope of support for learners. As your Lordships will have noted, Amendment 93 also specifically refers to amending the universal credit conditions in a way that would permit full-time study. There is therefore already a wide degree of support for more flexibility in the benefits system to maximise access to skills training and education.
I turn to Amendment 90A in more detail. The current welfare rules pose a major barrier to upskilling or retraining for many people out of work—a situation that is not new. Historically, that was embodied in the 16-hour rule but persists under the new universal credit system. For example, someone currently in receipt of universal credit will lose access to benefits if they take up the lifetime skills guarantee of a fully funded first level 3 qualification or other further education qualification. The Chancellor has invested in programmes in the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education to support 16 to 24 year-olds but the programmes do not currently operate in tandem and it is difficult to make them work for employers, students, unemployed people and colleges. In addition, while support with tuition fees is one element in enabling people to begin their courses, living costs—the maintenance element—are often a more significant barrier, a matter often discussed in reference to students in higher education but that is just as much a problem for students in further education, if not more so.
I fully recognise that the Government have begun a significant programme of substantial and complex work over the student loan system and the LLE, and that joint work is already under way between the DfE and the Department for Work and Pensions. I am most grateful to the Minister for having shared with me and colleagues some of those issues and their proposed solutions. We appreciate that there are also significant complexities—technical, practical and legislative—in embodying detailed provision for student financial support in primary legislation, and of which those of us who participated in scrutiny of the Higher Education and Research Act and its cousins will be all too well aware. I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for the information in her recent letter about the lifelong learning entitlement amendments tabled on Wednesday and the invitation to a briefing on the matter.
However, the purpose of the amendment is to give the noble Baroness an opportunity to assure the Committee that the Government are committed to reforming those aspects of the benefits system that may act as barriers to people’s participation in gaining new skills or increasing their present skills, which our post-Covid society will need. I would welcome further discussions with her or officials as the Government’s proposals are developed. At this stage, subject to those assurances, I will leave this as a probing amendment.
Baroness Janke (LD) [V]
My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 93 in the names of my noble friend Lord Storey and myself. As the right reverend Prelate said, the amendments in this group deal with finance and incentives to take up the training and development opportunities in the Bill, as well as addressing the disincentive posed by universal credit to taking up those opportunities.
Amendment 93 seeks to change the current situation of people who are unemployed and wish to follow full-time training courses to improve their job prospects by giving them entitlement to universal credit, from which they are currently excluded. As has been explained, that is because those receiving universal credit have obligations to prioritise job searches and take available jobs over full-time training. In addition, the length of time in which people can continue receiving universal credit while undertaking work-focused study has been capped at eight weeks. People taking up courses on offer would have to give up universal credit and have the choice of whether to take up chances of reskilling or have enough money on which to live, eat and pay bills. Unemployed people or those on low-paid jobs are the least likely to take out a loan, further risking indebtedness and poverty for themselves and their families.
The Bill is about the importance of training and retraining to support people and employers. The Government have rightly invested in traineeships, apprenticeships and the Kickstart and Restart programmes. However, those schemes have limited eligibility. Unemployment has risen in age groups other than those aged 18 to 25, on whom much attention is focused, but the people who would benefit from claiming universal credit are often those who would benefit most from retraining and development.
There is a lack of co-ordination across departments to make the Bill and its provisions succeed. There needs to be appraisal by the DWP and I should like to hear from the Minister what the Government have done to consider the difficulties of people who are trying to take up courses when they are unemployed and have no other means of support. Amendment 93 seeks to amend the regulations on universal credit to enable a more flexible and enabling approach to those most in need of retraining development for decent jobs. It relates only to courses leading to the lifetime guarantee and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I can be fairly brief, given that my noble friend has just done some of the heavy lifting on the amendment standing in her name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey.
Universal credit is there to help people, and it replaced a lot of other benefits. However, there are problems relating to the fact that generally one is supposed to be looking for work, but the system seems to exclude people from taking on training. That is purely an absurdity. If one wants to try to improve the skills levels of the nation, surely every time that people are available, often when they are not in work, it would be a good chance for them to take up that reskilling.
We need to get people better skilled. I hope that the Government when they answer will be able to tell us exactly how they are going to get those groups of people who are available to take up the training and skill opportunities to take part, because presumably some of them are not doing anything else. If one takes away the foundation on which they are able to live, one is stopping them taking part.
That is not a new problem, but at the moment the benefits system is acting in many cases as a disincentive to upskilling. We should do everything we can to change that. This is as good a time as any.
Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]
My Lords, I support the intentions of these three amendments. In essence, they would allow people on universal credit to engage in study without being financially disadvantaged.
The current situation creates a perverse disincentive, whereby those wishing to upskill and gain qualifications that may make them more employable find themselves financially worse off as they no longer receive universal credit payments. Allowing people to study and gain new skills improves their chances of getting off benefits and into employment. Whatever short-term savings the Government make by not paying benefits to people who enrol in training courses, they are lost if the system incentivises people to stay on universal credit rather than participating in education.
One understands completely the desire to limit benefit numbers and, further, to encourage those who can work while studying to do so. However, this needs to be carefully balanced with the need to encourage upskilling at a time when our workforce is changing rapidly—and will continue to do so, in my view.
This is an area that the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education need to work together to solve. Can the Government outline what work has been done to date by both departments on this important policy area? What steps will they take to ensure that universal credit policy is not inadvertently discouraging people from participating in crucial skills training?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. This group of amendments has already been outlined clearly by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. To sum up his contribution, he asked how people could better use their time while unemployed than by upskilling. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, said that it would be an absurdity not to encourage the unemployed to improve their skills.
On day one of our debates, we talked a great deal about the need, in our climate emergency and nature crisis, to increase our skills. There is simply so much that we need. People who are unemployed are obviously at a potential point where we can start to fill some of those gaps.
The noble Baroness, Lady Janke, made an important point: that unemployed people are of all ages, from those just leaving school to those in their 70s and beyond who still need, or want, to work. They often have commitments, for example to children, to rent, to a mortgage or to supporting older relatives. We cannot assume that they are just a unit of labour that can be shifted around at will.
What we have seen is decades of wretched economic change in many parts of the country, which has only been amplified by Covid. It is worth looking at a study from the Institute for Employment Studies, published in June. It attempts to explain the current conundrum where we have a recruitment crisis yet in parts of the country there are as many as 10 jobseekers for each vacancy. According to the study, the average number of people across the country claiming unemployment benefit and competing for each vacancy is 2.2, and almost 100 local authorities have five jobseekers going for each available role.
People have to be able to make choices in their own interests and in the interests of the country. Leaving people trapped, applying—pointlessly, they know—for scores and scores of jobs that they know they are not going to get is profoundly dispiriting and damaging. We need to give people the option of finding another path forward in life instead of being trapped in that situation.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken to air these important issues.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham identified some of the major barriers placed in the way of people who want to take up education and training to improve their skills. Did the Minister see the recent report from the Association of Colleges? It concluded that the current social security rules
“actively discourage people from getting the skills they need”—
a point reinforced by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. The report argues that, if this is not fixed, it will result in
“fewer people in stable and meaningful jobs … slower economic growth … reduced opportunity to meet employers’ skills needs; and … bigger tax burdens.”
It is crucial that government policy is joined up, with skills, employment and social security policy properly aligned. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, pointed out, all these must be aligned with our overriding plans to deal with the climate emergency. Amendment 98 in my name is designed to probe whether the Government have any plans to do this, in terms of alignment, by changing the rules on universal credit to support skills development.
Most people who are studying full-time cannot get universal credit. There are exceptions, such as for young people who are doing A-levels or other non-advanced courses and do not have parental support, for those who are responsible for children and for some disabled people with a limited capacity for work. Otherwise, people on UC face the kind of conditionality requirements mentioned by the right reverend Prelate, the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, and others. Specifically, unless they have an easement of some kind, UC claimants are meant to spend 35 hours a week looking for work, and to provide evidence. This can result in some pretty dispiriting things of the kind mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. The claimants are allowed to do part-time education or training, but only if they can fit it in in their spare time—in other words, fit it in around a full week’s job search.
Baroness Penn (Con) [V]
My Lords, this group of amendments broadly seeks to enable individuals studying at level 3 and below to claim universal credit. It may be helpful to noble Lords if I set out the work already under way in this space, as was noted by several participants in the debate.
Officials at the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions are working together—I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, will be reassured by that fact—to mitigate the barriers to unemployed adults taking advantage of our skills offers. In April, an extension to the flexibility offered by universal credit conditionality was announced for a trial period of six months. The noble Baroness, Lady Janke, made a point about the eight-week cap for full-time training for those on universal credit. As a result of the trial under way, adults who claim universal credit and are part of the intensive work search programme can now study full-time for up to 12 weeks, or up to 16 weeks as part of a skills bootcamp in England. This builds on the eight weeks for which claimants were already able to train full-time. Such measures are helping to ensure that universal credit claimants are supported in accessing training and skills that will improve their ability to gain good, stable, well-paid jobs.
Amendment 90A, moved by the right reverend Prelate, and Amendment 93, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, have a similar thrust so I will take them together. Section 4(1)(d) of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 sets out that one of the basic conditions of entitlement to universal credit is that the person must be “not receiving education”, which can be defined in the regulations made under subsection (6). Financial support for students comes from the current system of learner loans and grants designed for their needs. Where students have additional needs that are not met through this support system, exceptions are already provided under Regulation 14 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013, enabling those people to claim universal credit.
However, universal credit is not intended to duplicate the support provided by the student support system. Furthermore, the sub-paragraph of Regulation 14 referenced in Amendment 93 provides an exception to the requirement that a person must not be receiving education to be entitled to universal credit. That is designed to support care leavers aged 18 to 21 who wish to catch up on education that they may have missed when they were younger, and to make welfare support available to them. We therefore feel it would be of benefit to maintain this regulation to continue to support this group of adults.
On Amendment 98, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the point raised by the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, that it is not possible to take advantage of the lifetime skills guarantee while on universal credit, I point out more broadly that an adult undertaking a course up to level 3 may still be entitled to universal credit. This is provided that their course is compatible with work-related requirements agreed with their work coach. Where the course is work-related and will give the person the best chance of securing work, the work coach may consider it a suitable work preparation activity. In such cases, time spent on the courses will be deducted from the amount of time the person needs to spend looking for work.
To answer the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on this principle, she is right in noting that those on universal credit should not restrict their availability for work in favour of the course that they are undertaking. They might need to be prepared to give up or, more suitably, adjust their course in order to take up work, for example by moving to a part-time basis. The noble Baroness’s second question was on the pilot that we introduced for full-time training to last up to 12 or 16 weeks. We will evaluate the impacts of that extension before making a decision on its future. As the noble Baroness noted, the pilot runs until the end of October and then we will look at its effects.
I hope I have set out that the Government are already taking steps to ensure that the benefit system works better for those who need to undertake training to improve their prospects of finding work. As such, I hope that the right reverend Prelate is able to withdraw his amendment and that the noble Baronesses will not move theirs when they are reached.
The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply and thank all colleagues for their comments on all three of the amendments in this group. I am very grateful for all the insights that were offered. Thank you, Minister, for outlining where work is already under way. That is reassuring, and it is also reassuring to hear that the DfE and the DWP are working together to help mitigate barriers—I trust that will continue and deepen—and to hear of the greater flexibility already under trial.
On reflection, listening to the complexity with which the Minister cited sections, subsections and so on from different Acts to explain the system does not give me great confidence for the poor person trying to do a level 3 qualification and decide whether they can get some financial support through universal credit. I understand that the complexity of the law is a bit different from the way that a work coach might approach it, but she illustrated one of the difficulties for young and older people seeking to find their way through this system. At this stage, of course I will withdraw my amendment, but I hope that on Report there will be evidence of further joint working with the DWP and further consideration of where this might be eased for those for whom access to universal credit would make a complete difference to their upskilling for the future.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 90B. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 90B
The Lord Bishop of Durham
“Long-term funding review
(1) The Secretary of State must commission a panel of experts to review of the long-term funding for skills and post-16 education.(2) The panel must consider and make recommendations about—(a) resources available for different types of technical training, further education and higher education; (b) support for disadvantaged students and those with special education needs;(c) the impact of this Act on the long-term funding for skills and post-16 education.(3) The panel must conclude their review and make a report to the Secretary of State with their findings and recommendations.(4) Within the period of one year beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay the panel’s report before Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This is a probing amendment, intended to draw out the Government’s plans to introduce a longer-term funding settlement for FE, as called for by the Education Select Committee, prefigured in the White Paper and signalled, as the direction of travel by recent increases in core FE funding, capital funding allocations and the longer term Lifelong Learning Entitlement.
The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]
My Lords, in its 2014 report Sense & Instability, City & Guilds made a wryly humorous and powerful case for much greater coherence, greater focus on building on success and greater attention to effective implementation in skills policy. With the White Paper and this Bill, along with associated developments such as T-levels and, we hope, far more radical change to apprenticeships, it is clear that the present Government are moving in that direction—a trajectory that we on these Benches fully support. This amendment seeks to make those policy ambitions more concrete by placing their funding arrangements on a statutory footing.
The goal of joining up the wider education and skills system so that it better meets society’s needs and gives people the skills they need is by no means easy to reach. It also requires that goal to be embedded in a long-term national strategy, most appropriately on something like a 10-year horizon. That strategy needs to sit across government, so that it can more imaginatively bring coherence across departments, as well as give greater stability at college, local and regional levels. Crucially, it requires a matching long-term funding settlement.
It is already possible to see how this kind of cross-departmental approach can bring huge benefits, for example in areas such as sustainability and the green agenda, tackling the recruitment needs of nursing and other allied professions, the major changes facing the automotive industry and the significance of digital skills—all of which require colleges to play a major part in delivering the required skills to individuals, employers and businesses. The need for such a longer-term strategic investment has been called for by the Education Select Committee, is an underlying strand in the White Paper and is being signalled by the additional funding already released to colleges, as well as the lifelong loan entitlement already announced. The Augar report also signalled the clear advantages of treating HE and FE in a more comprehensive way. We look to see how the department intends to see that continue to affect policy.
Clearly, much will depend on the comprehensive spending review and the continued impact of the pandemic on public spending. It would, however, be helpful to have an indication of how such a long-term strategy is being developed and, as the amendment indicates, how it will translate into concrete recommendations and thence long-term action. I beg to move.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, when the Government are asked to have a long-term look at something, the usual answer is, “We are”. That is what generally comes out with all these different things, but the advantage of the right reverend Prelate’s amendment, which I have signed, is that it puts it in one nice solid place and gives us three good bases to start from.
I was initially attracted by the support for special educational needs, and I remind the Committee yet again of my interests in that particular part of the playground. But looking at things regularly, over a long period of time, is essential if a policy is to develop. To go back to special educational needs, there was a long development of saying, “Of course you can, but a requirement on the way in”—I have an interest in dyslexia—“is that, by the way, you have to pass a written test in English, despite your having God knows how many other qualifications.” I remind the Committee of how many hours I have burned on that subject over the years. If you have a way in, how do you maintain that person? Does that maintenance pattern keep up with both the understanding and the technology out there at the moment? That is a pattern of development that comes one after the other and will change over time.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who has made such a valuable contribution throughout this Committee. The Government’s skills-related goals, as embodied in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and the Bill, are rightly ambitious and will be correspondingly expensive to deliver. The aims of a skills strategy are necessarily long-term, and achieving them will depend on a complex web of specific policies and organisations, as has been clear from the debates we have had in Committee. Ensuring that adequate funding is in place to support all the activities involved across schools, FE colleges, universities, independent training providers, employers, local authorities, combined authorities and, of course, learners themselves, and to ensure a fair balance between them all, will be an immense challenge for government.
Amendment 90B in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, proposes commissioning a panel of experts to review and make recommendations on long-term funding for skills and post-16 education, building, of course, on the foundations set by the Augar review as well as the Skills for Jobs White Paper. This can be only helpful, if not essential, input for the Government, along with the various consultations they are planning, in addressing this challenge and getting the answers right. I too look forward to the Minister’s response and to hearing how the Government plan to tackle the important need for a joined-up, long-term, fully funded skills and training strategy.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, we welcome this probing amendment, introduced by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and supported by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and my noble friend Lady Morris. It is an opportunity to discuss the Government’s plans to introduce a longer-term funding settlement for further education, because the White Paper recognised that further education funding has been wholly insufficient.
Alongside increased funding, there is a need for, as alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, simpler, longer-term funding settlements that allow colleges to deliver on long-term strategic priorities. Their funding compares extremely unfavourably with university and school funding. Annual public funding per university student averaged £6,600, compared with £1,050 for adults in further education. Recent research from IPPR has found that if further education funding had kept up with demographic pressures and inflation over the last decade, we would be investing an extra £2.1 billion per year in adult skills and £2.7 billion per year in 16 to 19 further education. The result of this underfunding is that colleges have had to narrow their curriculum and reduce the broader support they offer to students—including careers advice and mental health services—and 16 to 19 funding for catch-up has also been woefully insufficient.
To deliver on the skills agenda, it is imperative that the Bill is backed up by long-term, multiyear, simplified funding. It will require redressing the long-standing underinvestment of the college sector in the upcoming comprehensive spending review with serious long-term funding—otherwise it will simply not be deliverable. But this must not come at the expense of HE funding. We want FE and HE to collaborate rather than compete for resources, because destabilising university funding, cutting courses or capping numbers will deny students the brilliant education and experience that our world-class institutions in the UK have to offer. Denying young people opportunities must not be the legacy of this Government’s approach.
Ensuring parity of esteem between different post-16 routes is enormously important, but it is best achieved by investing in FE and not by taking funds away from HE and levelling down. Having an ability to access further and higher education, with investment that matches that ambition, is the only way that the country can meet its skill needs and provide pathways into good careers today, as well as jobs for the future.
Baroness Penn (Con) [V]
I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for tabling his amendment. Based on the substance of the debate we just had, I am not sure that there is much disagreement between the Government and noble Lords.
The Government are committed to transforming further education so that everyone can access high-value provision relevant to labour market needs and job opportunities. As noble Lords noted, we published the Skills for Jobs White Paper in January, setting out the future policy direction in this area.
Over the past two years, we have invested significantly in post-16 education. In the 2019 spending round, we increased 16 to 19 year-old further education funding by £400 million, followed by a further £291 million at the spending review 2020, so the direction of travel for policy has been matched by the direction of travel for funding.
In addition, we are investing £325 million of the £2.5 billion national skills fund this year to support adult skills and retraining. We are continuing our investment in the £1.3 billion adult education budget and the £2.5 billion apprenticeships budget. We are also continuing our £1.5 billion multiyear capital investment in the FE capital transformation fund. This funding is helping to deliver on the commitments made in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and the lifetime skills guarantee. Noble Lords have rightly made the point about longer-term funding. However, funding beyond 2021-22 will be considered as part of the wider spending review later this year.
In addition, we have launched an extensive government consultation on reforms to the further education funding and accountability system to address many of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox. This consultation is a first step towards a funding and accountability system that will maximise the potential of further education and help us to build back better. We want to use the consultation to start a dialogue with the sector, employers and other interested parties on how government funding can be administered more simply and effectively so that colleges and other providers can focus on supporting learners to develop the skills they need.
Similarly, in the Interim Conclusion of the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, we committed to consulting on further reforms to higher education, including on future funding. We continue to consider the recommendations made in Sir Philip Augar’s report, supported by an independent panel, and will conclude that review in due course.
Furthermore, to address the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, we want all children and young people, no matter their background or special educational needs or disabilities, to reach their full potential and receive the right support. That is why we are allocating significant increases in high-needs funding—an additional £780 million in 2020-21 compared with 2019-20 funding levels, and a further £730 million in 2021-22, bringing the total support for young people with the most complex needs to over £8 billion.
In addition, the national funding formula for 16 to 19 year-olds includes extra funding for disadvantaged students. This is provided to institutions specifically for students with low prior attainment or who live in the most disadvantaged areas. Last year, the Government allocated more than £530 million in disadvantage funding to enable colleges, schools and other providers to recruit, support and retain disadvantaged 16 to 19 year-olds and to support students with special educational needs and disabilities. We also apply disadvantage uplift through the element of the adult education budget distributed by the Education and Skills Funding Agency to provide increased funding for learners living in deprived areas. The adult education budget also provides funds to providers to help adults overcome barriers to learning. This includes learner support for those with financial hardship and learning support to meet the additional needs of learners with learning difficulties.
As outlined in the Skills for Jobs White Paper, we will ensure that those with special educational needs and disabilities continue to gain direct work-related skills alongside maths and English to increase their employability. The noble Lord will know that the cross-government SEND review is identifying the reforms needed to improve support for children and young people with SEND, including those in post-16 provision, by working with system experts to design a SEND system fit for the future drawing on the best evidence available.
The breadth of measures already in train—some noble Lords may say that is a long list—contain many elements of a concerted strategy that is moving in a consistent direction on the back of a number of reports and reviews that have sought to look at this on a long-term basis, whether we go back to the Sainsbury review or the more recent Augar review. While I completely agree with the need to take a long-term and strategic approach to this issue, I am not sure that a further review supported by an independent panel at this time is the right way to knit this all together rather than the progress that we are making on delivering the important outcomes of a number of those reviews already undertaken. I therefore hope that the right reverend Prelate is able to withdraw his amendment.
The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington. I knew I could rely on him to pull out the specifics around special educational needs and the reasons for the need for long-term support and development. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for his support for the amendment.
I am very grateful to the Minister for her long and full answer which I will need to read carefully in Hansard to get the full breadth of all she outlined. I thank those who work with her for producing such a comprehensive list at this point. I will need time to look at and reflect on the length of the answer to determine whether there is enough guarantee or whether to pursue the possibility of this being in the Bill.
I wish the Minister well and hope she will have a safe and joyous delivery and much joy in her new child and family life. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 90C. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 90C
“Assessment of local skills gaps for life skills
Within two months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must prepare and lay before Parliament a means to assess local skills gaps for non-academic skills, including, but not limited to—(a) parenting,(b) budgeting,(c) mental and physical first aid,(d) financial management,(e) practical skills in maintenance and gardening,(f) community organising, and(g) community participation.”
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 90C in my name. I apologise to the Committee that this is a rather late arrival and very large in scope. It arose from reflections on the earlier stages of the Committee’s deliberations about the narrow focus of the contributors to local skills improvement plans, particularly existing employers who are likely to be larger employers. As I listened to that debate, I was forced to reflect on how very old-fashioned and mid-20th century it all felt, even as we were talking about trying to get a wider range of the self-employed and others into the development plans.
We were talking about getting qualifications for work in a very direct, obvious way. Of course, for many roles in society that may still be the case. Brain surgeons inevitably spring to mind—pun unintended—here, but also if you are likely to be, say, a technician maintaining a complicated piece of medical technology, a Passivhaus qualified building designer or a permaculture garden planner, you may go directly to a course and get the job that follows on, but most jobs are not like that, even if we are thinking of this Bill as being only about employment. Most jobs and most lives require a range of technical and soft skills acquired by a mixture of education, training, employment and life experience.
I draw here the example of someone I know from the Green Party—I am going to anonymise this because I did not check with them about using it. They started as a volunteer with a set of technical skills—design skills for leaflets and graphics—but through their voluntary involvement they were drawn into the management of volunteers, fund-raising, administration and management. That eventually led that person into a very different professional job using all those skills. That is what life is like now in employment and well beyond.
On the community side of this amendment, particularly following a decade of austerity, many provisions and services in communities are now provided by volunteers. In the interests of politics, I shall park that to one side while I think about it, but the fact is that often volunteer-run, volunteer-led and voluntarily provided services need people with skills, and with the increasing pension age and the high levels of employment for women, many of the traditional sources of volunteer skills have been closed off. Having been at the centre of a wide range of community groups in some very different communities, I know how deprived, disadvantaged communities, which exist in central London as much as in the north of England, may not have those skills and urgently need them and need local skills providers to be able to help with them.
It is not my intention to press this amendment at this stage. It is a small gesture towards making the Bill about something more comprehensive: skills for life. I hope that the Government will reflect before we reach Report on their approach to the Bill and its very narrow, outdated view of the dividing line between life skills and employment skills, as though they are two separate categories.
My list—I agree that it is somewhat scattergun—includes parenting, which is a skill. One might perhaps include child and older care because those are roles that all of us may well have to fulfil at some stage. Budgeting reflects what we often hear in your Lordships’ House about the need for financial literacy in our increasingly complex world. Mental and physical first aid and practical skills in gardening and maintenance are things that people need in their lives. The last two sections of this amendment—community organising and community participation—focus on the idea of people as part of a community, as all of us are. It is not my intention to press this amendment, but I look forward to the discussion and the Minister’s response. I hope it will be fruitful.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, it has always seemed odd to me that so many of us complete our education with extensive knowledge of maths, English language and literature, history, languages, the sciences and other academic subjects—in my case including Latin and Greek, much to my benefit—but with few, if any, of the skills listed in Amendment 90C from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, nor other rather fundamental skills such as cooking and household maintenance, generic skills such as communications, teamwork and self-presentation, or even typing and map-reading, which may still prove to be not entirely redundant, despite the impact of technology. Yet these are all valuable life skills that schools should be well placed to teach.
One of the skills listed in the amendment, first aid, could even be a matter of life and death. The figures I have, which may not be wholly up to date, indicate that 60,000 people suffer cardiac arrests out of hospital every year in the UK. Almost half of those that occur in public places are witnessed by bystanders, not infrequently children. With every minute that passes, their chances of survival decrease by about 10%, so teaching children quite straightforward first aid techniques at school, such as how to give CPR or use a defibrillator, can literally save lives, as well as being fun for the learners. The many countries in which such teaching is compulsory have significantly better survival rates from shockable cardiac arrest than the UK—as high as 52% in Norway, for example, against 2% to 12% in the UK, depending on where you live.
I will not labour this specific hobby-horse of mine, except to say that, in my view, it is just one of many strong arguments in support of the need for an assessment of current gaps in the teaching of non-academic but highly valuable life skills and how those gaps might be addressed, as suggested in Amendment 90C. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on how that might be achieved.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, we are very much in favour of Amendment 90C. I endorse the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in moving it and those of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare.
The life skills set out in the amendment are all essential building blocks in a developed, compassionate and forward-looking society. Many of these categories would fall under the heading of “social solidarity”, a concept that is, I have to say, anathema to many in the Conservative Party who still hold to the infamous, and utterly fatuous, claim by Prime Minister Thatcher that
“there’s no such thing as society.”
If the past 17 months show us anything, they have graphically described how society has pulled together in ways that perhaps we have not seen before out of wartime. I should make it clear that I have seen no evidence that either of the noble Baronesses looking after this Bill fall under that heading, and I am perfectly happy to do so.
Not to accept that these life skills are necessary in ensuring that there are as few local skills gaps as possible once the locals skills improvement partnerships are developed would be, at best, to leave the Ministers open to the charge that they do not attach sufficient importance to them. In reply, the Minister will no doubt say they are unnecessary, but I believe that what this Government regard as necessary does not correspond with what most people have a right to expect in a civilised, advanced society.
Sadly, yesterday provided the latest example of that, with proposals for severe cuts to arts and creative subjects in higher education confirmed by the Office for Students. The Government claim that they want to redirect funding for high-cost STEM subjects, as well as medicine and healthcare. Nobody is denying that these are important subjects—indeed, priority subjects—but that does not mean that arts and culture subjects are not important themselves. They should not be abandoned.
Almost one in eight businesses are creative businesses. Some 2 million jobs in the UK as a whole are in the creative sector, worth a staggering total of £111 billion a year to the economy, and yet this Government of philistines are prepared to ignore those huge numbers and to seriously undermine the creative industries, which include much more than the arts—themselves a form of social solidarity, of course. Yes, film, TV, animation, video games, children’s TV, theatres, museums and orchestras are all included, but so too are advertising and marketing, design, graphic products, fashion, architecture and much more.
The damaging cuts will halve the high-cost funding subsidy for creative and arts university subjects—not next year but as soon as September this year, at the start of the new academic term. That is likely to threaten the viability of arts courses in universities and lead to possible closures, which may well be the Government’s ultimate aim. The universities most vulnerable are those with a higher number of less well-off students, so this will deny young people the kind of opportunities that my noble friend Lady Wilcox mentioned during the last debate.
The attack on culture seems to be just the latest example of the Government’s rather pathetic culture war strategy over recent months. I cannot imagine that the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, as someone who served at the heart of Theresa May’s Government, would countenance such deliberately divisive nonsense.
The Bill should oblige local skills improvement partnerships to consider the role played by the creative industries locally and ensure that they are central to skills development plans. Equally, they should cover the life skills specified in the amendment. For that reason, we are fully in support, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.
Baroness Penn (Con) [V]
My Lords, the Government appreciate the importance of all forms of education in improving life chances, both through employment and through meeting broader social goals. For example, recent research from the Workers’ Educational Association, a leading adult provider, found that 22% of its students took part in activities to improve their local community as a result of their course.
Many of the skills mentioned in the amendment are particularly associated with community learning provision. The objectives of community learning provision are to develop the skills of adults to help them improve their health and well-being, develop stronger communities and progress towards formal learning or employment. Since 2019-20, a significant part of our £230 million funding for community learning has been devolved to mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority. In line with their strategic skills plans, those authorities are shaping education and skills provision, including supporting adults in developing new skills to improve well-being in their local communities. In May 2021, we announced that up to 7,800 colleges and schools will be able to access senior mental health lead training by March next year, as part of the Government’s commitment to offer this training to all colleges and state schools by 2025.
We are also supporting community participation elsewhere in the education system through the teaching of citizenship, which is in the secondary school national curriculum. The programmes of study are to direct teaching towards the core knowledge of citizenship to help prepare pupils to play a full and active part in our society. At key stage 4, pupils will be taught about the different electoral systems in and beyond the United Kingdom and how citizens influence decisions locally, nationally and beyond.
Pupils in the school system also currently receive financial education through the maths and citizenship curricula. To reassure the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, first aid and CPR are included in the national curriculum and are therefore compulsory in maintained schools and a benchmark in academies and free schools.
Improving the responsiveness of provision to the skills needs of local learners and potential future learners is already a key part of the proposals in the Bill. I do not accept that the Government artificially separate employment skills from social or life skills. The new duty set out in Clause 5 would require colleges and designated institutions to review how well the education or training they provide meets local needs and to consider what action might be taken to address any local skills gaps.
As described in our draft statutory guidance, the needs covered by a review would cover the whole of the institution’s education and training offer, including wider social needs of the kind currently addressed through community learning provision. The Government’s view is that decisions on how effective provision is in meeting local needs is a judgment best reached at a local level, by providers working in partnership with both employers and the wider communities they serve. This duty strengthens that process by establishing a legal framework that will help ensure transparency and consistency, and which promotes accountability around decisions on provision that is vital for local communities.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response and all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. The contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, made me think of an incident when an old man collapsed outside Sheffield Town Hall, obviously extremely ill. I happened to be the first one to reach him and the first to call an ambulance, but I was very relieved when another passer-by announced that he had first-aid training. I acted as a liaison for the ambulance while he took practical action. It was obvious that most of the bystanders wanted to help but had no idea what to do. I note some figures from 2018 from the British Heart Foundation, which I doubt have improved, sadly: nearly one-third of UK adults were not likely to perform CPR if they saw someone suffer a cardiac arrest.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, mentioned social solidarity. I think that phrase is highly apt. These are necessary skills to glue societies together. I also welcome his comments on arts and culture subjects, reflecting the financial value of the creative industries. I also reflect on the value of these to the quality of life for all of us, to well-being and to mental health. We should value creativity as providing challenging, critical ideas. That perhaps give us an idea of why the Government might not be so keen on these subjects. I also note that we have a huge lack of public art in the UK. We could be doing a lot more to fund that in Covid recovery.
I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, acknowledged the way in which skills and training in these kinds of subjects can lead to further study and employment, if not in a direct way. I very much agree with her that decisions about what is needed need to be made at a local level, working with the wider community. This provokes reflections on other debates we have had in this Committee about the role local government and regional and city mayors should have in these local skills improvement plans.
I will go away and read all the contributions carefully, particularly those from the Minister, and will think about where we might go with this on Report. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 91. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division might make that clear in the debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, has been delayed so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
Amendment 91
Lord Addington
“Personal Education and Skills Account
(1) A Personal Education and Skills Account (“PESA”) is an account—(a) held by an eligible adult (an “account holder”); and(b) which satisfies the requirements of this section.(2) An eligible adult is a person who—(a) is aged 18 or over; and(b) is ordinarily resident in England.(3) A PESA may be held only with a person (an “account provider”) who has been approved by the Secretary of State in accordance with regulations.(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations establish a body to administer the operation of the PESA scheme. (5) In the case of each person who is eligible under subsection (2), the body established under subsection (4) must open a PESA for that person.(6) If a person does not wish to hold a PESA, they must inform the body under subsection (4) in writing in accordance with regulations.(7) The Secretary of State must pay into each PESA a deposit of £4,000 during the year in which each account holder attains the age of 25 and a deposit of £3,000 during the year in which each account holder attains—(a) the age of 40; and(b) the age of 55.(8) Further contributions may be made to a PESA by—(a) an account holder;(b) employers; or(c) any other person as may be prescribed by regulations by the Secretary of State.(9) At any time after an account holder has attained the age of 25, they may transfer funding from their PESA to an approved institution for their chosen education or training course.(10) For the purposes of subsection (9) an “approved institution” is—(a) a “relevant provider” under section 18;(b) such other education or training providers as may be approved by the Office for Students.(11) Prior to an account holder making an initial funding transfer, the National Careers Service must offer a careers guidance consultation to that account holder.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for individual “skills wallets” which may be used by a person to pay for education and training courses throughout their lifetime. The Government will make a payment of £4,000 when an individual turns 25 and then two further payments of £3,000 when an individual turns 40 and 55.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I am sorry that I am out from the subs’ bench here. This amendment is quite straightforward and an act of unprecedented generosity from the Liberal Democrats because it was a clear commitment in our 2019 election manifesto. It is a practical way of dealing with some of the problems that we are looking at here. We would create a personal education and skills account, or a skills wallet. We can go through the amendment in fine detail, but I think my noble friend Lady Janke will be in a much better position to do that than I will. The principle behind this is that you have a degree of money that you are in control of to help you update or change your skills.
Anybody of my age who looks at the various changes in the work environment will know that you not only had to upgrade your skills, you had to change them. The world is a very different place. Let us face it—everything we hear at the moment suggests that the world of work and the skills required for it are liable to change rapidly over the next few years. There is the technical revolution and the digital revolution. Will they continue? Will they evolve? There is also the green revolution going on in the world of work.
The level of possible change required within those ideas is massive. Having the ability to say, “Yes, I have at certain times the ability to change my skill set,” must have some attraction to all those listening. When the Minister responds, I would like her to let us know the Government’s thinking on that idea.
We have given the Government a series of options here; whether they will decide to pay us the ultimate compliment by taking our ideas, I do not know. The ones that we have down here are that you can upgrade, you can change and you are in charge. Maybe you could argue about the times at which you might intervene, but not by much. They are reasonably well paced throughout somebody’s working life. There is an initial stage, then a few years in, then a few years more and then towards the end, as—we are told—we will all be working longer. Surely, that is about right.
I think the fact that you have good careers guidance going in with this is very important. These are components that have to be involved to keep somebody working productively for longer. They come in together and the person has a greater degree of control. There is less bureaucracy as you can choose where you go. You can go to regular employers and trainers, who are identified as being of a certain standard. That is the idea behind this.
I hope that the Government will be quite open to these ideas—and possibly this amendment. Who knows? I am not putting a great deal of money on that but, hey, we live in hope. If we could find out the Government’s thinking on this, we would all be slightly better informed for the next stage of Bill. I beg to move.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords it is a pleasure to follow—if unexpectedly—the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and to express support for the intention of this amendment. In a way, it is an acknowledgement that individuals gaining skills is to the benefit of all us. We should acknowledge that we are not talking here about narrow, financial cost-benefit calculations, but rather acknowledging that skills have a wide range of advantages for us all, embedded as they are in individuals.
I will be brief and I shall resist, with some difficulty, the urge for a cheap political shot about student fees. I have to note, however, that this amendment provides one way to ensure that people can access courses for free. There is an obvious, much simpler way to do that, which would be to abolish student fees and ensure that we are not, as the Bill is currently doing, expanding the burden of debt weighing on individuals in our society.
I look forward to the Minister’s response anyway. The question I am really asking is: do the Government acknowledge that skills are not something just acquired by individuals—I go back to the reference to social solidarity from the noble Lord, Lord Watson—but something that we all benefit from and should all help to pay for?
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
I call Lord Janke.
Baroness Janke (LD) [V]
My Lords, I am not a Lord, as you will see, but I thank the Deputy Chairman for calling me.
I support this amendment, which basically offers much greater certainty and flexibility and indeed—as my noble friend Lord Addington has already said—generosity. It gives confidence to people that lifelong learning is important and that they will have the opportunity throughout their lives to access different development skills and training, so that they can indeed plan their career and own development, while knowing that the flexibility is there to enable them to take maximum benefit from it.
We know that the average British worker will do different jobs throughout their career, so flexible learning will be essential. The developments that we see in green and digital technology will need lifelong learning; they will need people to be engaged at all stages of their lives. This offers a framework and a context for people to have the learning habit throughout their lives and benefit from it. Confidence is important. We heard earlier in the debate that some people will not be able to afford this training. Very often, these are the people who would most benefit from it, so I would like to feel that the Government will consider the idea of giving learners confidence that they will be able to take up opportunities.
With regard to the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, this is a different kind of learning. We are not talking so much about specialising in higher education, which I think she was referring to, but the opportunity to embrace a learning experience throughout one’s life. What we have here is a much better and more flexible system.
I hope that the Minister and the Government will look more closely at some of these plans, and perhaps see whether some ideas here could benefit the Bill. I am sure that we will have a chance to revisit these proposals at a later stage. I hope, too, that noble Lords will support the intention behind these plans sufficiently to give them some real consideration, with the possibility of exploring them further at a later stage.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
My apologies to the noble Baroness, Lady Janke: my list has an “L” in front of her name. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Janke.
We have heard that this amendment would provide for individual skills wallets, which may be used by a person to pay for education and training courses throughout their lifetime. The Government would make a payment of £4,000 when an individual turned 25, then two further payments of £3,000 when an individual turned 40 and 55. This amendment, as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Addington—a highly competent substitute for the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal—is based on a commitment in the 2019 Liberal Democrat manifesto. It is offered up as an alternative to the government plans; I presume it has been costed up.
Labour’s alternative is a job promise which would guarantee training, education, or employment opportunities for young people who have been out of work, education or training for six months. Today, young people are facing soaring unemployment and the toughest jobs market for a generation. The number of FE students has declined by a quarter since 2015, with the number of younger and poorer students declining fastest. Since 2015, the number of learners from the most deprived backgrounds has declined by nearly a third, climbing to almost 40% among learners under the age of 19. Yet young people in desperate need of new opportunities have been overlooked by this Government, whose 16 to 19 funding has been woefully insufficient.
The Welsh Labour Government were successfully elected in May on a manifesto that included a young person’s guarantee of training or work. As the Economy Minister told the Senedd on 29 June,
“we need to give young people hope for the future and to ensure that they are not left behind. It is more important than ever that we support young people to gain the skills and experiences that they will need to succeed, whether that’s in employment, education or starting their own business.”
I would humbly advise the UK Government that they could use this excellent strategy across England.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity to further discuss our vision for lifelong learning. As part of the lifetime skills guarantee, and as I hope noble Lords are now aware, the lifelong loan entitlement will be introduced from 2025. It will provide individuals with a loan entitlement to the equivalent of four years of post-18 education, to use over their lifetime. It will be available for modules and full courses of study at higher technical and degree levels, at levels 4 to 6, regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, is reassured that this plan will provide flexibility. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that it will enable people to update and change their skill base across their lifetime.
While the sentiment of the amendment to develop lifelong learning is admirable and one the Government share, unfortunately the personal skills account policy would create significant fiscal and logistical challenges—so at this point I would advise the noble Lord, Lord Addington, not to place any bets on its acceptance. The amendment could disrupt our established loan support system to accommodate an additional system of grants. This would substantially increase the costs to the taxpayer, both in the cost of such grants themselves and in their administration.
The amendment suggests that a new body would be created to administer these learning accounts for every adult resident in England. This process would have to happen seven years before an individual could first make use of any funds at 25, and integration of these new accounts with the Student Loans Company’s existing operations would have significant costs and operational impacts. Moreover, there is an opportunity cost to the Government in depositing thousands of pounds into these accounts, only for them potentially to be left idle and waiting for an unknown point of use. This poses a strong contrast to our current loan support, which is available at the point of study.
To answer one of the questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, we are all contributing to further and higher education, as what is called the RAB rate is currently 53p in the pound. That is what the Government end up paying for under the current student loan system that is not repaid by the student.
Finally, these significant changes to the basis of our student finance offer would risk delaying the rollout of the lifelong loan entitlement beyond 2025. I know that many noble Lords have sought to bring that date even earlier. As noble Lords will be aware, the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement was a key recommendation from the Independent Panel Report to the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, led by Sir Philip Augar. It was also endorsed by the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships' House. We want to ensure that the lifelong loan entitlement provides value for money to students, the education sector and the taxpayer. I am afraid this amendment is at odds with these aims. As such, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Storey—sorry, I meant the noble Lord, Lord Addington—will feel able to withdraw this amendment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I should now mention my noble friend Lady Garden, so that all three of us who have covered the Front Bench can be in on this one.
I am not surprised that the Government are not going down there. If I had any money on the Government accepting this, it would have been only on very long odds. However, we are getting a little clearer on what lifelong learning will mean under the Bill and under the current Government. We might want to dig further into the difference in approach here at a later stage of the Bill, but it is certainly something that we must look at all the options for. If the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, looks in our manifesto, she will see that the costings are there. I am sure that is a bit of light reading that she will embrace massively over the holiday.
Having been given that bit of assurance and saying that we will probably come back to this, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 91A. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in the group to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Clause 15: Lifelong learning: amendment of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017
Amendment 91A
Baroness Berridge
Member’s explanatory statement
This is consequential on the Minister’s second amendment at page 18, line 17.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I beg to move Government Amendment 91A and speak to Amendments 91B, 91C, 99C and 99D in my name. These are primarily aimed at amending Clause 15, which in turn amends the definition of “higher education course” in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, to make express provision for the regulation of modules and to make clear what a module of a higher education course is as distinct from a full course.
The current student finance system does not offer funding for modules, nor is there any fee maximum for such modules or a specific corresponding regulatory system. The lifelong loan entitlement will transform student finance by supporting more flexible and modular provision. This legislative change is needed to ensure that we can deliver modular provision. Taken with the amendments that we have previously laid, this clause makes specific provision for modules in Part 1 of HERA 2017, which relates to the regulatory regime under the Office for Students. The amendments also relieve higher education providers, the OfS and the designated quality body of certain additional burdens which would otherwise arise from the addition of the concept of modules under HERA. These relate to certain requirements to provide or publish information—for example, under Sections 9, 11 and 65 of that Act. We want to reduce bureaucratic burden on providers, and these changes will ensure that the introduction of funding for modules through the LLE will not add to this.
Clause 26 sets out the territorial extent of the provisions in the Bill. This is a standard clause for all legislation. In essence, and with minor technical exceptions, the LLE provisions extend to England and Wales but apply in relation to England, because we are making amendments to the English student finance system. Overall, these changes will help to pave the way for more flexible study and for greater parity between further and higher education. As noble Lords will be aware, we will be consulting on the detail and scope of the lifelong loan entitlement this year. Our commitment to supporting students through the LLE is a key consideration in the public consultation which we will launch in due course. This will include seeking views on specifics of our regulatory system.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con) [V]
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 92 in my name and draw attention to my interests in the register, as chair of TES, the education software and information group, and of Access Creative College, an independent provider of training for the digital and creative industries.
Amendment 92 is a probing amendment, to test the Government’s ambitions for the lifelong loan entitlement and to probe their assumptions about what provision is worthy of funding under it. We do not yet have critical details on the LLE, for which the Bill provides the legislative underpinning. That will emerge only following the consultations that the Minister has just mentioned, and then in secondary legislation due in 2024, ahead of the LLE’s actual introduction in 2025. In theory, the combination of the LLE and the introduction of the system of modular funding that the Minister has just mentioned, for sub-degree chunks of study, will make it easier for adults and young people to access learning in a more flexible way, to space out their studies and to earn while they learn if they wish.
Since 2012-13, English HE students have been eligible for loans only if they are studying at an intensity of 25% or more of a full-time equivalent course and are following a full course for a specified qualification, hence students studying individual modules or shorter courses of less intensity have not been eligible for loans. This has been an important factor in the decline of part-time adult learners. The LLE will, in theory, help to address this problem—therefore so far, so good, and I very much welcome it.
However, there is real complexity involved in the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement, and a danger that theory and practice might diverge in crucial ways in certain respects. One of the main sources of danger is that the Treasury, partly out of its desire for quick savings from higher education in the spending review, may water down the promised skills revolution by insisting on retaining the so-called equivalent or lower qualification rule. Indeed, I expect that the Treasury will put up a valiant attempt to keep the ELQ rule whatever the consultations on the LLE say when they are eventually produced.
The traditional rationale for the ELQ restriction is that funding available for student support is finite and that it is necessary to put in place limits to ensure that all eligible students who wish to enter HE for the first time can do so. Accordingly, the ELQ rule prevents those studying a second HE course, at an equivalent or lower level, from receiving tuition fee loans or maintenance support for the course. For example, if you study classics for an undergraduate degree in your 20s at UCL, you could not then reskill in your 30s by undertaking a diploma in graphic design at UAL.
Restrictions apply even to those who previously followed privately funded courses which they self-financed. These ELQ restrictions seem complex and very unusual, when you look across the global HE landscape. For example, they do not exist in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, whose HE systems are quite similar to England’s. The obvious trouble is that the ELQ rule not only constrains student choice about how best to retrain if they already have a qualification but treats tertiary education—post-18 education—as a one-off event, rather than as part of a process of lifelong learning in a world in which people can expect to have multiple careers over their working lives. Keeping it will therefore make a nonsense of the entire lifelong loan entitlement.
My contention is that any savings which the Exchequer might make on the subsidy in the loan book from retaining it are outweighed by the broader economic costs incurred by making it so difficult for students to change subject and retrain for new careers. We need a serious economic impact analysis of the ELQ rule before we can consider the secondary legislation on the LLE. Indeed, since it was introduced in 2008, various Governments have already effectively acknowledged the flaws with the ELQ by peppering it with ever more complicated exceptions, such as those applying for medicine, dentistry, and initial teacher training. Part-time ELQ exemptions have been made for engineering, computer science and technology, extended to STEM courses in 2016-17. In 2018 further exceptions were made for nursing, midwifery, allied health professions, and so on.
ELQ restrictions were possibly appropriate for a restricted grant-based HE system, but, under the current loans-based system, they are anachronistic and antithetical to the broader objectives of the Government’s skills reforms. That is why the 2019 Augar report rightly recommended that the ELQ rules be scrapped entirely for those taking out loans for levels 4, 5 and 6—yet nothing has happened since.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, of the two speeches that we have had so far, the noble Baroness’s introduction of the amendments seemed reasonable and necessary. Then we heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson. When someone who has been involved in the system as recently as the noble Lord says that you have got something wrong, I would listen hard and long—so I hope that, when the noble Baroness responds to that, she will give the impression that that is happening, because the creative arts and the creative sector pay for themselves. Many of my noble friends have spent a great deal of time on this, not usually with the noble Baroness but with others—the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, can probably show you the scars of dealing with that. This must be looked at because the creative sector is a growing part of our economy, and the ways in are not usually through formal qualification.
The amendments in this group with my name—Amendments 99 and 99B—go back to the familiar territory of special educational needs. Amendment 99 basically tries to say that higher education has a series of support structures involved for those with special educational needs who are going through it. The noble Baroness, Lady Penn, referred to one of my slight irritants on this subject—that we are dealing with higher needs, but most people with special educational needs do not have higher needs but just have slight difficulties in certain sectors.
In the higher education sector, one of the most useful things is information capture, for instance—namely, taping or recording lectures and tutorials and playing them back in certain formats, meaning that the person can digest it in other ways, such as in a written format that you do not have to take notes on, which is the great killer for dyslexics. Several pages of hieroglyphics are of no use to man nor beast, and, trust me, when you wrote them you did not really listen to what was going on anyway. That sort of device going through would be very helpful. I am trying to make sure that all these types of provision for lower needs will be accessible by anyone who is going through this lifelong learning process.
I was thinking in particular about levels 4 and 5, because here a person will be working independently for some of the time or, if they are taking lectures, et cetera, will need some support. The support is available in higher education, and higher education goes on within colleges of further education, does it not? It does if you look at their syllabuses. Will we make sure that this facility is there, is used and supports these candidates? If it does, we are doing a good thing with something that is already in place; we do not have to reinvent the wheel. We can go back and make sure we are getting the best out of what is in an existing system and transfer it across.
The same is true, as the right reverend Prelate who is speaking after me will confirm—I may be putting words in his mouth but I will take a chance on it—when we come to further education, where we have a different regime again. To the age of 25, support is more tied in with the education, health and care plan—but they are different regimes working across each other. Are we going to take the best of both and bring them together in one place to make sure people are supported, or are we going to let them compete with one another and decide where we come in? This is something of an absurdity that makes sense only if we assume that further education and higher education do not cross. I would have thought some of the subtext behind much of what we have heard here challenges that. Also, good practice in one area of learning will be good practice in another.
I just hope the Minister will be able, when she replies, to tell me that the Bill will bring a bit more coherence to these plans and support. Look for good practice and make it appropriate to the student, not to whether it is an F or an E—or an F or an H, or whatever the thing is. Is that a dyslexic mistake? Probably. Anyway, as we go through this, whether it is further or higher education we are dealing with should not really matter; it is merely what helps that candidate get through. I think I will get told off for using that expression. If the Minister can give me that assurance, I will be a little happier at the end of this. Making sure there is a coherent strategy that refers to good practice would make many people a little more comfortable about the direction of travel here.
We do not want to keep going back to this. If we can take what works in one sector and apply it to another, it would seem logical and sensible. This may be a challenge that is beyond any one Minister or Government—but strike a blow and we will all remember you fondly, no matter what happens.
Lord Flight (Con)
My Lords, this debate has, I believe, produced extremely valuable advice for government in sorting out our higher education and apprenticeship problems, and I give great praise to what I have heard today.
My amendment requires the Secretary of State to amend the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011 to ensure that those claiming the lifelong learning entitlement qualify as eligible students for support under those regulations. There is a similar amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on student maintenance, which I understand may have cross-party support. My proposals would create a maintenance support system that enables everyone to live reasonably while studying or training at colleges of both FE and HE. One might ask why student maintenance is needed when the Government’s ambition is to make education and training available to people throughout their life. It is welcome and needed as jobs change and are displaced and are likely to change even faster. The lifelong loan entitlement announced in September 2020 could open up tuition fee loans for people taking level 4 to 5 qualifications, which are especially important for unlocking higher technical skills for the sector.
Clauses 14 and 15 create powers to put this into effect, but they cover only tuition fees and higher-level courses—level 4 and above. This is packaged with an all-age level 3 entitlement in the lifetime skills guarantee. Many adults will be unable to take up those opportunities because there is no support for living costs when they are taking courses at this or higher levels. These people would be prevented from transforming their life chances and becoming part of the skilled workforce that employers and the economy need so much.
The Lord Bishop of Durham [V]
My Lords, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds observed at Second Reading, colleges play a vital role in providing for students with specific learning difficulties and disabilities—the term widely used in further education as being broader than the “special educational needs” used elsewhere. This amendment seeks to address the discrepancy between the range and funding available to younger students with specific learning difficulties or disabilities, principally those in school settings or specialist institutions, and those applicable to students in FE. It seeks also to harmonise best practice across the FE and HE sectors, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, outlined a few moments ago. It connects with the earlier Amendments 41 and 43 to 46, especially the requirement to review how well the education and training provided by an institution meet the needs of those with special educational needs in its area, and with Amendment 99, which places a specific duty on the Secretary of State to this end.
According to the Association of Colleges, students with SLDD make up 17% of the overall intake—a figure that rises to 23% of 16 to 18 year-old learners. In 2019-20, local authorities placed more than 64,000 students with education, health and care plans in colleges, 90% of them in general FE colleges and the rest in special institutions. However, the current funding regime does not provide support for those students in FE who do not have EHCPs to anything like the degree required. Yet the Bill makes no specific reference to such students, nor to those with other specific learning needs or disabilities—something to which the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Lingfield, have drawn particular attention during earlier debates and, indeed, on many other occasions in this House.
I know from discussion with the Minister that this is an issue the Government are fully aware of and are eager to address. The Green Paper promised for the summer will, we hope, set out in more detail and in more concrete terms how a much higher degree of priority could be given to this diverse cohort of learners in both policy and funding terms, and how that might best be reflected, if not in the Bill then as government policy develops. It would be most useful if the Minister were able to indicate how she sees progress with the Green Paper and some definite assurance of the Government’s commitment to greater equity or parity in the treatment of older students with SEN in our colleges. I would also welcome a further opportunity for discussion with her, which might also advantageously include other Members of this House with a particular concern for such an important area of post-16 provision.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, this broad group covers many of the crucial features of the lifelong learning entitlement. I will confine my remarks to Amendments 92 and 95, covering the availability of the entitlement and learners’ eligibility for it. The lifelong loan entitlement and the lifetime skills guarantee are absolutely at the heart of this Bill and the framework it seeks to create. To achieve the more highly skilled, productive and ambitious nation that we seek, people—not just some people, but all people—need to know that there are great opportunities available to them, whether they desire new skills, higher skills or refreshed skills, and they need to know how to find out how to pursue them. That is where careers information and guidance come in and why they need to be properly covered in the Bill.
People also need to know that the training and educational routes to acquiring the skills to grasp those opportunities are realistically open to them, without undue or unreasonable restrictions or conditions. That is what will generate the enthusiasm and the actual take-up, so that the skills policy and the ambitions behind the Bill achieve the outcomes they deserve. Both the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, have mentioned incentivising learners to encourage them to take part, which may not need to be in the Bill itself but needs to be a central part of the strategy.
If I have always nursed the desire to retrain as a bookbinder—or perhaps as a graphic designer, as in the example of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, also a classicist—but I find that loans are available only for specific skills not including bookbinding, or that they do not apply to my age group, or do not include any allowance for living expenses I might need, or are not available to me because I already have an equivalent-level qualification, or are ruled out for other reasons, I may well decide to drop the whole idea as an unrealisable or impractical aspiration. If I get the impression from the outset that there are likely to be such barriers or limitations to accessing the entitlement, I will probably not pursue it at all. But if the lifelong loan entitlement actually means what it says, it could unleash a wave of energy and creativity, as people embrace it to expand their skills and pursue their goals—and indeed their dreams. The suggestion of noble Lord, Lord Johnson, of a proper economic assessment, with that in mind, of the ELQ requirement and the limitations on creative and arts funding, would be very welcome.
The lifelong loan entitlement and the lifetime skills guarantee—LLE and LSG—should be the twin banners for a skills revolution, or a skills crusade, not just sets of rules, regulations and legislation setting limits on training availability. So I enthusiastically endorse Amendment 92 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and the somewhat similar Amendment 95 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and, again, the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, in their aims to establish a truly all-embracing and inspiring entitlement with a minimum of limitations, driven, above all, by learner aspiration, enthusiasm and desire. The LLE and the LSG together offer a real chance to make education and skills exciting and exhilarating, as they should be. I hope the Government will take that chance, even if not by accepting these amendments.
I wish the Government every success in making progress with this important Bill and with the strategy underlying it. Since this will be my last contribution in Committee, I would like to commend both Ministers—the noble Baronesses, Lady Berridge and Lady Penn—on their contribution to this Committee. I wish them an enjoyable and, I hope, restful—though possibly not, in the case of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn—and very happy recess before we get to grips with the Bill again.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, we have had some really interesting speeches in this group already, but I am afraid that this is the end of that trend. I am merely going to talk about the government amendments, and my noble friend Lord Watson will cover the interesting bits at the end.
They government amendments represent some of the wiring in the basement of higher education that are going to be needed when the Government unveil their renovation plans in the form of the detail of the lifelong loan entitlement. The Minister moved the government amendments in just over two minutes. I want to unpack them a little, so we can understand their potential implications. I confess I may have a suspicious nature, although I am encouraged, having heard the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, that I am not alone in that.
Currently, the different bits of legislation that frame the regulation and funding of higher education are predicated on the unit of education being a course made up of academic years. The Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998—THEA—governs which HE courses attract funding via the student loan system, by referring to the Education Reform Act 1988, while HERA governs which bits of HE are regulated by the Office for Students and are subject to fee limits and more besides. But of course the lifelong loan entitlement is intended to cover not just university degree courses but courses and modules in further and higher education. To make that possible, Clauses 14 amends the regulation-making powers in THEA to allow for the funding of courses in FE and modules in FE and HE, to set a lifetime funding limit, and to allow for funding based not only on the academic year.
The Minister explained that Clause 15 amends the definition of a higher education course in HERA to make it clear that the regulatory regime applies to modules of courses. The way it does that is to say that an HE course is either a course mentioned in Schedule 6 to the Education Reform Act 1988 or a module of such a course, whether or not undertaken as part of such a course. So a course is either a course or a part of a course—I confess I wrestled for a bit with whether a thing could be itself or part of itself. But then government Amendment 91C now distinguishes between a full course and a module for the purposes of HERA. A full course means a higher education course that is not a module of another higher education course. A module is a module of a full course, but which is undertaken otherwise than as part of those courses.
I know, on the face of it, that that sounds like a circular definition, but I have decided the only way I can understand it is as a set of Russian dolls: a smaller Russian doll counts as a module if she fits inside a bigger one and is a part of that set; an identical Russian doll that is not part of a set at all would not be a module; and a full course is the biggest Russian doll which does not fit inside any other Russian doll. I am grateful to the Minister for giving me access to some very clever and kind officials to help me try to understand this regulation—although I should say that their language was rather more precise, and there was no mention of dolls. I hope she can tell me whether I have got that right.
Why does it matter? I think that is up to the Minister to tell us. On access to student finance, can the Minister confirm whether this means that a module can be funded only via the student loan book if it is part of a full HE course? Is it right that the student does not have to be registered for that course, or indeed any course, while taking the module? Could I, say, draw on my lifelong loan entitlement to take the “Introduction to Christian ethics” module, which is part of a theology degree at Lindchester University, without being registered for that degree, or indeed any degree? If so, that raises another question. Modular degrees generally have a limited number of pathways that can be taken through them to reach a qualification, in order to ensure there is a coherence to a degree and that certain essentials are covered. Could a student take a series of modules, each of which is part of a full course but which taken together will never add up to a full course, and therefore could never lead to a qualification?
Do the Government intend to prescribe the size or shape of a module further, either for funding or regulatory purposes? There are lots of modules around: short, intensive modules and long, less intensive modules; modules worth 10 credits and others worth 15 or 20; and modules at level 4, level 5 and level 6. Clause 14 provides that two or more modules can count as a single module—for the purposes, I presume, of student finance. Is that a hint that the Government may want to set a minimum credit value that will be eligible for support under the loan? If the centre gets too stuck into defining what a module is, does it not risk both the autonomy and, crucially, the flexibility of providers—maybe even getting in the way of the innovation the Government say they want?
There are so many more questions that need answering, about choice, compatibility, comparability, funding and lots more. I suspect the Minister will say we need to wait until she brings forward more amendments on Report, but there is one matter she needs to address today: the changes these amendments would make to the powers of the Office for Students. By switching the unit of HE from just a course to either a full course or a module, these amendments would empower Ministers at a later date to allow funding for modules. But it seems to me that they immediately allow the Office for Students to regulate at the level of a module as well as a course. Amendment 91B does place some limits on that by saying, for example, that the OfS cannot request information on modules more often than courses. It also means that the OfS is not obliged to publish information on fee limits for modules, as it is for courses.
But can the Minister tell the Committee if the effect of these amendments is that the unit of higher education can be a module for the purposes of regulation? What will that mean for the way the OfS regulates quality in higher education? Currently its key metrics are student continuation rates, completion rates and progression to managerial and professional jobs. How does that work for modules? If a student takes modules at several different providers, who is responsible for her outcome? Is it the last one she happened to stop at?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and to express my awe at the—to use her phrase—“laser gaze” she applied to the government amendments, which I will not attempt to emulate.
I will focus on the amendments in this group that are not government amendments. For convenience, I will go through them in numerical order, beginning with Amendment 92 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, which—as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, noted—has some similarities to Amendment 95, which appears in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and myself. Somewhat to my surprise, I again find myself agreeing with a very large amount of what the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said, particularly the reflection that earnings data cannot be the be-all and end-all of judging the value of qualifications, and his points on the value of creative subjects, reflecting what many other noble Lords have said in this debate. However, I strongly disagree with his suggestion that lowering the earnings threshold for student loan repayment starting is some kind of solution to the current mess the Government are in. The fact is that we have generations—particularly but not solely—of young people finding it extremely hard to find a secure economic place in the world, and making them more insecure, creating more difficulties and putting further economic pressure on them, very often through those three decades of life when they would normally expect to perhaps settle down, have children or even buy a house, would have widespread effects reaching far beyond the educational impacts.
I move now to Amendments 94 and 95 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, and myself. It is a pity that he has not yet introduced these, but their meaning and intention is fairly clear. We are aiming here to introduce more flexibility and to acknowledge, as I said on an earlier group, that we are not in the 20th century, where people’s lives started by perhaps doing a course of study or an apprenticeship, working for 30 or 40 years and then collecting their gold carriage clock at the end of it. That is not how the world works; people move in many different directions. I have to say, I was rather attracted by the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, of taking up bookbinding; that sounds a rather attractive option. But people move in all kinds of different directions in all kinds of ways, and the idea that they could have some linear, progressive, straight-line course currently mars the Bill, and these amendments seek to acknowledge this. I look at Amendment 94 in particular: life happens. A third to a half of pregnancies in the UK are unplanned; people never know what life will throw at them, and they need flexibility to have the lifelong learning entitlement to work for whatever life throws at them. That perhaps applies even more to Amendment 96. We talked earlier about the possibility of people being able to receive universal credit while studying along their life course, and this is an alternative way of approaching the problem by allowing for maintenance grants—indeed, those two things might well go together, given the nature and cost of living these days.
Coming to Amendment 97, I feel I am picking up a subject on which many other noble Lords are vastly more qualified and have been working on for a long time, but we really have to highlight the utter government failure that this proposed new clause reflects on and, indeed, seeks to ensure is not extended. It is acknowledged that 9% of the student population currently are Muslim—I think that is a higher education figure rather than a further education one—but it should be higher. In 2013, David Cameron promised to provide an alternative student finance option to comply with sharia law, which prohibits riba, or interest. The following year there was a consultation to provide a takaful system that would fit within the existing structures. In 2017, the Higher Education and Research Act was granted Royal Assent and gave the Government the power to introduce such a system—yet we are still waiting. I would very much value any news the Minister might be able to give us on progress in this area. Covid really is no excuse; this has been going on and continuing and was an area of failure far before Covid. I note that in the other place there is an Early Day Motion calling for the introduction of this form of finance for students, which is receiving wide support.
Finally, on Amendment 99—and, indeed, Amendment 99B—I do not feel that I can add anything to what the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who is so extremely knowledgeable in this area, said, except to offer support.
This is my last contribution in this Committee. I join many others in offering the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, the very best wishes for the coming month or two in particular. I thank everyone who has contributed to this Committee. We have been a rather small and select band, which seems to be the case with many of the Bills before your Lordships’ House. I hope that we might see a broader level of engagement when we get to Report, but, in the meantime, I thank noble Lords.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a lively debate. To echo some of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I say that this is welcome, because there has been much less engagement than some of us had anticipated with the Bill in Committee. I hope that some of that will be put right on Report.
In this group of amendments, there is a huge opportunity, if the lifelong loan entitlement is designed well, for it to support opportunity around the country by revitalising flexible higher education and reversing the catastrophic decline in the number of adults in England aged 21 and over accessing undergraduate higher education. Yet, as my noble friend Lady Sherlock set out in detail, we still know far too little about the specific design features of the lifelong loan entitlement and how it will work in practice. Like much of this Bill, although urgently needed, the legislation has been laid before the policy detail has been proposed and consulted on.
It is disappointing to say the least that the Government tabled their amendments just a week ago and that further amendments on Report are necessary. I think it is fair to say that the coruscating criticism a few minutes ago by my noble friend Lady Sherlock brilliantly illustrated why we expect the Minister to withdraw and not move the amendments to allow the House time for the proposals to be fleshed out, so that noble Lords can give them the critical analysis necessary to enable the successful implementation that, in fairness, we all want.
We have said before that we believe that 2025 is too long to wait and that the lifelong loan entitlement system, or interim arrangements, must be put in place sooner. Can the Minister clarify whether all adults will be able to access support through the lifelong loan entitlement from its introduction, whenever it does appear, or whether it will be introduced gradually for different age cohorts?
The government amendments tabled on the entitlement provide the building blocks of a modular and potentially credit-based loan funding and fee limit system. We welcome the flexibility for the entitlement to incorporate modular funding and recognise that this presents both opportunities and, given the complexity, significant challenges. We know that details on the funding of courses will need to await the comprehensive spending review in the autumn, but can the Minister confirm whether there will be a fee limit for modules? Will this be proportionate to their credits towards a qualification? In the current arrangements, not all credits attract the same fees; short courses are generally more expensive per credit than full degree courses. The Government’s approach to this will be telling because it matters to potential students who would need to access loans in order to study.
Our Amendment 95 is similar to Amendment 92 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, which we support. I have to say, I much enjoyed his contribution, even if it is slightly odd to be on the same side as him, given our jousting on what became the Higher Education and Research Act in 2017. It is odd but none the less welcome.
Our Amendment 95 would remove the equivalent or lower qualification exemption rules for the lifelong loan entitlement to ensure eligibility for student loan funding for another qualification at that level or a lower level to make career changes as simple as possible. It would also ensure that eligibility is not restricted in any way that would prevent those seeking to use the entitlement in a manner that fits their lifestyle. Many people will have chosen at 18 a degree that has taken them down a different career path to that intended when they studied. It may be that their industry or sector has since contracted or disappeared completely, and the need to reskill becomes even more apparent.
This is why my Amendment 85 would remove the ELQ exemption rule for the lifelong loan entitlement. The equivalent or lower qualification rules prevent someone with a degree or a lower qualification, such as an HND, receiving a student loan for another qualification at that level or lower. We believe that this is a mistake because some in that position will already be in work and seeking to change career. In a loan system, the equivalent or lower qualification rules should be removed to prevent this block on changing careers. It provides a disincentive to do so.
Amendment 95 also aims to ensure that anyone wanting to undertake modular study can do so in all subject areas and that, when doing so, they are able to access the same support for fees and living costs regardless of how they choose to study, including through modules or full qualifications, part-time or full-time, face to face or at a distance.
The lifelong loan entitlement offers up to four years’ equivalent funding for levels 4 to 6. While this may be enough for some people, for others, it simply will not be. Undertaking a foundation or access year plus a three-year bachelor’s degree, which is a pretty common route, would swallow it in one go. This is why Amendment 94 would require the Secretary of State to consult on extending the eligibility to six years to give a bit more flexibility. As I said, for some, four years is not long enough. This will be of particular value to those studying part-time and key to the success of encouraging adult learners to take up an offer to study and reskill.
The Government’s stated aim is to encourage as many people as possible to prepare for the skills demanded by an ever-changing economy. Amendment 94 supports that aim.
It is also worth emphasising that the vast majority of part-time students in England are ineligible for maintenance loans, which are currently restricted to full-time students and part-time students on degree courses at face-to-face providers. This illustrates why the lifelong loan entitlement needs to support all modes of study. In fact, this is highlighted on page 42 of the Department for Education’s own impact assessment, as the noble Lord, Lord Flight, pointed out. The cost of study, including living costs, is very important yet, as drafted, the entitlement covers tuition costs only. Why have the Government ignored their own impact assessment in this regard? They must introduce a system of loans and means-tested grants that enables everyone to live well while studying or training at college across both the further education and higher education sectors.
Maintenance support will be crucial in preventing further hurdles being placed in the path of learners from disadvantaged backgrounds taking up studies. Otherwise, many adults will be unable to take up these opportunities, frustrating their aim—and that of the Government—of transforming their life chances and being part of the skilled workforce that employers and the economy need. Many will have existing debts and financial commitments, as well as caring needs for children or elderly relatives. If lifelong learning is to succeed, the system simply must recognise these differences and provide solutions.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords. I am feeling sympathy for my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott as I will deal first with the questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on the Government’s amendments.
First, we need the flexibility outlined by the noble Baroness in relation to modules to ensure one of the purposes, which is that a module can be transferred from institution to institution. The noble Baroness used the analogy of Russian dolls; I tend to use the analogy of carriages on a train. A course may be three carriages, but you can pick up one of those carriages and do that course as a module. Obviously, we need to define what a module is; that will be part of the consultation. A fee cap will also attach to that module, to answer the noble Baroness’s question, and you can do that carriage without signing up to do all three carriages at the same time.
The consultation will inform the questions she asked about whether or how you prevent people doing carriage number one of the six different trains. The consultation will inform the decisions that need to be made and, as noble Lords are aware, there will be amendments on Report, which will further amend HERA to attach a fee cap limit to that module, as it is currently attached to an academic year.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, raised questions on the regulatory regime of the Office for Students. We will be working closely with the Office for Students on the interconnection with the student outcomes quality framework of starts, continuity and completion and how that will work when we have modular provision. We are aware of the two cogs that will need to work closely together, but there will still be year-long funding. The HE finance system that at the moment funds straightforward three-year degrees will need to be changed. The Office for Students takes a risk-based approach to its regulatory activity. We are going to work with it to make sure that the expectations on providers are clear. It already regulates the fee limit condition and is required to do so in a proportionate way.
On comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and other noble Lords, I have specifically been asking questions of officials, because I did not have the pleasure of working on HERA or any of the other legislation, and I respect that noble Lords are often experts on the legislative process and bring their scrutiny to bear. But I believe we are legislating in a similar way to how we did with HERA, in that much of the primary legislation is a framework that gives broad powers to the Secretary of State, and then there are approximately 300 pages of statutory instruments on higher education finance, at the moment, which your Lordships’ House will have the opportunity to scrutinise. I sometimes feel a little constrained, because there is a limit to what can be in primary legislation.
In relation to noble Lords’ amendments, I assure the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that of course we are listening, and assure my noble friend Lord Johnson that I will make sure that the Treasury has listened to many of his comments, which I think is where he addressed them.
On the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Johnson and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, as I mentioned, we intend to consult on the detail and scope of the LLE, including on aspects such as eligibility—I was asked whether we would get it all at once or whether there would be a transition, and that will be in the consultation—and whether restrictions on previous study should be amended to facilitate retraining and stimulate high-quality provision. The final policy design will be informed by consultation and engagement, which is a crucial aspect of ensuring that the transformation of the student finance system is done in a way that takes into account the needs of providers, learners and stakeholders and, as my noble friend Lord Johnson said, enables that process of learning over a lifetime.
As such, it is very important that this legislation does not pre-empt or prescribe any further decisions based on its outcome. Introducing the proposed changes in primary legislation is likely to prejudice the consultation, which is important to ensure that we listen to providers and all affected by it. I also highlight the purpose of the existing equivalent or lower qualification and previous study rules. We are building the LLE on to a system designed to support students pursuing either further or higher education but, at the same time, to share the cost to the taxpayer fairly. We want to ensure that the lifetime loan entitlement provides value for money to students.
Furthermore, regarding the aspects in the amendment on the mode of study, institution of study and both modular and full course pathways, I confirm that the LLE is intended to support greater flexibility in all those areas. As I set out initially, it will be available for modules at levels 4 to 6, regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities. Although I respect that my noble friend Lord Johnson is probing and obviously making comments to the Treasury in his amendment, I cannot help but ask what the effect would be of having these amendments in the Bill. At the moment, if the ELQ is prohibited in the manner proposed by the amendment, we would not, in consultation or further regulations, be able to stop somebody doing the same level 4 course four times, for instance. We do not want to rule out the option of having statutory instruments that allow us to do that.
My noble friend asked questions about the creative industries, of which he is a great advocate. All these flexibilities are aimed at opening up opportunities in growing sectors of the economy. We have talked about LSIPs and the Skills and Productivity Board, but I think I am correct in noting that his examples were related to HE creative industry courses. Our hope and expectation are that this will open up many courses in these sectors within FE, as well as HE, institutions.
We are Chancellor in agreement with Amendments 99 and 99B, from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. We recognise that many or a disproportionate number of those students are within the FE sector. We want this to be flexible and expect that students who might particularly benefit are those with special educational needs and disabilities, or SLDD, as it was more accurately put by the right reverend Prelate.
I reassure noble Lords that our commitment to supporting FE students through the LLE is a key consideration, but we have yet to determine what form that support will take. I confirm to the right reverend Prelate that the SEND review includes further education; and to the noble Lord, Lord Watson—and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who has raised this away from the Chamber—that there are certain grants for SEND students in HE at the moment. What happens to those in relation to the LLE is also part of the consultation. I hope that noble Lords, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Addington, will tell us what they believe to be the best of both worlds, both in your Lordships’ House and through the consultation—and of course I would be delighted to meet with him and the right reverend Prelate on the issue of special educational needs and disabilities.
On Amendment 94, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, our vision is for a four-year entitlement, as recommended in Augar. Beyond the significant and obvious potential for additional costs, I also highlight to noble Lords that six years of entitlement would enable students to complete one degree, then turn straight around and do another undergraduate three-year degree. As such, a six-year entitlement might inadvertently further embed full-time study for level 6 degrees as the default option, when it is not necessarily best for some students. We are trying to open up the provision to be more flexible.
It is worth noting that the current HE system, as my noble friend Lord Johnson outlined, funds courses that are part-time, with a minimum intensity of 25%. That part-time study may take place over several calendar years. Under the LLE, we would not wish to remove this flexibility. As such, part-time study would also be able to exceed four calendar years.
Amendments 96 and 99A on maintenance were tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lord Flight respectively. We agree wholeheartedly with the importance of ensuring that students are supported to succeed in their studies. It is part of our ambition to help students have the opportunity to choose the best course or modules to suit their needs, rather than the most advantageous funding system. The Bill already provides the necessary powers for maintenance support to be introduced as part of the LLE, if the decision is taken that it should be, following the consultation I have outlined. The consultation will inform the way maintenance loans and other forms of living costs support—which the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was right to highlight—can be made available to students.
Amendment 97 is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and was supported in her speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss sharia-compliant student finance. Clause 14 already encompasses the possibility of sharia-compliant student finance under the LLE. This is encompassed by the term “alternative payments”, taken from the Secretary of State’s existing powers to make regulations introduced by Section 86 of HERA. As such, Amendment 97 would not give the Secretary of State any additional powers. Alongside our other priorities, we are carefully considering an alternative student finance product, compatible with Islamic finance principles, and have decided to align a decision on implementation with the outcome of the post-18 review of education and funding. We will provide an update on ASF when we conclude that review.
The Bill makes explicit provision for the funding of modules of courses, as well explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and will help create a more flexible system across both higher and further education. However, it does not set out changes to the rules of eligibility, maintenance support or other points of detail, which I argue are more appropriately a matter for regulations. As I have said, much more work is going to be done through the consultation. I will happily report back to noble Lords once the consultation is launched, and again once it has concluded and we have formulated our response.
In recognition of your Lordships’ contributions during this debate, and particularly the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, I beg leave to withdraw the amendments in my name. We will review and table them again on Report, alongside the other amendments we are already planning to table. I hope noble Lords will feel comfortable not moving their amendments when they are called.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Henig) (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, has a question that he would like to put to the Minister.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
I am perplexed because, in her response, the Minister said that she expected the announcement made yesterday by the Office for Students on funding for the arts and creative subjects would open up many more such courses. The report that I have received is that high-cost subsidy funding is to be cut by half, with effect from September this year. How on earth could that open up more courses? Universities are saying that they may even have to close down courses. Defunding cannot produce more courses, or have I misunderstood the noble Baroness?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
To clarify, the point that I was raising was in relation to FE courses. My noble friend Lord Johnson referred to existing courses in HE in terms of the creative industries. What we are hoping is, through this measure, to see a parity of esteem with FE. Obviously, FE delivers an enormous number of courses at the moment, but we would see an expansion of that provision in that sector as well. I just wanted to highlight that FE is also a main player in that sector. I was not referencing yesterday’s announcement. I am sorry for any confusion.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Henig)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 100. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Clause 27: Commencement
Amendment 100
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would prevent Clause 22 from automatically coming into force two months after the Act is passed.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, this is the final group today and I see that I am the only speaker, other than the Minister.
Clause 22 creates a power for the Department for Education to intervene in cases where a college is failing to meet local needs as set out in a local skills improvement plan. The Minister may not be aware that this is the eighth time that the DfE has amended its intervention powers in the past 25 years.
The effect of the amendment would be to prevent the Secretary of State’s intervention powers from automatically coming into force two months after the Act is passed. That would allow time for local skills improvement plans to be developed and for providers to have the opportunity to respond appropriately. There is no obvious reason—at least, not to me—why those powers would be needed so soon, given that the trailblazers have only just been announced and are not due to report until next year. It will then take time to develop the local skills improvement plans and for colleges to action them. The DfE surely needs to allow time for the new arrangements to take effect and should focus on supporting colleges to deliver on long-term strategic priorities and engender trust across the system. Moreover, the system should act to develop the authority, autonomy and accountability of colleges to deliver on long-term strategic priorities.
The Minister will also be aware that we are concerned by the nature of these powers themselves. Intervention should be reserved to cases where it is really necessary, and the legislation should clarify a limited set of circumstances where the DfE would use intervention powers to require compliance with a local skills improvement plan. In January, the DfE proposed to make its intervention rules more targeted, following the finding in a 2020 National Audit Office report that almost half of colleges were in early or full intervention. I hope that the Minister can update the Committee on that progress, too.
I hope that my description of the amendment is clear. I beg to move.
Baroness Penn (Con) [V]
The noble Lord has set out his amendment clearly to the Committee. As he said, the measures in Clause 22 strengthen existing intervention powers under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. They will enable the Secretary of State to intervene where the education or training provided has failed to meet local needs. They will also enable the Secretary of State to direct the governing body to make structural changes. This should help to resolve the most serious cases of college failure more quickly, where other intervention steps have not secured improvements.
As the noble Lord said, the effect of his amendment would be that Clause 22 would not automatically come into force two months after the Act is given Royal Assent. The measures in Clause 22 fit within the package of reforms concerning local needs in Clauses 1 to 5. They also enhance the existing statutory framework that underpins intervention activity undertaken through administrative arrangements, which we are strengthening. For those reasons, the Government’s view is that Clause 22 should be commenced at the same time as those other measures, two months after Royal Assent.
I would stress to the noble Lord that there is not an intention on the part of the Government to make early use of the new intervention powers. Our main focus will remain on supporting colleges and designated institutions in their response to the reforms supported by the measures in the Bill. I re-emphasise that use of the powers should only ever be a last resort, where it has not been possible to secure improvement by other means.
I completely understand the noble Lord’s point about the time that it will take to deliver local skills improvement plans, based on the outcomes of the trailblazers and other elements of colleges and FE providers meeting local needs. However, we see these reforms as part of an existing single package, and Clause 22 also contains powers to intervene to make structural changes to FE colleges. Although I re-emphasise that it is not our intention to make early use of these powers, we see these as a single set of reforms, which we would like to commence together.
As this has been such a short and sweet debate, I would like to take a moment to address a bugbear that came up in a previous group, when the noble Lord, Lord Addington, reacted to my reference to “higher needs”. I have, I hope, completely heard the noble Lord’s points throughout this Committee stage to the effect that, for many students, this is not about higher needs but about something much more on the margins, so that they have not been identified previously but do need to be identified when they reach further education. A lower-level intervention could make all the difference to those students’ education and their success, so I completely take the noble Lord’s point.
As this is the last time I shall be speaking, I thank noble Lords for their good wishes—and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
There has not been much of a “sweet debate”, as the Minister described it, to reply to, but I would like to address one or two details in what she said. She said that there is no intention on the part of the Government to make early use of the powers. I accept that: I am sure that is what she believes, and that that is the case at the moment. But such things can change. She also said that the powers would be used only as a last resort. Again, every other attempt should have been made to bring about improvement, and this is a backstop—but that is not likely to happen within two months of the Bill becoming law.
The Minister did not explain why the powers would be needed before the trailblazers had reported. Trailblazers are important; she talked about them herself, and we have all put a bit of faith in them to inform us where we should go in the early years of the effects of the Bill. My point has not been answered, but I do not think there is much further I can take it.
I will conclude by saying that it is usual at the end of a Bill for noble Lords to thank those who have contributed at various stages and at various levels. Of course, at this stage we are only at the end of Committee, which is just finishing now. But for the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, this is the last of her involvement with the Bill. So I certainly want to join in the good wishes from other noble Lords, including the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who revealed that—for those noble Lords who do not know—the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, is with child.
We have not only enjoyed her contributions, but I think it is appropriate to say that, to some extent—I am not sure whether she has considered this—she is the personification of the trailblazers whom she herself has talked about today and on other days, because she is the first ever serving Lords Minister to go on maternity leave. Like all other noble Lords, we on these Benches wish her very well and look forward to seeing her back in the new year.
In the interim period, I should also say that, up until now on the Government Benches, it has been very much a case of, in the words of the late, great Aretha Franklin, “Sisters doing it for themselves”. So we await the new ministerial team, when we reassemble in a few weeks’ time on Report. But for the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Tuesday 12th October 2021
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-R-I(Corrected) Marshalled list for Report - (11 Oct 2021)
18:10 - Division on Amendment 11 - Ayes: 193 / Noes: 186 - Amendment 11 agreed.
20:00 - Division on Amendment 29 - Ayes: 155 / Noes: 150 - Amendment 29 agreed.
20:16 - Division on Amendment 31 - Ayes: 148 / Noes: 129 - Amendment 31 agreed.
20:29 - Division on Amendment 33 - Ayes: 135 / Noes: 135 - Amendment 33 disagreed.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that Chapter 1 of Part 1 applies only in relation to post-16 technical education or training that is English-funded, which will be defined by virtue of the Minister’s amendment to Clause 4 at page 5, line 23.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments in my name. Before doing so, I pay tribute to my predecessor, my noble friend Lady Berridge. I thank her for all her hard work and the dedication that she brought to this role.
I will speak to Amendments 1, 2, 4, 15, 22 to 25, 51 and 52, which are in my name. The first set of these amendments makes clear that duties related to local skills improvement plans will apply only to relevant providers that deliver English-funded post-16 technical education or training that is material to a specified area in England. “English-funded” is defined as education or training funded by the Secretary of State or an authority in England. This includes student finance provided by the Secretary of State and covers subcontracting arrangements to relevant providers.
These amendments will help clarify and ensure that English-funded technical education and training provision that is material to an area in England is better aligned to employers’ skills needs, leading to good jobs for learners and improved productivity. The amendments also make clear that employers that provide English-funded education and training only to their own employees are excluded from the definition of an independent training provider.
Clause 22 places a requirement on the Secretary of State to take into account any applicable local skills improvement plan when assessing whether the institution has failed to meet local needs. As a consequence of the amendments to Clauses 1 and 4, Clause 22 has also been amended to reference providers of English-funded education and training.
I now turn to government Amendment 49, regarding the list of post-16 education or training providers. First, I want to set out that the Government strongly value the role of independent training providers in helping to provide a diverse and innovative learning offer.
Amendment 49 ensures that regulations setting up the list of relevant providers can allow the Secretary of State, or any other suitable person or organisation identified in regulations, to exercise discretion about whether certain conditions have been met by relevant providers. This is required to ensure that any conditions set are practically workable and that there can be legal certainty over whether a provider meets some of the criteria.
For example, if the regulations set out that a provider must have a student support plan in order to be on the list, this amendment ensures that it will be permissible for the regulations also to set out that the Secretary of State or other suitable person may determine whether that plan is of reasonable quality. The ability to exercise such discretion would be introduced only after consultation, which is required for the first regulations made under this clause. The nature of any such discretion would be subject to additional parliamentary scrutiny and debate, given that the relevant regulations are subject to the affirmative procedure. This amendment will help to ensure that this policy can be applied in a workable, certain and proportionate way, helping to preserve the continuation of study for learners and keeping learners engaged in the event of a provider exit.
Amendments 5 and 6 in my name relate to climate change, net zero and the environment, and to the skills needed to support the transition to a net-zero carbon economy and to recover our natural world. The Government recognise the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. We will need a workforce with the right skills and expertise to support and build a net-zero carbon economy and restore nature. To this end, we are working closely with BEIS and Defra to ensure that skills are at the heart of the Government’s environmental agenda. This will be emphasised by the proposed amendments, which will reflect our aims within legislation.
The amendment provides that the Secretary of State may approve and publish a local skills improvement plan only if satisfied that the skills, capabilities or expertise required in relation to jobs that directly contribute to or indirectly support the net-zero carbon target, adaptation to climate change and other environmental goals, have been considered in the development of the plans. This will ensure that employer representative bodies consider such skills needs when developing the plans. Through this amendment, local skills improvement plans will be an important tool supporting the Government to meet the new legally binding environmental targets being set via the Environment Bill, which will include a target to halt the decline in species abundance by 2030. Moreover, it will also aid the progress on environmental improvement plans, the first being the 25-year environment plan mentioned in the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman.
We will set out further details in statutory guidance, working closely with BEIS and Defra. These amendments, in addition to the statutory guidance, will support our collective efforts towards achieving our ambitious climate change and wider environmental objectives. I beg to move.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, I remind the House of my interest as co-chair of Peers for the Planet. Together with the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan of Cotes and Lady Sheehan, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, I have tabled Amendments 3, 7, 17 and 64 in this group. Amendments 3, 7 and 17 were tabled and discussed in Committee, but I am delighted that I do not have to press them and the case for them in the House today because of Amendment 6, to which the Minister has just spoken.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)
My Lords, I support the amendments that the noble Baroness has put forward. I draw attention to my role as a non-executive director of the Careers & Enterprise Company.
I very much welcome my noble friend the Minister to her place on the Front Bench. I wish her all the luck and enjoyment in what I know is a fantastic department. Like her, I also thank her predecessor for her hard work and commitment to the role when she held it.
I will speak very briefly in support of Amendments 3, 7, 17 and 64, to which I added my name with great pleasure. I also welcome government Amendments 5 and 6 and thank my noble friend and her civil servants for the discussions we have had. As she said in introducing those amendments, we will need a workforce with the right skills. As we just heard outlined so eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, local skills plans should take into account national skills strategy requirements, particularly on green jobs and net-zero strategy.
The impending COP 26 conference next month would be a perfect place. If the Minister feels unable to accept Amendment 64, perhaps she might be able to encourage her fellow Ministers, particularly in BEIS, that next month’s conference would be the right venue for an announcement on a national skills strategy for green jobs.
As we have just seen in recent weeks, and will continue to see, the transition to net zero is going to be a huge moment of both opportunity and challenges for the whole of our economy. I am pretty sure already from the debate on the Bill in this House that it is agreed on all sides that the education sector is vital in training and retraining the current and future workforce to have the right skills to deliver the transition to net zero—which is why these amendments are important, why I welcome the government amendments and why I look forward to hearing what my noble friend has to say about Amendment 64.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister’s predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for all her hard work on this Bill. I appreciated the fact that she seemed to be in listening mode throughout her time at the Dispatch Box on the Bill.
I thank the Minister for taking up the baton so swiftly and meeting representatives from Peers for the Planet to talk about Amendments 3, 7 and 17, tabled in my name and the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Morgan of Cotes, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, comprehensively introduced the thrust behind what we are trying to achieve through these amendments, so I can be relatively brief. They seek to insert recognition into the early stages of drawing up LSIPs of the importance of the skills and retraining necessary to equip people with the skills they need for the green jobs of the future. This is important because, without a workforce equipped with these capabilities, I am afraid we are destined to repeat the fiasco of the green homes grant, which ended in such ignominy.
I welcome government Amendment 6. It is a good amendment which makes it unnecessary to trouble the House with a Division, and I add my thanks for it to the Minister. It encompasses consideration of the net-zero target and the skills needed to deliver adaptation to the changes we are already seeing as a consequence of the climate emergency and takes into account other environmental goals. I hope the Minister will be able to confirm at the Dispatch Box that they include biodiversity, air quality, land use and marine environment targets.
However, despite my welcome of Amendment 6 and the accompanying technical amendments, there remains the niggling absence of a national net-zero skills strategy. This unease led us to table Amendment 64, which would require the Secretary of State to publish a national green skills strategy for net zero within 12 months of this Bill becoming an Act. The Climate Change Committee has called for this and numerous surveys have shown the demand among young people—and older people, in fact—for green jobs. The Government urgently need a strategy that matches supply and demand for green skills. It should clearly outline routes into the green economy and reassure the public that the net-zero economy provides a secure path for their future.
Just a few days ago at his party’s conference, the Prime Minister mentioned “skills, skills, skills” as a key priority for him. Sadly, he has a reputation for not always following through on his rhetoric, so I hope that the Minister can reassure us that on this occasion it will not be the case and give us a clear indication of when we can expect a national strategy for green jobs, as well as reassurance that it will have breadth and depth.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I rise to find myself in the slightly unusual position of warmly welcoming a government amendment. I thank the Minister for the meeting on Friday and the Bill team for the briefing that she provided. I welcome her to her post and offer congratulations to her predecessor.
I do not know whether this is the result of your Lordships’ House making the case so clearly in Committee, of the young climate strikers who were in Parliament Square after our debate finished, or of the young people who have so clearly been delivering the message that they want climate change and the nature crisis at the centre of every aspect of their education—perhaps it is a combination of all those—but this is a real demonstration that campaigning works.
I congratulate all the Members of your Lordships’ House, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who have helped to get us to this point. Had there been space, I would have attached my name to all these amendments, but I agree with all the other speakers who said that, except for Amendment 64, they have now been supplanted by the government amendment.
I will make one small point about how this government proposal should be interpreted. Sometimes, when we think about green skills, a lot of hard hats and yellow jackets are involved. Green skills and preparing to tackle the climate emergency we are now in takes a lot more than simply technical and physical skills. We also need an enormous amount of social innovation.
I was just thinking about my visit to Lancaster after the very big floods up there about six years ago. A couple of years later, I heard how local communities had got together, preparing flood resilience plans and for the next flood, which is very likely coming. Those communities had organised together to make sure that vulnerable residents would be rescued, cared for and supported to make sure that they were ready to do whatever they could to stop the floods. All of that was the community organising. This might not be what you think of as green skills, but it is absolutely crucial to adaptation and mitigation of the climate emergency.
This brings me to Amendment 64, which is about a “Skills Strategy”. Lots of people were talking about green jobs, but we need to think much more broadly than just about jobs. We are also talking very much about preparing our society for living in an age of shocks.
I finish by again commending the Minister and her team. We are making great progress but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, the next step in the scale of our progress will be when we open a government Bill and the climate emergency and the nature crisis are addressed in Committee and we can then say, “Well, how do we make this better?”
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, as a member of the Parliament Choir I am happy to join the chorus of welcome for the Minister in her new role, which is at least as important to the issues I care about as her previous one. I also thank her for helpfully including me in one of the very many meetings she has obviously been having in the last few days, along with members of the Bill team. I shall speak mainly to the Government’s Amendment 49 and very briefly in support of the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman.
I do not quite know what to make of Amendment 49, despite the Minister’s helpful introduction. I very much welcome what she said about the Government’s support for independent training providers, but I remain concerned that they are sometimes viewed mainly as gap-fillers in the training system, as being of secondary importance to colleges and other statutory providers, and as having an unfortunate propensity to abandon their learners, which, in reality, happens only very rarely. As a result, they often seem to be at the back of the queue for the allocation of government funding for skills training, and they may have to cut the amount of training they are able to offer.
I understand that Amendment 49 aims to ensure that conditions specified for inclusion in the list of relevant providers allow some flexibility in determining whether they have been met. This is welcome if it gives independent training providers some wiggle room in meeting conditions, but less so if it results in judgments—for example, on the quality of the student support plans the Minister mentioned—which could have a degree of unpredictability or subjectivity.
Apart from that, independent training providers have continuing concerns about the implications of the list and the conditions for inclusion in it, such as the suggested requirement for a form of professional indemnity insurance which does not currently exist, and about the fees and other costs involved, which may restrict access to the market for smaller providers. West Midlands Combined Authority has also expressed the concern that mayors of combined authorities may be prevented from funding providers they deem suitable but which are not on the centrally approved list.
I welcome the Government’s intention to ensure that this measure does not impose an unreasonable barrier to market for training providers while protecting the interests of learners, and their commitment to continuing to engage and consult with a wide range of stakeholders. I hope the Minister can give some reassurance that the discretion allowed by this amendment will be used wherever possible to facilitate inclusion for ITPs in the list, and that their contribution will be duly recognised in the new arrangements under the Bill, including within LSIPs and in the allocation of funding for skills training.
Finally, I add my support particularly to Amendments 17 and 64 in this group, in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman and others, which require the Secretary of State to report on how each published LSIP takes account of any national skills strategy and aligns with UK climate change and biodiversity targets. This is the sort of joined-up thinking needed to ensure that the different parts of the new system operate in a coherent way to deliver the skills and training needed by the nation as a whole, as well as in the local areas covered by LSIPs.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I too welcome not only the Minister but the Government’s recognition of the vital importance of a climate-oriented curriculum. I support Amendment 64, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others. This amendment should succeed because it places the policy of integrating the national response to the climate emergency even more solidly into the education and skills process. Without it, we risk not having an entrenched capability to cope with the most long-lasting peril of our times.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on her appointment and thank her for meeting with us to discuss the Bill over the conference Recess. I was very impressed by the rapidity with which she got up to speed on this complex Bill. As always, I am grateful for the engagement of officials and other stakeholders in the system who have briefed us. I would also like to place on record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for her thoughtful engagement.
Although most of the government amendments are necessary and technical, we were delighted to see on the face of the Bill the need for future skills, capabilities and expertise to align with the UK’s net-zero target. I pay tribute to Peers for the Planet and other Members across the House who argued so persuasively at Second Reading, in Committee and behind the scenes for green jobs to be formally recognised in legislation; and indeed to the further exhortation today of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, not to let pass an opportunity to ask for more.
It is imperative that consideration of climate change and environmental goals be embedded in skills strategies, and that LSIPs plan to deliver the high-skilled jobs our countries and our planet so desperately need. This is the right thing to do for so many people who are facing unemployment; it is the right thing to do for our economy to get a lead in the industries of the future; and it is the right thing to do in order to build a better quality of life for people across the UK.
Thus the devolution interactions with my colleagues in the Welsh Government should be resolved with this amendment, while the environmental issues with the requirement for consideration of net zero, the adaptation to climate change and other environmental goals are now in the Bill. They must be considered in the development of local skills plans, together with the requirement for the Secretary of State to publish a national green skills strategy that will include skills and will directly contribute to or indirectly support climate change and environmental goals.
Noble Lords are well aware that we face a jobs emergency and a climate emergency. More than 75,000 green jobs were lost from the UK economy in just five years under this Government. This includes thousands of jobs lost in solar power, onshore wind, renewable electricity and bioenergy, and a huge fall in the number of jobs in the energy efficiency sector. These figures throw into light the huge chasm between rhetoric and reality, with huge falls in low-carbon employment alongside pledges to deliver green jobs but without a genuine green stimulus.
We further see a technical fix in the list of post-16 education providers to allow conditions for being on the list to contain discretionary elements. Thus, an employer is considered an independent training provider only if education and training is provided exclusively to its employees.
We would have preferred a wider range of government amendments to be included in the list, and it will be the Opposition’s position to continue to persuade the Government that previously rejected amendments are crucial for inclusion in this important Bill, to ensure that the upskilling that is so desperately needed across our nations and regions is given the best possible start, and that post-16 education is enhanced and not limited by excluding certain learning pathways and is properly funded for both academic and vocational courses, to improve the life chances of young people and adults alike in the UK.
I hope the Minister can assure the House that this Government are ready to start delivering. It is what the British people deserve and what the crisis we face demands.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I now turn to Amendments 3, 7 and 17, from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which seek to ensure that local skills improvement plans consider the skills needs required to support the transition to a net-zero carbon economy to achieve our climate change and biodiversity targets. This was a topic of considerable interest in Committee and I thank all noble Lords for their contributions then. I cannot comment on whose persuasive powers were the greatest—whether it was the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett’s, protesters in Parliament Square, if I can describe them as such, or the persuasive powers of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, representing the Opposition Front Bench.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for acknowledging that the government amendments meet the aims of the amendments in her name—Amendments 3, 7 and 17. At this point I also reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that the Government are of course committed to delivering—but we are also committed to continuing constructive conversations about how we can deliver the best way forward on the issues that we all care so much about.
Amendment 64, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, seeks to ensure that a green skills strategy is published within 12 months of the Act being passed. The noble Baroness gave us a comprehensive view of a range of organisations which see this area as absolutely critical to address. My noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes also made the important link with careers guidance, and the Government absolutely recognise the importance of working with industry to boost green skills. Last year, BEIS and the Department for Education invited experts to form the Green Jobs Taskforce, helping to build evidence on skills gaps in key green sectors and to advise the Government and industry on how to tackle them.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
What the Minister said about the net-zero strategy and the Skills and Productivity Board was really reassuring, but how does that work connect directly to local skills improvement plans, so that we can be sure that there is join-up?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The aim for how local skills improvement plans will work—the noble Lord will be aware that we have trailblazer pilots running at the moment—is that the Secretary of State will ensure when signing off on a local skills improvement plan that it pays due regard to the national picture and all the different elements that input into that.
The Government recognise the importance of achieving our target of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and our wider environmental goals. I hope my remarks have provided the reassurance that the noble Baroness needs and that she will not press her amendments but will accept the proposed government amendment.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment at page 1, line 7.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment at page 1, line 7.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment to clause 1 at page 2, line 20.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel) (Lab)
My Lords, Amendments 6 and 7 appear to be alternatives. I can call Amendment 7 only if Amendment 6 is not agreed to.
Amendment 6
Baroness Barran
“(5A) The Secretary of State may approve and publish a local skills improvement plan only if satisfied that in the development of the plan due consideration was given to, amongst other things, the skills, capabilities or expertise required in relation to jobs that directly contribute to, or indirectly support, the following—(a) compliance with the duty imposed by section 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008 (UK net zero emissions target),(b) adaptation to climate change, or(c) meeting other environmental goals (such as restoration or enhancement of the natural environment).” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that jobs relating to climate change and other environmental goals are considered in the development of local skills improvement plans.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
“(5A) In producing a local skills improvement plan, employer representative bodies must consider skills deficiencies in the local area in the following fields—(a) digital,(b) innovation,(c) engineering,(d) the built environment, including climate related challenges, and(e) any other fields the Secretary of State deems relevant.”
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for his help in crafting this amendment, and the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his support. I also welcome my noble friend Lady Barran to her new role as Minister in the education department. Her consummate courtesy and forensic attention to detail were manifested at a meeting she arranged involving her, the Bill team and me yesterday. I am hopeful that she will have a long and successful stint at the department at a time when improving skills is a top priority. I declare my interests as a non-executive at a number of businesses which will benefit from improved skills.
My amendment is intended to ensure that local skills improvement plans take proper account of deficiencies in certain fields of vital importance to our country. Let me explain the rationale for the various proposals in the amendment. First, I am concerned that our lack of digital skills is acknowledged but not built consistently into either the school or the FE system—unlike, say, literacy and maths.
Next, innovation is essential to future growth and competitiveness and is well supported by our universities. What is less recognised is that innovation is also important in technical and vocational areas. I know this from my time at Tesco, when part of our success was down to thousands of people finding new ways of doing things that were quite often minor in themselves, but—and this is the vital bit—were able to be replicated very many times. I remember advances in packaging, for example, both to make it safer and to reduce its environmental footprint. I remember improvements in building design that reduced costs as we built more stores. The classic example, of course, is the UK Olympic cycling team, with its many small improvements, all of which helped us to win many gold medals over decades. We need to focus on that kind of thinking.
I have added engineering partly because the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is an engineer, and I very much look forward to hearing from him. We lag behind some other nations, such as Germany, and in engineering —ever more important in the digital world—we do not have a vocational route to the top from age 16, as it does. The industry associations decry this but have not found a way through so far, and we have a national shortage which is becoming ever more urgent.
Moving on, I should declare an interest as chair of this House’s Built Environment Committee. Our first inquiry into housing is already revealing a serious problem in relation to skills—construction skills needed on building sites, project management and building control. We heard this morning in the committee that we need people with design skills, architects and planners to build the kind of homes and places that we all want to live in. Skills to tackle climate-related challenges are also referred to in my amendment. That includes the dire shortage of heat pump installers and energy efficiency and retrofitting specialists. They are in short supply.
The new local skills improvement plans need to tackle these needs relating to the built environment. I should acknowledge the good practice already being pioneered by Crossrail and at Hinkley and elsewhere, but this kind of endeavour in vocational training should become part of the system. I was heartened by seeing on Sky News yesterday a trainee bricklayer at an FE college confidently planning his future and expecting to establish his own business as a bricklayer in a few years’ time. We need more like him, and they need to be paid properly.
The Minister has tabled—and we have already agreed—an amendment to the effect that skills relating to climate change and other environmental goals are to be considered in the development of local skills improvement plans. That is fine and dandy, but it does not meet my needs. I do not think—and I do not believe that most others, including our young people, will think—that environmental objectives should take precedence over all economic ones and, by implication, over jobs and skills in all non-environmental areas.
Of course, things change. For example, energy resilience has suddenly become a priority, as I predicted, Cassandra-like, when I was the Energy Minister a few years ago—I may add, to the surprise of some of the relevant officials at the time. To cater for the unexpected, my amendment also refers to
“any other fields the Secretary of State deems relevant”,
allowing him or her to add other categories to the plans in future.
Before I sit down, I have two related questions of which I have given notice. First, can we have a better idea of the geographical areas that the skills improvement plans will cover? I favour larger areas, such as the metro mayor areas, where top industrial and business players and small business interests can come together and help local colleges provide the right training in the right places. I worry that vested interests may lead to a less than effective patchwork of mini, unco-ordinated plans. It is somewhat unsatisfactory that we are agreeing new powers in this Bill without knowing how and at what level they will be applied, as we discussed in Committee.
Secondly, how can we ensure that the plans deliver results? We need incentives—carrots or sticks—so that they are implemented. Government, in my experience, is often good at vision and virtue signalling, but less good than business at implementation, as I have discovered from moving between one and the other. We need to monitor what happens; we do not want a repeat of the problems on apprenticeships, where, for a considerable period, the numbers went backwards despite many of us in business telling successive Secretaries of State of the problems. We need to learn from this sort of experience.
I very much look forward to hearing my noble friend’s comments and any reassurance she can provide and, of course, to hearing from other speakers on related subjects. I beg to move.
Amendment 9 (to Amendment 8)
“(da) the food system,(db) ecosystem management, and”
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I rise briefly to move Amendment 9, which could be described as a friendly amendment to Amendment 8; I hope its mover will agree. Proposed new paragraph (db) has already been supplanted by government Amendment 6, but I will speak to proposed new paragraph (da) on the food system, because the kind of shortages that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, identified in areas such as engineering and technical skills are also very much reflected in our food system.
We recently heard the Prime Minister say that it is not the job of government to feed people and that it is up to business, but I hope the Minister will acknowledge that it is crucial in this age of shocks—where, as we see from our empty shelves, we cannot be guaranteed that the market will feed us—for the Government to see that we have the skills available right through our food system. The obvious area for this is farming, but we must also think about training people, in schools and communities, how to cook; that is why I used the term “food system”, which is something the Dimbleby report identified. We have many faults in our current food system which need to be fixed, and lack of skills is certainly one.
It is now obvious that the market on its own will not guarantee food security; it has also not guaranteed a healthy supply of food, and we need to think not just about the supply of calories but about a healthy food supply and healthy food preparation. Of course, we have the problem that, in our current food system, one in six workers is not paid enough money to be food-secure themselves. Upskilling the food system and providing those skills in local plans is absolutely crucial. I beg to move.
Lord Bird (CB)
I want to support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, but probably from a slightly different angle. People who end up doing apprenticeships and going into vocational work often had problems at earlier stages in their education. I am speaking from my own experience. We have to recognise that 49% of employers say that they do not quite believe in the curriculum that children follow before they go into apprenticeships, or even to university. We always seem to be behind—we run our education system preparing children for jobs that often disappear before they come out of school. I was one of those people: I was trained in a very careful way to be a builder’s labourer when I left school at 15, but unfortunately, they had brought in all this gear, so I had to do things other than dig holes and lay concrete. I am being a bit facetious, but the point is that we have to make sure that, for the period before people enter an apprenticeship and before they wonder whether they are going to go to university, we look at reinventing that kind of education.
The biggest ask among most employers is more creativity, because they know that, with 65% of the jobs not yet invented when children are at school, we need to find a way to up our game. We have a skills shortage now which has led to the fact that there are 1.4 million jobs. If we did not have that—if we had made the adjustments many years ago—we would not have the problem of the law of unintended consequences, which means that we cannot even get gas or petrol from our local garage.
I believe that, if we are to go anywhere, we have to reinvent the whole way in which children are taught creatively. I declare an interest, in that I put my children through the Steiner system: on the first day of school you are taught about nature, on the second day you are taught about making things, and you go on and on. They put enormous emphasis on chess and maths and various other things, and the children who come out at the end are the children people want in the industries of tomorrow.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as an engineer and project director for Atkins, and as a director of Peers for the Planet. I am delighted to support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, to which I have added my name. I apologise to noble Lords for not speaking at earlier stages of the Bill, but I have followed its progress closely and am really pleased to be able to speak on this amendment today. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to her post in the DfE. It is great to see her in her place.
Amendment 8 seeks to ensure that some critical skills development for long-term national skills needs are taken into account in local skills improvement plans.
On digital skills and innovation, these skills areas are critical to the recovery of the economy following the pandemic and to the future, yet we are seeing a crisis in digital skills, with the number of young people taking IT at GCSE falling by around 40% since 2015, and high rates of digital exclusion; 20% of children in one class in a secondary school local to me do not have access to the internet, which is a shocking statistic. Digital skills cut across all areas of the economy and will be part of the key to addressing the flatline in total factor productivity growth across the economy that we have seen since 2008.
I will give noble Lords a simple example. In my consultancy business a few years back we were commissioned to do a project to undertake a large data transfer activity. On reviewing the task, one of our young engineers proposed using robotic process automation techniques to complete the task instead of the original manual approach, whereby an advanced computer script undertook the task in place of engineers. This allowed it to be completed in a third of the time and cost, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is productivity growth in action. In addition to improving productivity, such a process frees people from mundane and repetitive tasks and enables them to take on more value-added work; I liken the technology to the modern equivalent of machine automation, saving people from the drudgery of Adam Smith’s pin factory. Robotic process automation is already leading to data and finance sectors repatriating work that had previously been offshored, and to significant productivity gains, with work being undertaken by teams of software robots overseen by humans.
Time and again I have seen the ability of advanced software skills to automate tasks and radically improve the productivity of teams and projects, yet in my business and in businesses across the UK we are struggling to attract these skills. I am currently building a software team to design the control system software for a new nuclear reactor, and our job adverts for software engineers go largely unanswered. It is possible that this reflects my limited aptitude for advertising, but, in all seriousness, we must ensure that digital skills are prioritised to enable our businesses to grow, innovate, compete, create the jobs of the future and create the high-wage, high-productivity economy that we all want.
Our economy has long seen a shortfall in engineering skills. EngineeringUK estimates an annual shortfall of around 59,000 people in meeting an annual demand for 124,000 core engineering roles requiring level 3-plus skills. As our economy undergoes one of the biggest transformations in its history, engineering will become more important than ever. For example, it is estimated that between nine and 12 gigawatts of new generating capacity must be installed every year between now and 2050 to meet our net zero goals. New gigafactories will need to be constructed and immense infrastructure programmes completed to decarbonise heat and industry. All this will need to be accomplished by engineers. Again, in my consultancy business we are struggling to grow to meet demand from clients because there are simply not enough qualified engineers to go around. This is just to meet current demand. As engineering is a key enabler for the future economy, it too must be prioritised in LSIP developments.
I second the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, on the built environment and will not expand on them here, but I congratulate the Government on bringing forward amendments on alignment with climate and net zero goals in response to the work led by my noble friend Lady Hayman. Our amendment complements these by focusing on the key enablers for our future economy. I note the synergies with the green skills strategy amendment proposed by my noble friend.
Finally, I have a question for the Minister. I had an excellent skills review meeting with stakeholders from the Midlands Engine yesterday—I declare my interest as co-chair of the Midlands Engine All-Party Parliamentary Group. Given the importance of SMEs to the region and indeed nationally, there was some concern that their voices would not be heard, and that employer representative groups would be dominated by large corporates. This follows on from amendments raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, among others in Committee. Can the Minister provide some reassurance that those important voices will be heard in LSIP development?
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, it is very hard to disagree with anything that has been said in the last hour. Obviously, we all want to see that skills are promoted. We all agree that we need more green skills. We all agree with Amendment 8 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, that we want to see more digital innovation, engineering and built environment skills. She has a catch-all of
“any other fields the Secretary of State deems relevant.”
So, in case the noble Baroness feels that she does not have enough powers in the department, she can have almost anything she likes under paragraph (e). Who would want to disagree with Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that we should include the food system and ecomanagement systems? We all agree with all those things.
However, in essence, this is all fiddling while Rome burns, because the Government do not require any of these powers to promote skills. They have all the powers they require to promote skills. They do not need any additional funding powers. They have funding powers, and they directly control all the funding levers. They appoint all the people to the various quangos. The whole of Clause 1 on these local skills improvement plans appears to me to be a substitute for actual action on improving skills.
Obviously, we will have a lot of generation of plans now. Consultants are salivating; I know because I spoke to one last week who told me that he is already starting to put bids in writing. The people who will actually do these skills improvement plans are not all the big employers and those others we have paid tribute to. They will be consultants, who will be paid by those people, who want to start bidding for the money to start producing all these plans. Now that they might have an even longer list of things they have to produce—particularly with the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe—my goodness, the fees these consultants will charge will go through the roof as they start to produce them.
It is motherhood and apple pie. No one is going to disagree with any of these things. The fact is that they will not make any difference: the Government could do it all already. They have had years to do it. They do not require any of these powers. They do not require local skills improvement plans for employers to be brought together locally. Indeed, as we ascertained in Committee, the actual groups of employers that are going to be brought together do not exist at the moment. In the White Paper, which I recommend that noble Lords read, there was a great tribute to chambers of commerce. They might be able to bring these together—except that the box on page 15 of the White Paper says:
“Case study: German Chambers of Commerce”,
because, for the most part, chambers of commerce do not exist in this country due to chronic failure of policy over the last 150 years.
This is all fine; we can carry on like this and make all these legal provisions and probably nothing much will change. But we face a real crisis in the real world. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, referred to apprenticeships. The route by which most young people who do not go to university get on a career ladder to get well-paid jobs in this country is, or should be, apprenticeships. While we are talking about local skills improvement plans and new employers’ bodies that do not currently exist and which are going to produce all these plans, in the real world there is a deepening apprenticeship crisis at the moment. I looked up the figures before coming into the House. The latest figures published by the ONS in May this year show a 19% drop—I repeat, a 19% drop—in the number of apprenticeship starts in the first two quarters of 2020-21 compared with a year before. The drop in intermediate-level apprenticeships, which is by and large those people who most noble Lords would think of as apprentices—that is, school leavers who are getting on a work and training route which will get them an apprenticeship—dropped by even more. The apprentices mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, are now few and far between.
By the way, none of these local skills improvement plans will make much difference to this, because apprenticeships are largely created directly by employers, whereas the local skills improvement plans we are talking about are guidance to public providers, predominantly FE colleges, on what sorts of courses they should provide. But the number of actual apprenticeships—which are the things that, for the most part, will get young people jobs—is declining. We went through the reason why they are declining earlier, but we have not yet had any satisfactory account from the Government about it. It is because of the chronic misdesign and failure of the apprenticeship levy. The apprenticeship levy, which was dressed up by George Osborne as a levy on all employers to require them to train more apprentices, has led to a systematic decline in the number of apprentices, for two reasons.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 11, which I have put my name to, and regret that the rules on Report do not allow the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to launch into his exposition of it before the end, unless he wants to rise now.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord. I did intend to speak before the end of the debate.
I will speak to Amendment 11, which has cross-party support and has also been endorsed by the Local Government Association and the Association of Colleges. We support the Government’s ambition to give local employers a strong role in the skills system through local skills improvement plans, but we believe that it should be done as part of an integrated place-based approach to deliver sustained outcomes for local people and local businesses.
I cannot understand the Government’s determination to exclude major players in the localities where the employer representative bodies are based. There needs to be a much more clearly defined and significant role for local and mayoral combined authorities, as well as colleges and other training providers. There has to be an appreciation of differing labour markets, and the way they have developed and are likely to develop. Surely that is best understood at local and regional level. I suggest, as I did in Committee, that it is impossible to prescribe the skills needed for the whole of England from DfE headquarters, yet that is what the Bill’s measures effectively currently propose.
There has been a change since then because we now have a new Secretary of State, who, we are led to believe, has less centralising tendencies than his predecessor. Making the role of local authorities, MCAs, colleges and training providers clear and more effective would be a positive sign by the new Minister to that effect.
To achieve the best outcomes in every area, local authorities and providers should be named as a core and strategic partner in the LSIP process alongside employer representative bodies. To that end, Amendment 11 would provide for ERBs to develop LSIPs—sorry about all these contractions—in partnership with local authorities, mayoral combined authorities and further education providers to ensure that they reflect the needs of learners, employers and, as I said, the local community. Adults and young people have the right to expect access to quality education and training opportunities provided by a joined-up, place-based employment, skills and careers system. Integration at the local level will be vital to support the skills talent pipeline and to join up those skills and occupational pathways of progression.
Amendment 11 would also require local skills improvement plans to consider social and economic development strategies in the local area and long-term national needs that may not apply to local employers. Unless local authorities have a meaningful role in the development and approval of LSIPs there is a risk that these reforms could create further fragmentation within the skills system, which may result in further education providers being subject to different skills plans, disruption of progression pathways for learners and a lack of local democratic accountability, which I do not think we should lose sight of.
I can tell the Minister that local and combined authorities are ambitious to do more to join up local provision to create integrated skills and employment offers tailored to the needs of local economies and residents. This amendment would make use of local government’s expertise to deliver the best outcomes for every community.
Finally, Amendment 11 would require LSIPs to identify actions that relevant providers and other local bodies can take regarding any post-16 technical education or training that they provide. This is drafted to avoid being too prescriptive but would allow LSIPs to work closely with other agencies, including Jobcentre Plus and careers advisory services. As Amendment 12 from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, says, bodies providing careers information, advice and guidance, and independent training are also crucial to the development and success of a local skills improvement plan.
I want to mention the LSIP trailblazers. Less than 24 hours ago, the Minister circulated to noble Lords a 20-page draft guide for employers on LSIP trailblazers. This was promised by her predecessor in Committee 12 weeks ago, so I have to ask why we received it quite literally at the 11th hour, which was not helpful. I do not claim to have gone through it in depth, partly because I was still trying to digest the 69 pages of additional policy notes I found on the DfE website last week that had not been drawn to our attention—yes, I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. There are ways in which communication of some of these papers could be improved, not least in their timing.
Colleges and employer representative bodies in the recently announced successful LSIP trailblazers and strategic development fund pilots will be considering how best they can work in partnership and how they can work with other key partners. There is considerable scope for the sector to lead the way in building new linkages between colleges, universities, schools and other providers; strengthening relationships with mayoral combined authorities and local government; and embedding the voice of students, staff and the wider community in all of this, in so doing demonstrating and strengthening the new environment that they want to operate in. The Government should do everything that they can to facilitate that. It would be to everybody’s benefit.
I am very sympathetic to Amendments 10 and 66 in the name of my noble friend Lady Whitaker, who is yet to speak to them, which aim to ensure that the DfE has a plan for closing the attainment gap and that employer representative bodies have regard to it. The latest annual report from the Education Policy Institute found that the gap between what poorer pupils and their richer peers achieve at school had stopped closing even before the disruption of the pandemic. Disadvantaged pupils in England are now 18 months of learning behind their peers by the time they finish their GCSEs—a huge gap, but the same as five years ago. Disparities at primary school age are also widening for the first time since 2007.
However, a plan will not be worth the paper it is written on unless it includes substantive proposals backed by funding. Noble Lords will be well aware that the Government’s education recovery plan has been roundly criticised as insufficient, including by Tory Members of Parliament and the Government’s own, now departed, Education Recovery Commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, who said that it did not come close to what was needed. I do not expect the Minister to answer me on that point now, but it is an issue that had an impact on Oral Questions earlier today and which must be taken forward and dealt with if the full effects of the pandemic are to be dealt with. I like to think that we might see a much-needed policy change shortly in the spending review, although, like other noble Lords, I obviously will not hold my breath.
Finally, the development of local skills improvement plans must be inclusive by demonstrating an awareness of and commitment to equality and diversity. It is crucial that those with learning and other disabilities can benefit from the measures in the Bill and that support for schemes that help, especially supported internships, are on the face of the Bill. It requires a focus on making all the so-called three ships—traineeships, supported internships and apprenticeships—more accessible and widely available, opening up pathways into long-term employment for people with a learning disability. Apprenticeships need to be made more flexible; this should be included as part of reforms to the post-16 education offer. Additionally, we want to see more of a commitment to people with education, health and care plans, as well as those who have disabilities but do not qualify for such care plans. Leaving these groups out will only further entrench the current barriers that people with learning disabilities face in finding sustainable paid employment.
There is much for the Minister to respond to in this group of amendments. I do not expect her to respond to all of it in detail but it would helpful if she could follow up on some of my points by letter after the debate. However, let me be clear: we want both employer representative bodies and local skills improvement plans to be successful but we believe that, as it stands, the Bill will limit what can be achieved. There are so many people and organisations with much to offer. They should be encouraged to play their part fully in developing skills for the future.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I want to go back to Amendment 10. I assumed that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was going to speak to Amendment 9—my apologies. I will speak to Amendments 10 and 66. In doing so, I declare my interests as chair of the Department for Education’s stakeholder group for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma and a former chair and current fellow of the Working Men’s College for men and women.
I am grateful for the advice and support of the Association of Colleges. I was also grateful for the sympathetic response to my amendment from the Minister’s predecessor—the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge —in Committee, and even more so for her positive letter to me and others last month. However, we must look at the facts, not just the aspirations.
All the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 19 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, are worth pursuing. I turn to Amendments 10 and 66. Again, they are aimed at enabling the missing third to gain the skills to earn a good and useful living. They respect the decision of the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, not to proceed immediately with a national plan for those who have not achieved grade 4 or above in GCSE maths or English. However, they would oblige the Government to find out what is actually happening.
In her letter, the noble Baroness again promised the publication of the long-overdue national strategy for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma, which will inter alia address the widely acknowledged educational attainment deficit. Can the Minister give us the date of publication and specify what consultation has taken place? The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, also said that tuition for 16 to 19 year-olds has been expanded for those who need help to catch up in English, maths and other vocational subjects. How many Gypsies, Travellers and Roma have been given this tuition, and with what results? Similarly, what has happened with the additional funding of small group tuition?
Finally, on the assurances in the letter, how will the department make the new centres for excellence in mathematics accessible to disadvantaged minorities? As I said in Committee, there is no evidence that such minorities lack the requisite ability—– something else is at play.
Most importantly, in what terms have the Government made it
“clear to employers that we will fund apprentices without English and maths to achieve Functional Skills qualifications during their apprenticeship”?
Frankly, without the review that my amendment proposes, we shall, as usual, not know what is happening to the missing third. This would enable something to be done about the plight of thousands of our young people who should be entering the world of work.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I will pick up where I left off on Amendment 11 and also speak to my Amendment 20. I welcome my noble friend to the Front Bench. There was a period when she was my Whip; she probably thought that she had finally escaped having to deal with me, but now she is back, front and centre of my interests.
I apologise that my first action will be to vote with the noble Lord, Lord Watson, if he pushes his amendment. Like him, I absolutely support the objectives of the Bill, but I will vote with him because I am really unhappy and unclear about it in its current state. I want us to be able to continue this conversation as the Bill winds its way through the Commons. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, the key element of this discussion—the local skills improvement plan trailblazers document—arrived today, at least for me, and I have not managed to look at it properly. There is a lot there that needs attention.
I thoroughly support the idea of local employer involvement in skills provision. For a long time, local employers have complained to me that their local colleges and other providers are not doing the courses they need: the engineering kit that the FE college has is 20 years out of date, and graduates have to be completely retrained if they enter engineering; the building courses do not align with the methods used at the moment; nothing is available for the local foundry; and so on. The need for local employers to be involved in local skills provision is very clear to me.
However, to get successful employer engagement you need both status and longevity. You are asking employers to get senior, good and effective members of staff to spend time on collaborative bodies and arriving at results. They need to do that over a period of years to build up relationships and understanding with each other, among the employer community as much as with education providers. That takes time and an attitude to these bodies that is not, “Oh, we’ve had this for five years—let’s throw it out of the window and start again”. Starting again takes you back to zero.
If I have understood the document right, the trailblazers will exist only for a year or two. Why will any sensible employer spend time trying to make something right when it will be torn up after two or three years? There will be a few, but there will not be the comprehensive effort that would be made if the Government gave themselves a bit more time and, when they know what they want to do, set out to provide employers with something that has a hope of lasting 10 or 20 years.
We have a new ministry for levelling up, which gives it an opportunity to make a decision about what is happening to local enterprise partnerships. These are a source of relationships, understanding and established ways of doing things which might well be drawn on to make a success of local skills improvement plans, but they appear to be ignored entirely. Why? Let us have some coherence in this across government. This is already at least the second way in which the Department for Education is proposing to consult employers; it already has a reasonably well-established network in IfATE, but it does not appear to be tying that in at all to what is happening with local skills improvement plans. There are also networks based in BEIS and in the Department for Work and Pensions. There needs to be more thought and coherence before we set out on this, so that we can really make a success of the idea.
If I read this document right, there is a budget of £4 million for the seven trailblazers, so that is about half a million quid each. In our local area, this is the whole of Sussex, and because of the way Sussex has evolved, the Sussex Chamber of Commerce knows very little about what happens down at the town level. There is almost no relationship between the Sussex chamber and Eastbourne; Eastbourne is dealt with by the Eastbourne Chamber of Commerce. There is also very little relationship between the Sussex Chamber of Commerce and that huge employer of people in Sussex: London. So you are asking this body to build from nothing a knowledge of the skills needs of a very large area—four or five million people’s worth, if you embrace the south of London—on a budget of half a million quid. It is a comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that there is no possible way they will have money to pay consultants; they will be really pushed to do this on a few local people. It does not seem to be a recipe for success.
To pick a quote from the document, these partnerships are supposed to look at
“opportunities created by emerging technologies, cleaner growth and new global markets.”
How can you do that based in Sussex, for goodness’ sake? You are not exactly at the middle of any of these industries. Where is the source of knowledge and information to enable them to do that? That sort of thing requires national co-ordination and there is no sign in this plan of how that national understanding will develop.
As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, you need an organisation which is looking ahead; ideally, 10 years ahead—though it is getting pretty speculative—but certainly five years. If you talk, as I do, to the jobs board providers, they will say, by and large, that employers look at what they want today and, if you push them hard, they will look a year or so ahead. Local employers do not have that understanding of where their whole industry is going; they have to deal with the problems of today. You need to build in something which is looking further ahead, and there is no reason to try to do that locally. Also, there is a lot of commonality between local problems: the problems we face in Sussex will be replicated in East Anglia, the north-east and elsewhere, one way or another. We do not want to have to create individual, from-the-ground-up solutions to each of these problems; we want to have a mechanism for sharing the problems and approaches and putting the best solutions forward, rather than just creating new things locally. Again, I do not see a sign of that in the Bill.
The system of careers advice for children at school set up by this Government in the Careers and Enterprise Company, of which I have a high opinion, is based on their relationship with local enterprise partnerships. What is proposed under this new system to enable them to continue the rollout of local career hubs? Again, I do not see anything. Where in this structure do we encounter the interests of students? Somewhere in Eastbourne is the engineer that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, wants. Under the LSIP, as described here, the only training available for us will be for hoteliers—that is the main business in Eastbourne. There is no engineering contractor, let alone a nuclear industry. There is not much IT at the moment; there is no obvious source of green growth jobs within our patch. Where is this understanding to come from? Why should our children be restricted in their opportunities to what happens to be available in Sussex? An awful lot of people who live in Sussex work in London. How is the source of demand and need to be factored into the local skills improvement plan in Sussex?
I hope that when the Bill comes back to us from the Commons we will end up with a nationally coherent, long-living system of involving local employers and other sources of information in producing a structure of training that works for local people and local industries. What the noble Lord, Lord Watson, suggests is the right way to do it. As for Boris—if I am allowed that shorthand for my right honourable friend the Prime Minister—he was talking about that last time I read one of his speeches regarding raising the leaders of counties to the same status as local mayors and giving them the same sort of powers and ambit. We will see how that direction works out but at least the understanding is there. A lot of support is available at county level, including a lot of knowledge, skills and people in the workforce, which would really support an enterprise like a local skills improvement partnership. If the two aspects are embedded together, they are likely to work together and benefit from each other. In terms of sending a message to our colleagues in the Commons, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, does that pretty well.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 13, 16 and 19, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who is unable to be present because of his other engagements. Along with others, I welcome the Minister to her new role and join others in offering appreciation to her predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge. I should also say, as a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Environment and Climate Change, how much I welcome government Amendment 6, and I add my support to Amendment 64.
The context of my remarks is a general welcome for the Bill and recognition of its role in helping to meet the Government’s ambition on FE and skills. However, there is almost no specific reference to SEND provision in the Bill, despite the significant role that FE plays in provision for students with additional needs or disabilities. Noble Lords will know that around 202,000 students have special educational needs in further education, of whom 90% attend general FE colleges and make up almost one in six of all enrolments. Within those, almost a quarter of students are aged 16 to 18. In contrast to the school sector, there is a small number of specialist institutions. That situation makes a profound difference to the scale and range of support needed in general FE and sixth-form colleges.
During Second Reading, the Minister gave assurances that the overall legislative framework, notably the Equality Act and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, provided sufficiently rigorous safeguards for ensuring that the needs of SEN students were met. It was also most helpful to see the updated policy note and to hear the further assurances from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chisholm and Lady Barran, at their meeting with my right reverend friend the Bishop of Durham last week. The Government’s high aspirations for students with learning needs and disabilities is clear, and we warmly welcome that ambition.
However, the evidence from the Special Educational Consortium and Natspec, which are key voices promoting the rights of disabled children and young people, those with special educational needs and specialist further education, is that far more explicit duties should be incorporated into the Bill to ensure that high ambitions and good intentions are subsequently consistently turned into effective action.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, before speaking to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to which I added my name, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for the work she did on this Bill and wish her well.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, uses the word “integrated”; I would use “partnership”. What the Government are trying to achieve, which we want to achieve, will fail if we do not get the local skills improvement plan right. To do that, we must have a partnership of people. A key factor in that must be the local combined authorities. It is not just me saying that. Your Lordships may remember when a former Chancellor, George Osborne, set up combined authorities. He said that they were a “devolution revolution” and gave them extra powers involving the provision of skills training, business support and economic development.
Indeed, the powers of the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, where I live, include apprenticeships, grants for employers, an adult skills budget, post-16 FE and oversight of skills and advisory panels. Combined authorities have a wealth of experience, yet we are pushing them to the side. We are marginalising them. I just do not get it at all. It is not just me saying that, or the combined authorities saying that, or Peers saying that. It is interesting to see that message coming loud and clear from employers themselves. You have only to look at the comments from the Food and Drink Federation, which has again said that it is really important that there is a partnership across all areas.
Interestingly, the Energy & Utility Skills Partnership talks about the need to look not just at local skills but at those skills which are nationwide and at how they will be swept up or dealt with if there is just a local focus. I hope that when she responds the Minister will be positive. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that when this goes to the Commons it will be sensible enough to realise what we have said, and that changes will be made if we are able to give it those changes.
I end by saying how much I support Amendment 19 from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. He is right to say that if we are to have these representative employer bodies, they must have a record of showing that they care about diversity, equality and disability and that should be an important hallmark of these bodies. If that amendment is not agreed, I am sure that if the Government saw a body set up that was not equal or concerned about diversity and disability, they would have the sense to step in.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I, too, have added my name to Amendment 11, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and to the amendment to it, Amendment 12. I shall speak also to my Amendments 14, 18 and 21, which are mainly concerned with the overall coherence and effectiveness of the skills systems of which this Bill will be such a major part. Many aspects of that system lie outside the Bill as drafted, but are essential for it to achieve its aims, so Amendment 11 and my amendments seek to fill some of the more important gaps that need to be addressed in the Bill. Others will no doubt be covered in the forthcoming guidance for employer representative bodies, which I have been no more successful than the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in absorbing since I received it this morning.
The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, lists a range of bodies whose views rightly need to be taken into account in LSIPs. My Amendment 12 adds two more categories to the list: bodies providing careers information, advice and guidance and independent training providers. I have previously expressed my view that the importance of high-quality careers guidance should be more explicitly covered in the Bill. Every LSIP should surely take account of the status of careers guidance provision in its area through drawing on the views of those responsible for it, including careers hubs and careers leaders in local education institutions. Seeking to ensure that all schools and colleges in its area are meeting the eight Gatsby careers benchmarks and complying fully with the requirements of the Baker clause as, I hope, amended by the Bill.
Given the importance of informing young people about their career choices and options early on, will the Minister tell us how the Government are ensuring that chambers of commerce currently delivering trailblazer LSIPs are engaging with local careers hubs to ensure that careers provision in schools is aligned with local labour market skills needs?
Could she also say whether there are any plans for a new careers strategy, to revive the terrific impetus provided by the previous one in improving the careers situation, and what the Government are doing to ensure that careers hubs will be an established part of the future careers landscape right across England, with sufficient funding to support careers activities in schools and colleges and enough qualified careers professionals to deliver them? Finding those professionals seems an increasing problem for some schools.
My Amendment 12 would also add independent training providers. I will spare noble Lords a repeat of my spiel on independent training providers, but I do believe that no LSIP can afford not to take account of their role in meeting the skills needs of its area.
My Amendments 14 and 18 seek to ensure that LSIPs take account of UK-wide standards developed by national employer groups, picking up on what the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said. Either of the two might meet the need, although the first relates to the actual content of an LSIP, and the second to the characteristics of the employer representative body which develops it. I apologise to your Lordships if this seems like trying to get two amendments for the price of one.
There will be many areas of technology where there is a pressing need for LSIPs to upskill and reskill the existing workforce in their area but there are no associated apprenticeship standards; for example, because they would not support a full year of study. Examples include some of the key green technologies, such as installation of ground source heat pumps or electric car charging points. In the absence of formal standards, LSIPs will need to assure themselves that training provision and assessment is of the right quality and meets agreed industry standards. This assurance could be provided by recognised national not-for-profit employer bodies representing specific sectors, such as the Energy & Utility Skills Partnership, again mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for whose briefing I am grateful. I would welcome the Minister’s views on how this need might be met and whether she might consider establishing a reasonably short list of recognised sectoral employer bodies capable of supporting LSIPs in this respect.
Amendment 21 addresses a related issue. The Bill says remarkably little about accountability and reporting requirements of employer representative bodies, apart from developing their LSIPs in a form that the Secretary of State is prepared to approve and publish. Perhaps the Minister could say something about how the subsequent progress and implementation of the plans will be reported and monitored; how information from LSIPs across the country will be aggregated to assess their impact on national skills needs and objectives; and how the Secretary of State will determine whether the new arrangements in specific LSIP areas are working as intended, bearing in mind the point that noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others have made, that chambers of commerce in England vary considerably in size, scope and capacity, and may not always be the right body to lead ERBs.
Amendment 21 addresses only one specific aspect of this broader issue of reporting accountability and two-way flows of information between local plan areas and the centre. The amendment would ensure that the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has access, via reports from ERBs, to information on the activities and outcomes of the upskilling and reskilling programmes being pursued through their LSIPs, to inform its own work in identifying and approving needed apprenticeship standards and other technical qualifications for the future.
I do not anticipate pressing any of my amendments to a vote, but if the noble Lord, Lord Watson, decides to seek the opinion of the House on his Amendment 11, I shall gladly support him.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, if I may say a few words now, let me first say that I will speak to Amendment 26 in my name. It was originally in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, who has just sent me a note saying that he wishes me well but he has an appointment he must go to in the City. All right for some, but it was his idea in the first place.
Anyway, I have a few comments about the clerical Bench’s series of amendments here. What I like about these is that when we deal with special educational needs, often it is as special educational needs going forward into the outside world. The fact is that talking about the employment gap for people with disabilities is something we should spend more time on and is sometimes a better way of looking at it to get clarification.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, I will say a few concluding remarks before the Minister speaks. As I look around the Chamber, there are numerous former Secretaries of State and schools Ministers, including myself, and many others who have grappled with skills and post-16 education over a number of years. Why are we back here again? It is because, frankly, there is still a major issue and a major problem. This is one thing all of us want to do something about and yet we grapple with the fact that whatever we do does not seem to work in the way we want it to. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned his maiden speech 35 years ago when he talked about special educational needs with reference to this. I have heard many noble Lords speak on this issue and some of the things being said now could have been said by them decades ago.
I have one simple question and some comments for the Minister. The Government are attempting to grapple with a problem that has bedevilled our education system and our country for decades, so why will it be different this time? Why will it work in a way that it has not under other Governments—despite the best intentions—this time? There has been some progress. there are powers, as my noble friend Lord Adonis pointed out, ad nauseam for the Government to use should they choose to. So, why will it work?
This is a crucial issue. I was at Thales and Leonardo yesterday. They have graduate skills programmes and apprenticeships, but they struggle to fill them. The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, talked about his own company. They cannot fill the vacancies, yet there are people who need skilled jobs, and they cannot be matched. Everybody knows it is a problem. Everybody knows it is an issue. Why has it not been resolved? It is not through lack of intent, desire or passion; it just has not worked.
This debate is crucial because the vehicle the Government are going to use is local skills improvement plans. The Government are saying, “Through our local skills improvement plans, this time it will be different. This time it will work. We won’t need to have another skills Bill in three, four or five years’ time, because this time it will work.” I say this to the Government: if they turn their backs on some of the amendments being put forward by all sides of this House today, whether they be on creativity or special needs or the amendments moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and others, the Government—whichever Government it is—will be back in two, three or four years’ time and the same debates will be replayed.
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, must be sitting there wondering. I remember talking to him goodness knows how many years ago. I remember talking to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, when he was my MP, about these sorts of things. He has been saying it for decades in his own constituency to his own schools: we have a skills shortage. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has been saying, “What’s happened with technical education?” The fundamental question for the Minister is: why will these local skills improvement plans work, when they did not in whatever guise they were in in the past and, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, the present? Why will these work? Why will they make a difference? Why do they mean that we will not be here again in a few years’ time?
Amendment 11, in the name of my noble friend on the Front Bench, is fundamental. Why on earth would you have a local skills improvement plan that does not include local authorities, the mayors or all the providers? Why would they not—unless it is the Government’s view, which it should not be, that local authorities, the mayors, or the other things mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, are an impediment to it? If the Government are really saying, “The local authorities are in the way, we want them out of the way and we’re going to do it without them,” that is is ludicrous, and I do not believe that is what the Government think.
I finish with this; it is a plea from the heart. I was a careers teacher. I remember we had women into schools and engineering buses coming round. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Bird, has spent decades trying to get people into creativity. We cannot get people. We are crying out for lorry drivers, bricklayers, and graduate skills. Our country, our Government and our education system have failed. There have been improvements and there has been progress, but it has been so slow. I do not want to be here in five or 10 years’ time having the same debates and discussions again.
So, I say to the Minister: why will it be different this time? Why will local skills improvement plans work when others have not? I say to the Minister, who I know listens and takes all her responsibilities incredibly seriously, that Amendment 11 is one example and is fundamental, but so are many of the other amendments noble Lords across this House have tabled. If the Government do not listen to them, we will be back in five years’ time debating another such Bill, and none of us wants that.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak very briefly, because we have spent a long time on this very important group of amendments. I added my name to Amendment 20, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to ensure collaboration between the Departments for Education and for Business, and local government. Of course, this is hugely important, because there is little point in encouraging students into work-based qualifications if there are no jobs for them to fill either locally—which is where the local government people come in—or nationally, where the Business Department should have an overview of the skills the country needs. We desperately need a long-term coherent strategy.
I so agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bird, in his plea for creativity in education. I have long espoused the idea that education should be fun and that every child should be encouraged in their own skills and interests to try to get confidence that they can contribute to society, and I do not think that our education system does that.
I also support Amendment 66, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, putting in a plea for vocational English and maths. GCSE English and maths are academic and are absolutely not appropriate for a whole load of people whose skills are more practical. The noble Baroness is quite right to press for support for those for whom literacy and numeracy are real difficulties and challenges. Without those basic skills, people have such difficulties in every aspect of their lives. They need all the help they can get from the nation and community. There are some really valuable amendments in this group, and I hope that the Minister sees that and takes them on board.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to this group of amendments. If I may, I shall start by responding to the words of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and his challenge to the Government. I do not want to be flippant, but there is nobody in this Chamber more aware than me of just how many former Secretaries of State for Education and former Education Ministers I am surrounded by. In listening to the noble Lord, I was reminded of the time when I worked in the City, where I was advised early on that “This time it will be different” were the most expensive words for an investor—so I hear him.
In trying to answer the noble Lord’s point about why it will work this time, I am grateful to him for pointing out that this is an enormously difficult and challenging area. He will be aware that, in the White Paper, we set out a number of planks through which we will try to address the entrenched issues that he raised. LSIPs—I think that by this stage in the debate I am allowed an acronym—are an important plank, and our reform of technical and vocational qualifications is another, along with how further education is funded in this country. I shall come on to the points that my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, raised about accountability, and the fact that we need to stay honest and keep checking how this works in practice, if necessary course-correcting to make sure that it delivers what the House resoundingly wants it to deliver. That is also an important part of it, albeit in future. So I thank the noble Lord for giving me the opportunity to set that out.
I turn to the detail of the amendments, and first to Amendments 8 and 9 from my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on consideration of skills deficiencies in specific fields when developing local skills improvement plans—skills described as absolutely crucial by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. I know that my noble friend brings enormous experience from boardrooms around the country to her amendment; she rightly raises the importance of digital skills and innovation. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has great insight into the issues surrounding the food system and biodiversity. We also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, about his very practical and relevant expertise and experience in engineering skills. These are all areas that the Government are actively trying to address in our skills policy. We have introduced, as noble Lords know, digital and other skills boot camps, covering construction and, most recently, HGV. So we are trying to be responsive to needs. On T-levels, we have introduced them recently in engineering and other related areas.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
I am grateful to the Minister for her response—fairly grateful—but I had a number of other very specific questions. May I take it that she will write to me on those?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I had not forgotten, so I absolutely undertake to write on the noble Baroness’s specific questions in relation to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities and on the other points that she raised.
In response to the disruptions to education during the pandemic, a further £222 million has been provided to continue the 16 to 19 tuition fund for an additional two years from the 2022-23 academic year. It allows students to access one-to-one and small group catch-up tuition in subjects that will benefit them most, including maths, English and vocational courses.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, three days off my second anniversary in your Lordships’ House, I occasionally think that I am on top of procedure and am then comprehensively disabused of that fact. I thank the noble Lord the Deputy Speaker for his advance guidance on this matter; I was not aware that my modest little Amendment 9 would put me in this position, for which I feel particularly ill equipped, given the distinguished nature and level of experience of so many people contributing to this debate.
However, I shall do my best, briefly, and begin by thanking the Minister for her comprehensive wrap-up of this long group. If we look at the group’s nature, it makes some kind of sense despite its large size. Amendments 8 and 9 are addressing the gaps in the matter—the skills needed—and, as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, said, we need to prioritise the jobs that need doing. Many of the other amendments—I particularly highlight those from the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and the right reverend Prelate—address the need to ensure that all humans in our society are able to contribute to the fullest extent, to meet the needs of our society and develop their own human potential.
I should declare my position here as a vice-president of the LGA and the NALC. I will briefly address the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and Amendment 11. I agree with him that there was lots of criticism of the apprenticeship levy, but where there is hope is that this is working through the local level and local steps. I had a debate with the Minister in her kind meeting last week about which decisions should be made at a local level and which at a national level. There is a green economic theory about bio-regions; different regions have different skills needs, and Amendment 11 addresses the way in which local government fits together in making these decisions.
In saying that briefly, I have one final sentence. I am going to keep to the battle by saying that skills are not just about jobs; skills are about providing the individuals in our communities with preparation for life in our difficult world. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 9.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I thank all those who have taken part in such an interesting and wide-ranging debate on the content and creation of local skills improvement plans. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his contribution on both the need to look ahead and the importance of creativity. I agree, and creativity and innovation are clearly linked. We should all emphasise creativity, including in arts, music and innovation, when we visit schools and colleges. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for his emphasis—coming from an expert position—on the crisis in digital skills, especially digital engineering, and the need to listen to the voice of small business.
The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was his usual challenging self but he is right to be concerned about the decline in apprenticeships. It is very good to hear from my noble friend the Minister that the Chancellor is on to this.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, said that we needed more flexibility in apprenticeships; perhaps we could think about that one. He is also right that local and mayoral authorities are keen and ambitious to do more on skills and they should be consulted, as the Minister has said that they will be. I do not support the precise terms of the noble Lord’s amendment, which would slow down the reforms that we need and lead to a patchiness in provision, as I have seen with the local enterprise partnerships. We need to avoid slowness and bureaucracy, and—responding to the oratory of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker—get on with the skills revolution.
Above all, I thank the Minister for her helpful and concrete responses. I very much look forward to having the opportunity to see the statutory guidance—and to quizzing her on the subject of monitoring—but for now, with many thanks, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
“(6) A “local skills improvement plan”, in relation to a specified area, means a plan which—(a) is developed by an employer representative body in partnership with local authorities, including the Mayoral Combined Authorities and further education providers for the specified area, (b) draws on the views of—(i) employers operating within the specified area,(ii) regional and local authorities , including the Mayoral Combined Authorities, within the specified area with specific reference to published plans and strategies which have been developed by these authorities to inform the distribution of funding and prioritisation of resources,(iii) post-16 education providers active in the specified area, including schools, further education institutions, community learning providers, specialist designated institutions and universities,such sources of information on long-term national skills needs as the Secretary of State may specify, and any other evidence, to summarise the skills, capabilities or expertise that are, or may in the future be, required by people resident in the specified area, and(c) identifies actions that relevant providers and other local bodies can take regarding any post-16 technical education or training that they provide so as to address the requirements mentioned in paragraph (b).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would provide for employer representative boards to develop local skills improvement plans in partnership with local authorities, including the Mayoral Combined Authorities, and local further education providers to ensure that they reflect the needs of learners, residents and employers. LSIPs must also consider social and economic development strategies in the local area and long-term national needs which may not apply to local employers.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her comprehensive responses. It is clear that she has quickly got up to speed on the Bill. However, she said—I think I am quoting her accurately—that local skills improvement plans will not be effective without the involvement of local authorities and mayoral combined authorities, which is essentially what Amendment 11 is about. She went on to say that it can be covered by guidance, which is of course more flexible than primary legislation. I get that point, but in this case I do not really think that it applies.
Proposed new paragraph (a) in the amendment specifically mentions
“local authorities, including the Mayoral Combined Authorities and further education providers”.
It is not likely that any of them will change: there will always be local authorities and FE providers. I do not know about mayoral combined authorities. They have been invented, so they can be dis-invented, but I do not think that is going to happen any time soon. That argument does not serve the Minister well on this occasion.
This is the third time—at Second Reading, in Committee and now on Report—that we have discussed this issue. A lot of noble Lords have indicated their support at each stage. We have a new Minister but I am afraid that we still have the old argument. For that reason, it is time that noble Lords have a chance to express an opinion. I therefore wish to test the opinion of the House on this matter.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment at page 1, line 7.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment to Clause 1 at page 1, line 7.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment at page 4, line 24.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment makes clear that an employer is excepted by virtue of paragraph (b)(i) of the definition of “independent training provider” only if education and training within paragraph (a) that it provides is provided only to its employees.
“(1A) For the purposes of sections 1 to 3 and this section, education or training is “English-funded” if it is funded, wholly or partly, by—(a) the Secretary of State,(b) a combined authority,(c) the Greater London Authority, or(d) a local authority in England.(1B) For those purposes, education or training funded by the Secretary of State includes education or training in respect of which amounts are paid directly to the provider of the education or training by the Secretary of State in accordance with provision in regulations made under section 22(1) of the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 (financial support for students) by virtue of section 22(2)(h) or (i) of that Act.(1C) Where a relevant provider that provides English-funded post-16 technical education or training enters into arrangements under which all or part of that education or training is provided by another relevant provider, the education or training provided under the arrangements is to be treated as English-funded post-16 technical education or training provided by the second relevant provider (as well as by the first).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that Chapter 1 of Part 1 applies only in relation to post-16 technical education or training that is funded by the Secretary of State or an authority in England, including where it is funded by student finance provided by the Secretary of State. Where such education or training is sub-contracted by one provider to another, both are treated as providing it.
Lord Lucas
“(c) must specify a range of qualifications with a teaching and learning requirement equivalent to one GCSE (at level 2) and one A level (at level 3) which allow students to combine academic and vocational education.”
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, there are a number of other amendments in this group. I very much hope that we will pursue one or more of them to a Division if we do not get some very clear reassurances from my noble friend, because it is my conviction that BTECs should continue to be widely available for some good long time yet at least, and that the Government’s suggestion that we should quickly move to a system of A-levels and T-levels only is profoundly mistaken. I have a number of reasons for this.
First, BTECs are respected. When it comes to educational qualifications, respect is hard to gain. BTECs are respected by universities, employers and parents, and not just parents of disadvantaged children. My daughter took a BTEC, her friend took three, and my cousin took three. They are something, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, that I would happily advise a child to take. They are a well-respected qualification and to dispose of them in haste and short order is profoundly un-Conservative. I very much hope that my new colleagues in the department will share that view.
I am very grateful to the department for sharing its reasoning with us. Broadly, as I understand it—my noble friend will doubtless correct me if I am wrong—it is that, looking at the people who take BTECs and comparing them with similar people who take A-levels, the people who take BTECs have a higher drop-out rate at university, and those who stay at university go on to learn less than equivalent pupils who take A-levels. That analysis is deeply statistically unsound. I will explain why.
A definitive and careful choice is made by a pupil and the people advising them as to whether they should go down the A-level or BTEC route. It is not a question of random allocation. Unless you really analyse what is going on in that process of differentiation, you absolutely cannot legitimately statistically compare the subsequent path of the two groups. You can remark on and look at them, but to compare them and say that one is therefore better than the other is not something you can do because you do not have the data to understand what that process of differentiation was. They are two different groups. They are swallows and crows—both birds, but to compare them is just to describe. It is not something you can draw conclusions from.
Nor is that the only point at which these two streams have different processes applied to them. When it comes to applying to university, they receive advice as to which course they should take at which university. The quality of that advice might well differ markedly for people taking BTECs as opposed to people taking A-levels. It certainly differs markedly between institutions. When, a few years ago, I was working with HESA statistics it was quite remarkable how drop-outs focused on the products of particular institutions rather than particular types of students or courses they were going for. So there is a second point at which this stream is different, which destroys the ability to compare.
Then there is what happens at universities. Universities are supposed, under their access policies, to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is quite clear that they have not been doing this properly. I am delighted that the OfS is picking them up on this, but universities have not been looking at how they make the best of a student and give them the best possible outcome. They have been providing them with a relatively standard product and seeing how they get on with it.
Students who take BTECs are likely to have a different set of requirements in terms of teaching and support from students who take A-levels, so the differentiation may be entirely down to the practices of universities in not supporting BTEC students properly. That means that you cannot tell what is going on. The department is using this data to evince the reasons for its proposals on BTECs, but the data applies to the old pattern BTECs only—those that existed before the 2016 reforms. The new BTECs were specifically designed to deal with the worries people had about how BTEC students were doing at university. All the changes made to BTECs in the first teaching in 2016 were directed at helping students do better at university, but there is as yet no data available on how those students do at university. There were big changes—it is a different qualification in many ways—but the Government are treating it as if they can apply the data from the old qualification.
There is then another set of data which the Government do not seem to have applied themselves to: the data that comes before the surge in popularity of BTECs. The data for disadvantaged students in 2013-15 shows that almost all of them took A-levels and there was a huge rate of dropout, because these were not suitable for them. Go on a few years and there was a much lower school dropout rate because BTECs were holding these students in school. That does not seem to have been taken into the Government’s calculations. The department talks of getting these students back to doing A-levels, but we used to do that, and it had terrible results. Why does it want to do that again?
I am somewhat in despair at the quality of the DfE’s analysis of why it wants to do away with BTECs quickly. However, its analysis does suggest a test; it suggests that we should look at how new qualifications do when they have run their course and students have got to the point of being in employment. We can then judge how well they are doing. If we look at 2019-21 as the sample cohort for the new BTECs, we should have a reasonable idea of that by 2027. We should have a reasonable idea of how well T-levels are doing by 2029 or 2030.
That gives us a timescale for when we will have legitimate data to compare how T-levels and BTECs have done, if the Government are doing proper research—I do not know that they are—on how decisions are taken as to which qualification is provided, how pupils with the qualifications are supported at university and on careers advice given to different groups of students. All of that is necessary to take a justified decision about which set of qualifications should be provided.
I hope I am right in quoting the Government as saying that T-levels are the best option for 16 to 19 year-olds. How can they possibly know that? These qualifications have only just been created—they are newborn. The emperor’s second wife always wants to kill the older children. It is a natural thing, but we really should not allow that. We ought to insist on a proper period of comparison to find out how they work out. I think the answer will turn out to be that we need not two qualifications but three: A, B and T. We want parity of esteem. If the system has just A-levels and T-levels, we will lose parity of esteem.
I would never, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, advise a child to do a T-level unless they were so clearly committed—at age 16—to the narrow scope of that T-level that they could legitimately take such a decision. There are not many 16 year-olds who are so clear and focused that they can reasonably take that decision. It is really hard to commit yourself to a single, narrow line which leads you away from the generality of university and towards a specific career. There are children for whom this will work, but there are fewer of them than the Government think, and there are an awful lot who need to be kept more general.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 28, 29 and 30 in my name plus, very briefly, Amendments 32 and 33, to which I have added my name.
The Government are undertaking significant reform to level 3 qualifications and that is an aim that we certainly support in principle. For too long, there have been far too many qualifications. These have not only confused young people but have not been recognised by employers, who often have no means of gauging their worth.
The Government’s vision is for A-levels and T-levels to form the main further education level 3 qualifications in England and to sit alongside apprenticeships. Funding for other current post-GCSE options, including most BTECs, which are characterised by the Government as “low-quality qualifications”, will be removed from the system by 2025. The move to introduce T-levels, a recommendation of the 2016 review led by my noble friend Lord Sainsbury—I think I am allowed to refer to him as such, even though he has now retired from your Lordships’ House—is one that we welcome and very much want to see succeed.
However, the Government seem intent on introducing a binary system of academic and technical pathways, where students progress to employment, or further study, only via A-levels or the newly created T-levels. The reforms include the defunding of the vast majority of applied general qualifications, including BTECs. They do not appear to have considered the impact of defunding these qualifications on widening access to higher education and on social mobility—or social justice as we in Labour prefer to call it. We have just seen a new social mobility tsar appointed and it would certainly be interesting to know her views on this issue, particularly given her experience as a headteacher.
Yesterday, again at the 11th hour—Minister, please note—we received from the DfE an additional briefing on BTECs and applied general qualifications. In it, the DfE conceded that responses to the consultation highlighted that A-levels and T-levels alone would not meet the needs of all students, and it went on to explain:
“We will give funding approval to qualifications supporting progression to specialist HE courses in areas which are not covered by T Levels and not well-served by A levels as alternative programmes of study to A levels, such as those in performing and creative arts.”
Evidence around BTECs suggests that, while they generally provide positive impacts for students in terms of progression to higher education, wage returns and employment, those benefits are generally exceeded by those with A-levels. I suppose that that was to be expected, but it is not a reason to close down that route for those who did not find A-levels an appropriate option, for whatever reason. We would argue that it is the destination that matters, not the mode of travel to it. Accessing higher education will always have a value, and the greater the number of young people who do so, the better, surely.
Ofqual has also stated its concerns about the proposed new system. In its response to the 2020 review of post-16 qualifications at level 3 in England, it said, in relation to the risks to progression to higher education:
“We recognise the potential benefits for all learners at level 3 from the proposed reforms … in recognising the benefits, we must also remain alert to the potential adverse impacts that these reforms may risk.”
The DfE’s own consultation impact assessment estimated that the qualifications that may no longer be funded could account for around 62% of current non-A-level 16 to 19 year-old enrolments at level 3, yet we know that the number of learners using qualifications other than A-levels to access higher education is in fact growing.
The DfE document referred to earlier—the one that appeared yesterday—contained six evidence sources, but that list did not include the National Education Opportunities Network at the University of West London, which has an unrivalled reputation for supporting widening access to HE. It published a report in February this year that contained a raft of evidence from universities, many of them in the Russell group, with 70% of respondents saying that BTECs prepared students for higher education study as well as, or better than, A-levels. The teaching and assessment style of the BTEC was seen to be particularly good at preparing students to enter more vocationally oriented HE courses.
The conclusion was that BTECs are essential to widening access to higher education, although it is only fair to say that this view is not universally accepted. But, until T-levels become fully established, which, I repeat, we very much want to see, more BTECs than the Government currently plan for need to be retained.
I accept that it is not helpful if BTECs overlap with T-levels and that that could delay their becoming fully entrenched. But while there is a risk, as highlighted by the NEON survey to which I referred, that a substantial proportion of students from the neighbourhoods with the lowest participation rate may not enter higher education under the proposed new system, that is a risk that the Government should weigh very carefully.
The most likely outcome is that around five years’ progress in increasing the numbers of students entering higher education from the neighbourhoods with the lowest participation rate will be lost by the defunding of BTECs. It is almost certain that the proportion of students entering higher education who are from black and Asian backgrounds will decrease.
The DfE document also did not refer to research published by the Social Market Foundation in 2018 showing that students accepted to university from working-class backgrounds and/or minority-ethnic backgrounds are more likely to hold a BTEC qualification than their peers. The foundation’s report said that a quarter of Asian students and 37% of black students were accepted to university after completing only BTEC qualifications at level 3.
On the basis of the evidence in these reports, the Government are strongly urged to reconsider the timescale of their plans to defund applied general qualifications. If the Minister can explain how doing so will not have a negative impact on widening access to higher education and social mobility, I am sure that noble Lords would be most interested to hear that argument.
I turn to the amendments in my name. Amendment 28 requires the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, hitherto referred to as IfATE, to consult and gain the consent of the relevant employer representative bodies before withdrawing course approval. The Government are intent on making the employer representative bodies all-powerful in their areas, which suggests that they, as organisations, would not want decisions taken that cut across their ability to pursue local priorities for qualifications. I accept that there is a danger that a BTEC defunded in one area could remain available in another. That is certainly not ideal, but if local characteristics are to hold sway, it is an issue that can be accommodated, provided that these BTECs do not overlap with T-levels.
Amendment 29 calls for a four-year moratorium on IfATE withdrawing approval and thus defunding BTECs and other level 3 courses. This would prevent removal before 2025, rather than the Government’s ambition of achieving this by 2025. This is a reflection of concerns that it will take some time, as I have said, for T-levels to become embedded and more widely understood and accepted by students, universities, colleges and employers. This is a real issue in the current economic climate, as T-level students are required to complete 315 hours or 45 days of work placements. Many employers have warned that they may not be able to commit to that, given the challenges they are facing, as evidenced by their ability to provide the necessary current work experience placements for T-levels in the health and social care, digital and construction sectors.
There is no mechanism in the Bill for a provider, or a student or prospective student for that matter, to challenge an IfATE decision to withdraw course approval. This is all the more concerning, given that we do not yet know how IfATE will make the decision on which courses to withdrawal approval for. The DfE has referred to course duplication between T-levels and BTECs, and some courses have been labelled “low value” without reference to an objective established measure of quality, applied across the board.
Amendment 30 would therefore allow someone to challenge the lawfulness of the decision to withdraw approval through a judicial review. For example, IfATE’s decision could be overturned on the grounds of procedural unfairness if the process leading up to the decision were improper—perhaps simply biased in favour of T-levels over BTECs—or incompatible with human rights under the Human Rights Act 1998, which could come into play, given the issue of BTECs widening participation and/or ethnic minority entry. This links with Amendment 32, which would make it much less likely that a judicial review would be necessary.
Finally, Amendment 33, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has our support because we believe that it would put in place a safety net to guard against the issue surrounding the defunding of some BTECs that I have outlined.
If the Government really do want to level up, they need to slow down this major reform and recognise the risks posed to thousands of young people. We are big supporters of T-levels because they have the potential to improve the reputation and standing of technical education, if they are implemented properly, alongside other qualifications.
As the Association of Colleges has said:
“We don’t need a strong-armed approach to force change, that change will happen.”
The Government’s approach risks leaving thousands of disadvantaged students with limited or no routes to progress into work or continuing education when they need them most, and that is an outcome the Government will surely want to avoid.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, this is the first time that I have engaged on Report, and I gather that I have to speak to the various amendments I have supported. I certainly strongly support the one that has just been dealt with, and I will also speak to Amendments 30 and 31.
That amendment would delay the whole implementation of the Bill by four years. I will explain why that is necessary. The Bill is one of the most extraordinary Bills that has been laid before Parliament because it has no policy in it. It sets up two administrative procedures, one to deal with a statement that appeared in the White Paper on education and one to deal with a paper that appeared out of the blue on 1 January this year, on abolishing thousands of technical qualifications, which was totally unexpected. The Bill sets up a framework.
As regards the White Paper qualification, a framework of employer representative bodies was set up to prepare skill plans for each of the towns where the employers live, which is a very interesting idea. It is a bit experimental, but it means that local industry could get involved in setting the curriculum for Darlington, Newcastle, Plymouth or Exeter, and that is a good thing. It engages industry, which determines what technical subjects it needs. The various bodies that do the training, like the FE colleges, the apprenticeship providers, the private providers and the colleges that I support, such as the technical colleges, can then adjust their curricula accordingly.
The second policy that is not in the Bill appeared on 1 January this year, when the Government issued a paper on technical qualifications. This was totally unexpected: there has been nothing in a White Paper and no research on it—I am very interested to know what they will do—but they set out their policy.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
It can get worse, you know.
I am quoting from the documents so that they are on the record, so that when MPs see it they know I am not making this up. This is real stuff. Listen to this:
“We have recognised the need for additional qualifications alongside A levels and T Levels, including small qualifications designed to be taken as part of a study programme including A levels. However, we recognise that students who traditionally take”
things such as diplomas, two BTECs or extended diplomas
“tend to have achieved lower GCSE grades than their peers who progress onto A level study. They are also more likely to be Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students, have SEND and have received free school meals.”
So the Government admit in this impact document that one of the consequences of this is that the following people will suffer: black, Asian and minority ethnic students, those with SEND and those who have received free meals. They will not actually have much of a chance of going to university. This is a disgraceful and shaming statement to put into any public document.
It gets worse: those from
“Asian and black ethnic backgrounds are more likely to be affected by the proposals, as they are particularly strongly represented on qualifications expected to no longer be available in the future.”
It then does disabled students and disability, with
“these students being more strongly negatively impacted by being unable to achieve level 3 in the reformed landscape.”
So disabled students are going to be disadvantaged in this reformed landscape. Scrap the blasted landscape! It is absolutely disgusting. Quite frankly, I am very ashamed that a Conservative Government have done this. What they are denying to lots of people—black, Asian, ethnic minority, disadvantaged and disabled students—is hope and aspiration.
The Conservative Party at the moment has been accused of abandoning lots of the things it has traditionally lived by. One of the things it has lived by is improvement in education. With respect to my own family, my grandfather left school at 12, and my father left elementary school at 16 and studied all sorts of other things to get on, leave and eventually become a senior civil servant. That is what Conservatives believe in—hope and aspiration—yet this denies hope and aspiration. As Browning said, the reach should exceed the grasp,
“Or what’s a heaven for?”
They are denied that reach. This is a shaming thing. I am very ashamed that a Conservative Government could do it, and all I can say to your Lordships is that I apologise for the Government.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I was going to say it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, but actually it is an extremely daunting task after that magnificent speech.
I shall speak to my Amendment 32 and add my support to Amendments 27, 28 and 33, to which I have added my name. But I support all the amendments in this group, which, as has been so powerfully set out by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, address a key concern over the Government’s policies on technical—or can I still say vocational?—qualifications.
I remind the House of my interests as a vice-president of City & Guilds, an organisation for which I worked for 20 years on practical, work-based technical and craft qualifications. BTEC broke away from City & Guilds in the 1970s, originally separating the business from the technical as BEC and TEC, but then coming together to offer both types of qualifications, particularly but not exclusively for secondary schools and further education colleges. Over nearly half a century, BTEC has built a reputation which is recognised, understood and valued—or, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, respected—by candidates, employers and academia.
It would be an act of extreme folly and damage for the Government to undermine, let alone cease to fund, a set of qualifications which have had a profound influence on the work skills of the country, especially, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, pointed out, for disadvantaged groups, and especially at a time when the country needs all the skills it can muster. We need skilled people to replace all the skilled workers which Brexit has seen return to their countries of origin. Do you know, I do not remember seeing that in the Leave campaign materials: “Vote Leave and be deprived of all the skilled workers you need.” We have shortages of farm workers, HGV drivers and butchers. My grandfather was a butcher. He had no problems in those far-off days in encouraging young people into an essential and respected trade.
Successive Governments’ relentless focus on universities and academia has led to a generation believing that actually doing things is less worthy than thinking things. We must urgently work to address the academic superiority which has so beset this nation for generations.
This Government have invented T-levels. Previous Governments, academically minded, have tried to invent different sorts of vocational qualifications. We had NVQs, which were going to be the vocational qualification to end all vocational qualifications—they were brilliant. We had GNVQs, we had CPVE. I looked after CPVE for a while. It was a brilliant secondary school practical programme. It was done away with by the academic superiority, who said that it lacked intellect. We had diplomas. They were all designed to break through this country’s unwillingness actually to do and make things. T-levels are untried and untested and will pose real problems, particularly, as has been mentioned, in the work element.
In proposing those shiny new toys, the Government chose to ignore City & Guilds and BTEC, with well over a century of expertise. They need now to put their weight behind those schemes which are proven and to encourage candidates to work with colleges and employers to fulfil their potential and fill the skilled jobs which are so crucial to the country’s well-being, indeed to its survival as a 21st-century force for good.
I support all the amendments in this group. Mine insists that the institution must publish specified criteria before it can withdraw funding, or approval, from an existing qualification. That of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, insists on public consultation; that of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, promotes the combination of academic and vocational education; and that of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, also calls for public consultation and the consent of employer representative bodies. On all sides of the House, we express concern that the Government’s blinkered support for their own invention threatens to undermine all that has been good and valuable in the past.
I wish the Minister well in her new post and hope that her own academic background will enable her to see just how important it is that we protect all that has been good and successful in the vocational field and support both BTEC and City & Guilds qualifications, which have been the bedrock of work-based skills for so long.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak extremely briefly, otherwise I think we will lose the amendments that we want to support. I declare an interest, because I have assisted Pearson’s with its consultation, including attending workshops chaired by the former Conservative Skills and Apprenticeships Minister, Anne Milton.
I have never met anyone outside the DfE who thinks it a good idea to do away with BTECs. I have not met anyone who thinks it impossible to promote the quality and worth of T-levels without having to demonstrate that they must do away with, defund or have a hard stop on BTECs and associated general qualifications. It is perfectly feasible to square this circle, and that is why I have put my name to all the amendments before us. I thank my assistant, Joanna Firth, who has been liaising with noble Lords and those outside who are campaigning on this critical issue.
It would be a great shame if—perhaps I may just refer to myself here—ageing Peers did not actually protect the interests of the young people we so often talk about, the vocational qualifications and drive for good-quality vocational opportunity that we so often talk about on the back of the Augar report and beyond: if we did not tonight help the Government to help themselves. The new ministerial team will need time to absorb what is being put in front of them and what they have inherited from their predecessors. The civil servants have worked extremely hard on this aspect, including in the Bill, but—I say with some temerity —they need to avoid the syndrome I found all those years ago, which is that once people have got on a trajectory, they cannot find a way of getting themselves off it. Tonight, we have the opportunity of helping both officials and Ministers to get themselves off what could be an absolute disaster. It is not often that I offer to help the Conservative Party out of a hole, but on this occasion, it matters. If a quarter of a million-plus young people are denied a route to a good qualification simply on an ideological whim, it would be a great shame not just for them but for our economy and our nation.
At this moment, we have never needed training in vocational qualifications more; we have never needed more opportunity to succeed outside A-levels. We know that; we know the gaps; we can feel them; we have seen them in the past month, not just at petrol pumps but on the shelves, in abattoirs and other key areas, including in the steel industry in my city and beyond. We need to support T-levels as a really good opportunity to develop quality, but not position them against good quality, high-level vocational BTEC qualifications. If T-levels are good, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and my noble friend on the Front Bench said, they will stand on their own merits.
An interesting document was circulated for this evening’s debate. I shall quote only two bits of it. It is very interesting, as was the document to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred, published on 14 July and placed in the public sphere on 15 July. Here is a question for the Government.
“Why are you defunding qualifications when we don’t yet know if T Levels will be a success?”
This is the answer:
“The government is committed to ensuring that T Levels are accessible to all”—
I stress, all—“young people”. But of course, they are not, for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, spelled out. If you have to get a particular GCSE at level 6 or above to be able to take part in them, those who currently get levels 4 and 5 and go forward to BTEC are disqualified. We are talking here about tens of thousands of young people.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendment 33 in my name and in support of the other amendments, particularly Amendments 29 and 31. It has been a powerful debate and I shall speak briefly because the case has been made so effectively already.
I welcome the Minister to her post because I trust her to listen to the powerful points made by noble Lords from all sides of the House. I should declare my interests as the chancellor of the University of Leicester, as a visiting professor at King’s College London and as a member of the board of Thames Holdings.
I want to turn to the concern that lies behind all these amendments, which is the future of BTECs. What the debate has revealed is that the scheme of thinking—the Government’s model that lies behind their attempt to get rid of BTECs—is deeply flawed. The Government think that there should be some kind of clear divide between academic qualifications— A-levels—and vocational qualifications—T-levels—and nothing else in between. The reason why BTECs do not fit in is that they straddle that divide between vocational and academic—and that is a good thing, too. It is totally unrealistic to expect every teenager neatly to fit into one of just two specified routes.
It is good that T-levels have that breadth of appeal. The Government are clearly committed to T-levels and all of us on all sides of the House have said that we want them to succeed. However, they should succeed on their merits, not because viable alternatives are removed by government fiat. My noble friend Lord Baker spoke powerfully and, as a fellow Conservative, I believe in choice and trusting the judgment of the people. If people are choosing T-levels, that is fantastic. If they are obliged to do them because the alternatives have been removed, that is not a strong case for T-levels. They are, as we have heard, so far untried and untested, and that is why I have particular sympathy for Amendment 29, spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, asking for a four-year delay so that the evidence on their performance, so powerfully referred to by my noble friend Lord Baker, could become available.
In private, Ministers and the Government think that BTECs are not much good. That is what they really believe. They do not think that BTECs are of a high-enough standard and worry that people who have done them do not perform so well afterwards. Ministers think that they are a soft option. That argument rarely speaks its name but that is part of the thinking. However, BTECs have been reformed. There is now an external examiner and that arrangement could be strengthened. BTECs are not unimprovable but they are not so bad that they should just be abolished. When one digs deeply into the evidence that they are apparently underperforming, one sees that the real evidence is on poorer academic performance. It is actually the old standard and always the academic measure. Indeed, as we have heard powerfully, T-levels are being designed as an academic vocational qualification. Often when Ministers say BTECs are a soft option, what they are really saying is that BTECs are not an academic route like A-levels. They appeal particularly to people who have other aptitudes, people for whom we have an obligation to design suitable qualifications, and I am not convinced that T-levels are right for them.
The other argument that one hears is that there are so many vocational qualifications that we need a cull of them. However, in that jungle of vocational qualifications, BTECs stand out. They are a recognised brand and are tried and tested. They were created by Margaret Thatcher’s Government in the 1980s by the then Secretary of State for Education precisely to develop as a recognised vocational qualification, and they are now widely sat, as we have heard, by hundreds of thousands of young people and are known. Having a vocational qualification that is known, trusted and recognised is a precious thing. One does not throw away something that is well known and well recognised entirely in the belief in some experimental future alternative.
My amendment is designed to fit into the structure of the Bill, not to undermine its fundamental purpose. It says that as the Minister clearly has a power to decide funding, there should be a process of consultation before any significant decision to remove the funding of BTECs is taken. We hear all the time from Ministers about the importance of the employer voice and they are legislating to bring in new employer-representative bodies. It is therefore reasonable that these new bodies should at least be asked what they think about the abolition of BTECs.
I end on a personal note. Sometimes people associate my interests with higher education, and I am very aware of the charge that we must not design an education policy solely around the academic route. There is a real danger that T-levels as well as A-levels are being designed around that academic route. Imagine that the Government were proposing to remove the funding of an academic qualification—a set of A-levels sat by 100,000 or 200,000 young people. There would be absolute uproar and fury at a sudden decision that within two or three years the funding for that academic qualification was to be removed. The least we owe to young people who have a different set of aptitudes, who are taking a different route, who are being served often by FE colleges that are also entitled to a fair deal, is to treat a decision to remove the funding for the qualifications that they do as seriously as we would treat a decision to remove the funding for A-levels. That is why, as an absolute minimum, proper consultation is a prerequisite before any decision of such significance were to be taken.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, I think that the House wants to move towards a decision and the arguments made have been utterly compelling. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, deserves to be parliamentarian of the year for his speech alone. I have rarely heard a government policy eviscerated so comprehensively by one of the Government’s own supporters.
However, the Minister has our deep sympathy in seeking to reply. Can she point us to the actual statement of policy on which we are supposed to think that this is a good idea? I have been in search of it in the run-up to the debate because I am always in the market for evidence-based policy; after all, this is supposed to be an education Bill and one might expect that it has evidence behind it. I have searched in vain. The only statement that I could find on the policy that the Government are pursuing is in the skills White Paper of January 2021, which has one paragraph on this policy—an Orwellian paragraph because it states as fact things that have not yet even happened. I will read it to the House because it adds compelling force to the arguments of my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Baker.
Paragraph 63 on page 33 of the White Paper reads as follows:
“In September 2020, students across England started on the first ever T Levels.”
That is one year ago. These are some of the students in those two colleges that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to. It goes on:
“The first three T Levels are in Construction, Digital, and Education & Childcare, and a further seven will be introduced in 2021.”
That is now; they are literally starting just now. We are being invited to legislate to abolish the qualifications which people sit in favour of qualifications that are only just at this moment being introduced. The Government say:
“We are proud of this programme”—
I am delighted that they are proud of the programme—
“which is based on employer-led standards and offers a prestigious technical alternative to A Levels.”
How can we know that they are a prestigious technical alternative when most of them have only just started, only a small minority have been going for a year, no candidates have yet got any of these qualifications and been able to give a view on them, and there has been no evaluation whatever? That is the sum total of the Government’s justification for this policy of unilaterally abolishing all the existing qualifications in favour of those that have not yet started.
The really compelling point was the last one made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts. Not following the day-to-day developments in the education world, I had not realised that the Government were moving to abolish BTECs so quickly. We all support the development of T-levels, but to abolish the existing qualifications regime in this way is a truly astonishing act. He is completely right; I invite the House to imagine what would happen if the Government announced that in two years’ time, GCSEs and A-levels were going to be abolished in favour of a qualification which is only this year being piloted in schools for the first time.
When I was Minister of Education, we had to decide what to do with the Tomlinson report, which proposed to replace GCSEs and A-levels with a new 14 to 19 diploma. I strongly advised Tony Blair not to go ahead with this on the grounds that trying to run these two systems side by side—the development of a completely new diploma alongside maintaining GCSEs and A-levels—over a period of 10 to 20 years was simply unsustainable. In any case, we were being invited by Sir Mike Tomlinson, who is a friend of mine and I hold him in very high regard, on a series of assertions and nothing more, to think that a completely new qualification would outclass and—with the great English middle classes, who are very attached to the status quo—prove itself to be better than the entire existing system of education that was available then.
I can assure noble Lords that the arguments in the Tomlinson report did not get very far with Tony Blair; he certainly was not going to be the Prime Minister who announced that he was abolishing the entire existing system of GCSEs and A-levels in favour of an exam which had not even been introduced then. But that is precisely what is happening at the moment in respect of vocational qualifications. My noble friend Lord Blunkett brought up the social aspect, as did the noble Lord, Lord Baker—his closing remarks on the impact of this reform on students from black and ethnic minority communities and disabled students were literally breathtaking in their import.
We would not dream—least of all a Conservative Government, but I do not believe a Labour Government would either—of announcing in advance the abolition of the entire system of academic qualifications in favour of a new regime which had not even been properly designed, let alone tested. That is precisely what is happening in respect of vocational qualifications under the policy announced by the Government and taken forward by the Bill, and we need the biggest possible majority behind the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and these other amendments, so that the Government are invited to think again.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank all noble Lords for their powerful contributions on this group and I will attempt to set out again our measures in relation to technical educational qualifications. I underline that our ambition with these changes is for a technical education system that is directly rooted in the needs of the workplace. Our reforms will raise the quality of technical qualifications and give young people and adults the skills they need to progress into skilled employment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
Oh, I am so sorry, I will try to speak a little louder; forgive me. Our reforms will make sure that every qualification has a clear and distinct purpose so that learners attain the skills they need to succeed in high-quality higher education or to progress into skilled employment.
We set out the qualifications we intend to fund alongside A-levels and T-levels in the summer. I can assure noble Lords that we will fund a small range of high-quality qualifications at level 3, including some BTECs, that could typically be taken alongside A-levels if they meet our new approval criteria. These are qualifications with practical and applied elements, in areas such as STEM and IT, which support progression to high-quality higher education. For example, a student may choose to undertake an applied qualification in health and social care alongside A-levels in biology and psychology.
We will also fund larger qualifications that support progression to higher education in subject areas less well served by A-levels and where there is no T-level; for example, in the performing arts. These are not qualifications designed to relate to specific occupations and so will fall outside the institute’s remit, but we do expect them to include some BTECs.
In addition, we will fund technical qualifications which support the development of competence in occupations that are not currently covered by T-levels, where they meet the approval criteria. For example, this could include areas such as travel and tourism or training to be a blacksmith; these will be within the institute’s remit. Employers must play an active role in the technical qualifications system. The institute places the independent view of employers at the heart of its activity. It is important that the institute has discretion in its activity so that it can respond to the changing needs of the labour market.
Both my noble friends raised important points of detail about the data that we use to compare BTECs and A-levels and the specific rules around taking a second BTEC, the environment in which T-levels are taught, and the background to the recent policy announcement. If I may, in the interests of time, I will give responses and clarification to those points because there were possibly some misunderstandings, which I can address in a letter.
Amendments 28 and 33 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lord Willetts, would require public consultation and the consent of employer representative bodies before institute approval is withdrawn, or before funding is withdrawn where a qualification no longer has institute approval. Institute approval is a mark of quality and currency with business and industry, showing that employers demand employees who have obtained that qualification. I hope that in some way that reassures my noble friend Lord Willetts and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, both of whom referred—my words, not theirs—to a certain academic snobbery about technical qualifications. This is not about academic snobbery but about what employers have told us they need and value. Approval would be withdrawn when a qualification no longer meets the criteria against which it is approved and no longer delivers the outcomes that employers need.
The institute will actively involve employers when making decisions, including through its route panels. These panels hold national sector expertise and expert knowledge of occupational standards which have portability across employers. The requirement for a public consultation and consent from employer representative bodies, which are not designed to give input on individual qualifications, is therefore unnecessary.
Amendment 29 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, seeks to delay withdrawal of level 3 qualifications for four years. It is vital in a fast-moving and high-tech economy that we close the gap between what people study and the needs of employers. That is why we are introducing more than 20 T-levels in 2023 and strengthening other routes to progress into skilled employment or further study.
The number of T-level providers is already growing quickly, from 43 providers in the first year to over 100 delivering in year 2, 188 in total by 2022, and significantly more by 2023, when we allow a greater range of providers to start delivery. We are looking carefully at where students currently take qualifications that may be withdrawn to ensure that relevant T-levels and sufficient numbers of industry placements are available in those areas. I know that both points were of concern to your Lordships this evening. I want to be clear that we will not leave learners without access to the technical qualifications that they and employers need during this transition phase.
We have provided significant support to help providers get ready for T-levels and will continue to do so. This includes £165 million to support industry placements, and over £250 million has been made available in capital funding and the T-level professional development programme, available to all staff teaching T-levels.
T-levels raise the quality bar for technical education. They are co-designed with over 250 leading employers and based on employer-led occupational standards. We have tried to learn the lessons from the past, when new, high-quality programmes, such as the 14-to-19 diplomas, failed because they were added to the market without the removal of competing qualifications. We want as many young people as possible to benefit from T-levels, which is why it is important for us to proceed at pace.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
Did the noble Baroness just say—I think the House was slightly surprised by that remark—that it was mistake not to have abolished GCSEs and A-levels because that might have led to the development of a 14-to-19 diploma?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am happy to write to the noble Lord to clarify the background to that but my understanding is that there were quality programmes, such as the 14-to-19 diploma, which did not gain traction, which I am sure the noble Lord would accept. I suggest that in part, that was because other qualifications were not removed.
Baroness Barran (Con)
Perhaps the noble Lord will allow me to proceed.
Amendment 30 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, seeks to confirm that the decision to withdraw approval from a technical qualification may be subject to judicial review. I assure your Lordships that the institute is a public authority and its decisions can be reviewed by the courts in the same way as the decisions of any other public authority.
Amendment 32 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, would require the institute to publish in advance the criteria which must be met before withdrawing approval of a technical education qualification. It is absolutely right that the institute should publish information so that awarding bodies know in advance the matters the institute will take into account. The Bill already provides for this in new Section A2D6(4).
As I said, approval will be withdrawn when a qualification no longer meets the criteria against which it was approved; for example, where it fails to keep pace with the relevant occupational standard, which will evolve with industrial advances. Specifying criteria that must be met for withdrawal—in addition to criteria that must continue to be met for a qualification to retain approval—would result in duplication and will remove the flexibility the institute requires to meet employer needs.
A number of questions were asked regarding the impact of T-levels on social mobility. Again, if I may, I will set out our position in more detail. However, I would like to be clear that the Government are absolutely committed to levelling up. Social mobility is clearly an integral part of this and education, skills and careers are vital to making a success of those efforts. We believe that T-levels represent a much-needed step change in the quality of the technical offer. As we have heard, they have the endorsement of employers, and alongside T-levels we have introduced the T-level transition programme to support students who are not yet ready to start a T-level at 16 but who have the potential to progress to one. We have also introduced flexibility for SEND learners across all elements of the T-level programme.
In conclusion, our reforms to post-16 qualifications aim to ensure that we will have a system where the choices are clear and learners can be assured that every option is of high quality, whether it supports progression to higher education or to skilled employment. Extending the role of the institute will make certain that the majority of technical qualifications available in England are based on employer-led occupational standards and deliver the skills outcomes that employers need. Given this, I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment, and that other noble Lords will not feel it necessary to move theirs.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that comprehensive reply. I will start by agreeing with her final words. Let us have qualifications that are clear, where every option is high quality, with employer-led standards and the skills outcomes that employers need. However, whatever language my noble friend dresses this up in, she is saying that the Government intend to abolish BTECs well in advance of having any information to show that T-levels deliver what we all hope they will deliver. Given in particular the effects that my noble friend Lord Baker has outlined on the children we ought to be having most care for—so ought the Government—I very much hope that one of my noble friends, or more of my noble friends than the noble Lord opposite, will choose to move their amendments. As far as my amendment is concerned, I prefer that in the name of my noble friend Lord Baker, so I hope he will consider moving it. However, I will certainly vote for some of the amendments in this group if they are moved to a Division. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
“(2A) Subsection (2) does not apply to the withdrawal of level three courses for the period of four years beginning with the day on which this Act is passed.” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment prevents IfATE from withdrawing approval of established level 3 courses including BTECs for four years to ensure that T levels are fully embedded and acceptable to students, employers and universities.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, we have had a really compelling debate, with some powerful speeches from education big hitters on all sides. I will not rehearse any of the arguments; they have been well made. I just want to pick up a point made by my noble friend Lord Blunkett. He said that, on this issue, we need to help the Government help themselves. I want to do that by testing the opinion of the House.
Lord Baker of Dorking
“(2A) But no student will be deprived of the right to take two BTECs, AGQ or a Diploma or an extended Diploma.”
Lord Willetts
33: Clause 7, page 10, line 17, at end insert—
“(8) Where a technical education qualification has had its approval withdrawn under subsection (2), funding may not be withdrawn by the Secretary of State without public consultation and the consent of the relevant employer representative bodies, as defined in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2021.”
Lord Willetts (Con)
It is very important that we sense the mood of the House on this issue. I beg to move.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Finlay of Llandaff) (CB)
My Lords, there being an equality of votes, in accordance with Standing Order 55, which provides that no proposal to amend a Bill in the form in which it is before the House shall be agreed to unless there is a majority in favour of such amendment, I declare the amendment disagreed to.
Lord Storey
“Review of apprenticeship levy
The Secretary of State may request a review of the apprenticeship levy to—(a) ensure eligible costs are sufficient to enable apprenticeship standards to fully meet the demands of their occupation in relation to specific industries in the sector; and(b) provide the opportunity for coordinated pre-apprenticeship training and industry experience to broaden diversity and inclusion.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to create flexibility in the eligible use of employers’ apprenticeship levy funds and to ensure there is wider diversity and inclusion in apprenticeships.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, apprenticeships have been a really important development, particularly for young people. We saw at the beginning of the development of apprenticeships how young people felt that this was an important way to develop their skills and career prospects. For young people, it meant no student debt and more experience—20% on study and the rest on practical training—but in recent years, we have seen a massive decline in apprenticeships for young people, not just because of Covid. Current rates of employer-funded training for 16 and 17 year-olds are at their lowest levels since the 1980s. Just 3% of young people took up an apprenticeship in 2020 and only 2% of those were employer-funded training: it is almost back to the future.
Obviously, the pandemic and staying in education has had an effect, but the IFS concluded that there are fewer policy reforms or initiatives to arrest that decline in work experience among 16 to 17 year-olds. That is the area that we need to talk about, to look at and to be flexible about. Apprenticeship, like other routes of technical education, suffers from entrenched negative perceptions, biases and stereotypes in comparison to an academic route. Apprenticeship providers of high quality that lead to high earnings and better employment outcomes need to be stressed.
The Government have set a target that all public bodies should take on 250 apprenticeships with no age bracket, but the National Audit Office report found that employers were simply using money on existing professional development courses. Will the Government look again at how those targets might be honed more to young people because there is no age limit on them?
Of course, experienced workers should upskill or retrain, but apprenticeships should be prioritised for young people. The Government should look at employers and at receiving funds from the apprenticeship levy, using a substantial part of it on young people who began apprenticeships at levels 2 and 3, before the age of 25. We now need to refocus on the under 25s. We need to be ambitious, particularly with how we use the levy. The LGA—I declare an interest as a vice-president —has asked for more flexibility, for example by allowing a proportion of levy funds to be used to subsidise apprenticeship wages.
As we have discussed before, any of the apprenticeship that is unused of course goes back to the Treasury. The Energy & Utilities Skills Partnership did a survey of its membership and found that 54% of the levy was unspent and going back to the Treasury. What a waste for the education sector and for skills and vocational education. Why are we allowing that to happen? We could unlock that logjam by ensuring that we use that money in more flexible ways—there are plenty of examples.
My amendment highlights the issue of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds, who, quite frankly, have not been taking up apprenticeship opportunities. We need to understand why, and how we can encourage them to do that. By being flexible, we can perhaps make that happen. I hope that Members will support this amendment.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 34 of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, because of the key role that apprenticeships have to play in meeting the UK’s skills challenges, as pointed out earlier by my noble friend Lord Bird. However, as it stands, the policy is not working as well as it should or could, as pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Storey.
I was about to regale your Lordships with the results of a survey carried out by the energy and utilities sector, but that has already been done on my behalf, so noble Lords will be glad to hear that my speech will be even shorter. However, this illustrates that greater flexibility in the use of levy funds could actually increase the use of apprenticeships to deliver competences needed in that sector, for example through supporting pre-apprentice training initiatives in schools to increase the diversity and inclusiveness of new entrants.
Extra flexibility might allow some of the available levy funds to be used for approved high-quality shorter courses—less than one year long—or for apprenticeship-related costs outside the training itself, which might help in the perennial challenge of encouraging smaller firms to offer apprenticeships. This simple amendment merely gives the Secretary of State the power to request a much-needed review of the apprenticeship levy to ensure that it is working effectively in terms of the level of funding available for different apprenticeship standards and the opportunity to link policy on the levy more closely to other aspects of the overall skills programme. Even if the Government do not accept this amendment, I hope the Minister may say something about how they will respond to the widespread perception that the levy as it stands is not playing as effective a part in addressing the skills challenge as it should.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss apprenticeships. We have already heard from several noble Lords today about apprenticeships. They are at the heart of the Government’s skills ambitions—does the noble Lord want to speak?
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness. The time rumblings in certain areas are making us act a little less rationally. I will be very brief. I welcome the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I am pleasantly surprised that the Public Bill Office accepted it and regarded it as within the scope of Bill. The levy does not merit a mention in the Bill, despite the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, which develops and approves the apprenticeships and technical qualifications of employers, being prominent in several clauses. However, here we are.
As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said, apprenticeships are key to ensuring that Britain is equipped with a well-skilled workforce in the years ahead. It is a bit of a disappointment to some of us—certainly to me—that the scheme, which is a good idea, and the levy, which is an important way of ensuring that employers contribute to the costs of training, have yet to produce anything like the effects hoped for and, indeed, required. The number of young people taking apprenticeships is now down to something like 60,000—I am not quite sure. It has declined dramatically, and that is to be regretted.
When we debated this in Committee, I said to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that I was happy to support the amendment but remained a bit unsure about using levy funds for any purpose other than apprenticeships. In his opening remarks, he said that it could perhaps be used to pay apprenticeship wages, and I am not sure whether that is different. I want to avoid a situation where the money goes back to the Treasury and disappears. As long as the unspent part of the levy was kept within apprenticeships, as it were, we would not be unhappy if it involved some support for wages. On that basis, I am happy to support the amendment. I hope that when we talk about apprenticeships again we will see an upturn in their fortunes. They have a very important contribution to make to the development of skills going ahead.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
I offer many apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Watson. It was so rude of me. I am afraid my tummy overtook my brain, not for the first time.
Apprenticeships are at the heart of the Government’s skills ambition. Given Covid-19’s impact on our economy, apprenticeships are as important as ever in helping businesses to recruit the right people and develop the skills they need.
I want to take a few minutes to outline the principles of the apprenticeship levy and funding as I think that will help to respond to some of the points made. The apprenticeship levy has put apprenticeship funding on a sustainable footing and means that this year £2.5 billion is available to support apprenticeships. The levy has been set at a level to fund apprenticeship training and assessment in all employers—both those who pay the levy and those who do not.
As my noble friend Lady Penn explained in Committee, the funds available to levy- paying employers through their apprenticeship service accounts
“are not the same … as the Department for Education’s … apprenticeships budget.”—[Official Report, 15/7/21; col. 2025.]
This budget also funds additional payments made to employers and providers with apprentices aged 16 to 18. It funds the £3,000 incentive that can be claimed by employers hiring new apprentices. I should like to highlight to noble Lords that these incentives were recently extended by the Chancellor of the Exchequer until the end of January 2022, helping more employers to invest in apprenticeships as we recover from the pandemic.
This is one example showing that the apprenticeships programme is dynamic and responsive to both employers and the wider economic context. In addition, we are delivering a set of improvements and flexibilities that will make apprenticeships work better for employers in all sectors and give employers greater opportunities to make full use of their levy funds. Importantly, we also continue to listen to employers and adapt apprenticeships to better meet their needs. Work is under way to deliver a package of improvements which responds directly to employer feedback so that they can make greater use of the apprenticeship funds.
I think the noble Lord, Lord Storey, will be pleased to hear that, first, we are introducing a new service to make it easier for employers who pay the apprenticeship levy to transfer funds in their accounts to other employers. Large employers are able to pledge funds for transfers and other employers will be able to apply to receive these funds, helping both to benefit from transfers. Secondly, we are helping employers choose more innovative training models, such as front-loaded training and accelerated apprenticeships, which will help apprentices with relevant skills and experience to complete their training more quickly. Finally, we are supporting sectors of the economy which have more flexible working patterns, such as the creative industries. We will shortly launch a £7 million fund to help organisations in England set up and expand new flexi-job apprenticeship schemes.
I should also like to say a little about how we are supporting individuals into apprenticeships. We have introduced accelerated apprenticeships, which will reduce the duration of an apprenticeship for individuals coming from certain T-levels, skills boot camps and occupational traineeships where they have acquired substantial prior learning. This will join up skills opportunities and make them more appealing to both employers and individuals. We are undertaking the largest ever expansion of the traineeship programme for 16 to 24 year-olds, supporting more young people to move into apprenticeships and work. As over 30% of all traineeship starts are by learners from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, and over 20% of traineeship starts are from learners with learning difficulties or disabilities, our investment will also help to broaden diversity and inclusion. I hope the noble Lord will agree that there are some positive steps we are taking.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked if the programme has shifted from older people. More than half—53%—of all apprenticeship starts continue to be by young people under the age of 25. This compares to 56% in 2015-16, prior to our reforms. As well as supporting young people into employment, it is important to recognise the role apprenticeships play in upskilling and reskilling people throughout their lifetimes. I hope I have made the noble Lord, Lord Storey, happy with what I have said and that he will therefore feel comfortable withdrawing his amendment.
Lord Storey (LD)
I think you have made Lord Storey very happy. I felt at one stage like I was in a sort of parallel universe when I was speaking—with people walking past, it was very strange. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that I was not proposing that levy funds be used for wages. I was saying that we should be innovative in how we use the levy and that might mean increasing the amount of money we give to apprenticeships.
I was pleased to hear from the Minister about the package of improvements and new models of working. Flexibility is really important. We are all committed to the notion of apprenticeships, but we have to make the wider community and society realise how valuable they are. Maybe we could start in Parliament itself. I wonder how many apprenticeships for 16 to 24 year-olds there are in the House of Lords. Are there any? Perhaps not. Let us say straightaway that we will introduce some apprenticeships in our House. That would be a real start. I beg to withdraw this amendment.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Thursday 21st October 2021
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-R-II Second marshalled list for Report - (14 Oct 2021)
16:23 - Division on Amendment 45 - Ayes: 166 / Noes: 150 - Amendment 45 agreed.
16:38 - Division on Amendment 45A - Ayes: 160 / Noes: 150 - Amendment 45A agreed.
16:51 - Division on Amendment 46 - Ayes: 169 / Noes: 147 - Amendment 46 agreed.
18:37 - Division on Amendment 50 - Ayes: 126 / Noes: 116 - Amendment 50 agreed.
Lord Storey
“Personal Education and Skills Account
(1) A Personal Education and Skills Account (“PESA”) is an account—(a) held by an eligible adult (an “account holder”); and(b) which satisfies the requirements of this section.(2) An eligible adult is a person who—(a) is aged 18 or over; and(b) is ordinarily resident in England.(3) A PESA may be held only with a person (an “account provider”) who has been approved by the Secretary of State in accordance with regulations.(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations establish a body to administer the operation of the PESA scheme.(5) In the case of each person who is eligible under subsection (2), the body established under subsection (4) must open a PESA for that person.(6) If a person does not wish to hold a PESA, they must inform the body under subsection (4) in writing in accordance with regulations.(7) The Secretary of State must pay into each PESA a deposit of £4,000 during the year in which each account holder attains the age of 25 and a deposit of £3,000 during the year in which each account holder attains—(a) the age of 40; and(b) the age of 55.(8) Further contributions may be made to a PESA by—(a) an account holder;(b) employers; or (c) any other person as may be prescribed by regulations by the Secretary of State.(9) At any time after an account holder has attained the age of 25, they may transfer funding from their PESA to an approved institution for their chosen education or training course.(10) For the purposes of subsection (9) an “approved institution” is—(a) a “relevant provider” under section 18;(b) such other education or training providers as may be approved by the Office for Students.(11) Prior to an account holder making an initial funding transfer, the National Careers Service must offer a careers guidance consultation to that account holder.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for individual “skills wallets” which may be used by a person to pay for education and training courses throughout their lifetime. The Government will make a payment of £4,000 when an individual turns 25 and then two further payments of £3,000 when an individual turns 40 and 55.
Lord Storey (LD)
Amendment 36 provides for the introduction of personal education and skills accounts, commonly known as skills wallets. As stressed by many of your Lordships during the passage of the Bill, there is growing discontent about the way in which post-16 education and training are provided and the reality of the skills needed for our population.
We know that in future the average British worker will do several different jobs throughout their lifetime; almost half will retrain completely during the course of their career. Meanwhile, the number of adult learners has fallen dramatically, almost halving between 2004 and 2016. With technology advancing and the world of work always rapidly changing, skills learned at 18 or 21 will not last a lifetime. It has never been more important for people to continually develop new skills. Yet our higher education and student finance systems are still tailored mainly to people taking their first degree or beginning an apprenticeship around the age of 18. Meanwhile, there is a desperate shortage of funding in the FE sector. The current system limits the opportunities, and people do not get the chance to make the most of their talents. Do we not want to empower people to develop new skills, so that they can thrive in the technologies and industries that are key to Britain’s economic future? Championing flexible lifelong learning will give people the power to follow the path that best suits their ability. A skills wallet would be open to every adult over the age of 18 and resident in the UK.
I remind the House of the quite important words of the previous Secretary of State for Education when introducing the lifetime skills guarantee:
“What we are determined to do, and what we must do, is give people the opportunity to retrain and upskill, so that if one door closes, they will have the key to open others.”
He went on to say that the Government
“stand for empowering everyone in this country, wherever they live. We stand for the forgotten 50% who do not go to university.”
The measures that he wanted to see
“will embed greater flexibility in the technical and vocational system to support not just young people but adults who need to retrain and upskill at any point in their working lives.”—[Official Report, Commons, 1/10/20; col. 541.]
Those comments justify the need for this amendment. I beg to move.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I think there has been a regrouping; I was about to speak on an amendment that seems to have disappeared from here. I have added my name to Amendment 45A from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which is still in this group, and of course I entirely endorse what my noble friend Lord Storey said about the importance of the skills wallet.
The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, is on lifelong learning. Of course, we would much rather see the support for this as grants, rather than loans, to attract adults with financial obligations that deter them from accruing more long-term debt—particularly if it is to encourage their own learning. The amendment is designed to monitor how well the lifelong learning arrangements are working. We particularly wish to see how restricting funding for those studying for an equal or lower-level qualification than one they already hold is impacting the nation’s skills level.
Changes in the world of work mean that many people who already have a level 3 qualification, if they are made unemployed and need to retrain, will need to be able to study for a subsequent qualification at this level or below. The lifetime skills guarantee extended the entitlement beyond those aged under 25 to all adults, but only to a limited list of level 3 qualifications and only for those who do not already have one. It is vital that adults are able to reskill at a lower level in a skill area different from the one already mastered, if that will enable them to gain employment.
This really important amendment calls for the Secretary of State
“to publish an annual report on the impact on re-skilling of funding restrictions on those who wish to pursue a qualification at a level equivalent to or lower than one they already hold.”
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have also added my name to Amendment 45A from the noble Lord, Lord Watson. During the first day of Report, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, spoke about previous unsuccessful skills improvement initiatives and asked,
“why will it be different this time?”—[Official Report, 12/10/21; col. 1765.]
Why will the Government’s new skills system, as embodied in the Bill, work better than its predecessors? In my view, one of the answers will need to be a really vigorous and well thought-through approach to reporting, monitoring and evaluating the different elements of the strategy and how they all work together. The lifelong learning entitlement and the lifetime skills guarantee—I think I have those the right way around—are essential elements of the strategy but need to be transformed from slogans into realities. A crucial part of achieving that will be review, review, review.
I might prefer this amendment if proposed new subsection (1) ended slightly differently, to read, “a report on the impact on the overall levels of skills in England and Wales of all the provisions of this Act”, rather than confining itself to
“the rules regarding eligibility for funding for those undertaking further or higher education courses.”
In the meantime, I will content myself with supporting the noble Lord’s amendment as it stands—with its effect of ensuring that the impact of the equivalent or lower qualification rule is at least reviewed and assessed on a regular annual basis—while encouraging the Minister to look at beefing up further the process of reviewing the overall progress of the skills strategy, beyond the performance monitoring and review of designated employer representative bodies described in her letter to us.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I slightly unexpectedly find myself to be the first person to speak to Amendment 40 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, also signed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and me. Amendment 45A calls for a review to look at the issues around a restriction on allowing people to study at a level below that which they already possess. Amendment 40 goes further in removing restrictions.
I would have thought that naturally the Conservative position would be a belief that the person best placed to decide their best course of study would be the individual concerned rather than the state. This is a question of individual choice, about people knowing best their own situation. Therefore, while I very much support Amendment 45A, which at least calls for a review, I would go back to the more fundamental change in Amendment 40.
I am also in favour of Amendment 36 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. Education is a public good. We hear a lot of talk about investment for levelling up. Well, investment in people is the most fundamental investment of all. It is flexible, it enables people to make choices for themselves. A new or improved railway line or better school facilities are there and accessible to people, but people making their own choices is what investment in education is all about.
I am also in favour of Amendment 48, not yet addressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. I will leave her to fully explain this, but it is worth stressing that what does not get measured and focused on does not get funded or supported. That is the principle behind that amendment.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, as this is my first speech on Report, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to her new ministerial role, and place on record my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for her hard work on the Bill and her openness and willingness to engage with those of us on this side.
I speak specifically to the government amendments in this group. My noble friend Lady Wilcox will talk about the others in this group. We would have preferred them to be de-grouped, but time is short. However, the Government were planning to bring back for Report detailed amendments on the lifelong loan entitlement. Since they have now decided not to do that, we are left with several questions which I must ask. I apologise for doing so on Report, but we have not had an opportunity to do so otherwise.
In Committee, the Government tabled some amendments which were presented as providing some of the wiring in the basement of higher education that would be needed when Ministers unveiled their renovation plans in the form of the LLE. However, since those plans must wait until another day and, we are told, until more primary legislation, because Ministers want to wait for the consultation first, we are left with some big questions. One obvious question is: when will the consultation happen? Indeed, why is it not already out there? What is holding it up?
Ministers have brought back some parts of the wiring amendments on Report. The LLE is meant to cover courses and modules in FE and HE. Clause 14 amends the Teaching and Higher Education Act to allow for the funding of courses in FE and modules in FE and HE, a lifetime funding limit and for funding not just for an academic year. Clause 15 amends HERA to change the definition of a “higher education course” to make it clear that the regulatory regime applies to modules. Government Amendment 39 defines what a course and a module are. However, at the risk of being nerdy, I point out that the Government have not brought back the parts of an amendment that they tabled in Committee which required the Office for Students to specify fee limits for modules as well as courses. We are told offline that the Government will provide for modular fee limits after the consultation. Will that require primary legislation? Does any other aspect of the LLE require primary legislation? If so, can we have a timescale for it? If not, can the Minister say how and when Parliament will have a full debate on the shape and scope of the LLE absent primary legislation?
Where does that leave us in the gap between the Bill taking effect and the new regime being brought forward? If THEA will now permit student loan funding to cover modules which are not taken as part of a full course, does that mean that a provider could do that now but with no fee limits, or would that require regulations to be made, perhaps under THEA? If so, can the Minister assure the House that no such regulations will be brought forward ahead of the debate on the primary legislation promised to enable LLE?
I have three other questions. First, does the same definition of a module in the Bill, as it will be amended, apply for all purposes—funding and regulation—in both HERA and THEA? I ask because Clause 15 as amended by government Amendment 39 offers a definition of a module, which I mentioned in Committee. However, new subsection (1)(e) in Clause 14(1) provides that regulations under Section 28A of HERA may prescribe the meaning of “module” in relation to HE or FE. Can the Minister clarify that distinction? Secondly, on funding, irrespective of how LLE develops, does it mean that a module can be funded via the student loan book only if it is part of a full course? In other words, would the Bill as amended exclude a module which was not part of a qualification?
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, as the Bill before us today is about education, I hope that noble Lords will not mind me veering slightly off topic for a moment. Today marks the 55th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip on 21 October 1966 that killed 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed Pantglas Junior School. I was a pupil at Pontygwaith Junior School in the Rhondda at that time, another valleys primary school built on the side of a mountain, and as we returned to school after lunch we were sent into the yard and told to put our hands together, close our eyes and pray for the children of Aberfan. I had never heard of Aberfan at that time, but I have never forgotten it since.
I speak to Amendments 40, 41, 45A and 61 in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson, who unfortunately, because of the change to the timetable, is unable to be here today. The Government originally promised to table LLE amendments ahead of Committee, but unfortunately very few of substance materialised. We were told that they would be tabled for Report, but we have now been advised by the Minister and her Bill team that this was not possible and that they intend to consult and pilot the lifelong loan entitlement before returning with new primary legislation. This is disappointing given that the LLE is supposed to be the Government’s flagship policy and is urgently needed, but it is not surprising, because the sheer complexity of what they are trying to build was immediately apparent to all—apart from, it seems, the Bill team.
Perhaps the delay will give the Minister time to reflect on the length of the LLE. At present, it will offer up to four years of equivalent funding for levels 4 to 6, and while for some people this may be enough, for others it simply will not be. Undertaking a foundation or access year plus a three-year bachelor’s degree, which is a common route, would use it all up in one go. Therefore Amendment 41, requiring the Secretary of State to consult on extending eligibility to six years to give greater flexibility, is important. It will be especially important to those studying part-time and help to encourage adult learners to take up an offer to study and upskill. It is supported by the Association of Colleges, training providers and other stakeholders that we have engaged with in preparation for this debate.
I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for tabling Amendment 43, which allows the Secretary of State to make provision for the LLE to include maintenance provisions to include living costs to help disadvantaged students. We tabled this amendment in Committee and, as my noble friend Lord Watson highlighted then, one of the main barriers for adult learners, highlighted in the DfE’s own impact assessment, is the cost of study, including living costs. Yet, as drafted, the LLE covers only tuition costs. The Welsh Government recently introduced reforms to tackle this issue by extending maintenance support, including means-tested grants to all students regardless of mode of study, while maintaining low tuition fees for part-time study. Unsurprisingly, this has had a huge impact on participation.
Amendment 40 removes the equivalent or lower qualification—ELQ—exemption rule for the LLE to ensure eligibility for student loan funding for another qualification at that or a lower level, to facilitate career changes. It also ensures LLE eligibility regardless of subject, intensity of study, institution or learning style. We are concerned that, unless reformed, the ELQ rule could pose a significant barrier to further education providers working with local employers to deliver training in priority sectors that support communities.
I will not repeat in full the arguments my noble friend Lord Watson gave on this issue in Committee, nor will I repeat the searching and directly targeted questions from my noble friend Lady Sherlock. The ELQ rule means that anyone qualified to level 4 cannot access government loans or grants to study a qualification at an equivalent or lower level. I suggest this must be urgently reconsidered if the LLE is to succeed in providing opportunities for people to reskill for a new career where such skills are in demand. According to the Office for Students, there are exemptions to the ELQ rule if it is a qualification in a public sector profession, such as medicine, nursing, social work or teaching, or if the student is studying for a foundation degree or receiving a disability student allowance.
Mayoral combined authorities with devolved powers have begun to move away from the ELQ rule. Indeed, the Conservative-controlled West Midlands Combined Authority is running a pilot offering fully funded care management qualifications at level 3 and 4 to black, Asian and minority-ethnic women regardless of their prior attainment. The Augar review also proposed scrapping the complex ELQ rule. The need has been recognised, and there are precedents for the Government to follow.
It was disappointing that the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, withdrew last week what was then Amendment 42, requiring the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on the impact on reskilling of funding restrictions on people requiring a qualification at a level equivalent to or below the one they already hold. We were supportive of that amendment, so it has been resubmitted in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson and appears as Amendment 45A. I do not propose to elaborate, as it is self-explanatory.
Another complex area concerns credit transfer arrangements to allow students to move between education providers. Amendment 61 is a probing amendment designed to elicit more information on this. A universal credit transfer system would have significant benefits to many students, not least in terms of widening participation. The Open University’s OpenPlus programme, where students initially study at one institution before completing their studies at another, is an example of what can be achieved. I would be very grateful if, ahead of consultation, the Minister can outline how the Government intend to address and overcome the lack of commonality which my noble friend Lord Watson raised in Committee. Can she say what discussions the DfE has had since then with the devolved Governments and what those discussions have produced? Any scheme for allowing students to use credit flexibly must enable transferability across the UK—many people living in Newport study in Bristol, and vice versa—and internationally. It also needs to support credit transfer not just in HE but between FE and HE. I hope the Minister can say how she anticipates that will be facilitated.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport, for reminding us of the tragedy of Aberfan and the terrible loss of life on that day. I will speak first to the amendments in my name on the lifelong loan entitlement and then respond to your Lordships’ amendments.
The amendments being laid today primarily address the technical underpinnings of the LLE and make other minor corrections to enable a strong legislative framework. We are laying them now to introduce the enabling powers for the Secretary of State that are necessary to the delivery of the LLE from 2025. The Government previously set out that we would table additional amendments, as your Lordships have noted, outlining further detail on the modular fee limit policy of the LLE. Following further policy development and engagement with stakeholders, including debate in Committee in this House, the Government have decided not to lay these before we consult. As noble Lords have noted, these are complex issues and it is essential that our final policy approach is informed by the needs of students, providers and all key stakeholders. This complexity was demonstrated in Committee by some of the questions on the detail and implementation of the lifelong loan entitlement. Given the intricate nature of such legislation, we must not pre-empt further policy design or decisions based on the consultation.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked what the consultation will contain. We intend to seek views on our ambition, objectives and coverage. This will include aspects such as but not limited to: the level of modularity —this will cover the minimum number of credits a course will need to bear to be eligible for funding; maintenance support; how to support quality provision and flexible learning; how to incentivise and enable effective credit transfer; and whether restrictions on previous study should be amended to facilitate retraining and stimulate high-quality provision. We intend to bring further primary legislation following consultation. This will allow us to meet the rollout timetable of the LLE from 2025, as originally planned.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, describes herself as nerdy; in my world, that is a great compliment. I thank her for her kind remarks about my getting to grips with the role, but I also commend my noble friend Lady Chisholm, who has found herself on an equally steep learning curve. To be clear on the timing of the LLE consultation, we commit to delivering the LLE from 2025. We cannot give the noble Baroness a firm date today, but it will be lined up so that we can deliver on that commitment. She also asked whether fee limits would require primary legislation; I can confirm that they would.
The noble Baroness also asked why the Government are laying amendments on the LLE now rather than waiting for future primary legislation—I have an instinctive feeling that, if we had not laid these amendments, she might have challenged the Government on our commitment to really delivering on this. Part of the reason is to be absolutely clear that there should be no doubt about that level of commitment.
In terms of the definitions of a module in the Bill, from both a funding and a regulatory perspective, I know that the noble Baroness has been in correspondence with colleagues in the department and I am happy to put a full, detailed response in a letter in the interests of time. The THEA and HERA legislation have two very different purposes. The former makes provision for loan funding via a broad set of regulation-making powers for the Secretary of State; the latter is principally about the regulatory regime—the powers of the Office for Students—and specifically enables the setting of fee limits for higher education courses by the Secretary of State. In Clause 14, new Section 28A(1)(e) modifies Section 22 of THEA by inserting new subsection (2ZA). That enables the Secretary of State to define what “module” means in relation to a higher or further education course for the purposes of making loan regulations.
Clause 15, which is to be amended by the government amendments, takes a slightly different approach due to the different regime that it covers. It clarifies that a module of a “full course”—an HE course, for example, mentioned in Schedule 6 to the Education Reform Act 1988—is itself a category of higher education course for the purposes of Part 1 of HERA 2017 when it is taken separately from the course from which it is derived.
Lord Storey (LD)
I thank the Minister for all her comments. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 36.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s second amendment at page 18, line 17.
(2) In section 9 (mandatory transparency condition for certain providers), after subsection (3) insert—“(3A) The OfS must not request information relating to modules of full courses by virtue of a transparency condition more frequently than it requests information relating to full courses by virtue of the condition.”(3) In section 83(1)”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that requirements for higher education providers to provide information by virtue of a transparency condition are no greater in relation to modules than to full courses.
(4) In section 85 (definitions)—(a) in subsection (1), at the appropriate place insert—““full course” means a higher education course that is not a module of another higher education course;”;(b) after subsection (1) insert—“(1A) References in this Part to modules (except in relation to references to the full course of which the module forms part) are to modules which are—(a) modules of full courses, but(b) undertaken otherwise than as part of those courses.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment clarifies that the two categories of higher education course for the purposes of Part I of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 are full courses and modules of full courses where they are undertaken otherwise than as part of full courses, and defines references to modules accordingly.
Lord Addington
“Lifelong learning: special educational needs
When exercising functions under this Act, the Secretary of State must ensure that—(a) providers of further education are required to include special educational needs awareness training to all teaching staff to ensure that all staff are able to—(i) identify, and(ii) support,those students who have special educational needs; (b) providers of further education provide support for students with special educational needs or disabilities that is of an equivalent standard to those with similar needs in higher education.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment places a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that there is sufficient SEN training for teachers of students in further education and that there is support for students with special educational needs or disabilities that is of an equivalent standard to those with similar needs in higher education.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, and I welcome the support of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for them. They are both about special educational needs in the further education sector. Special educational needs in further education are a bit like they are in everything else: an afterthought. They are an afterthought with a couple of special bits of legislation attached, including education, health and care plans, which allow some support until the age of 25 but do not apply to higher education. For those who get to higher education with special educational needs, there is a nice, structured support centre based on the disabled students’ allowance—some of the old jobs of which are taken on by the institution.
Why did I need to preamble like that? My amendments are trying to take best practice from the other two areas of education and apply them to further education. If you happen to attend a higher education institution and you have an identified special educational need, the institution must do certain things—for instance, it must make sure that you have information capture available to you. A few noble Lords might ask what that is. It is where students can digitally record a lecture, seminar or whatever and transfer it into a format which they can take the information from. It could be putting it on to a screen or into verbal means. Basically, there are lots of clever things you can do with technology nowadays that you could not do 10 or 20 years ago which mean that just about anybody can access it in any way they want to. This is a duty in higher education.
Some might ask why I have tabled these amendments, as these two areas are different. I think it was the right reverend Prelate’s office which provided me with the fact that over 100,000 students taking higher education degrees are doing it at colleges—100,000 students are able to get this support, but they cannot get it if they are on a level 4 or level 3 course. I think level 5 is covered by it; if I have that wrong, I put my hands up, but the principle is still there. Why are we not taking the best practice from one area of education and applying it to another? Let us face it: making sure that further education is a viable option is central to this debate. Everything in the Bill implies that, and we have an overlap of provider, so why are the Government not doing this?
There is also the question of how to train people to deal with this, and that is also a part of Amendment 44. Virtually everybody with a special educational need or disability that applies in this sector—depending on which end you take it from—will usually have a slightly different learning process. Can they write or read well? Will they absorb the information in the same way? Can they tolerate the same amount of time concentrating within a lecture or tutorial? All these people are slightly different, and understanding that is the way that they can succeed. I once again refer to the disabled students’ allowance, which guarantees support in higher education. So, level 6 and level 4 apparently have two totally different systems which contradict each other, and there is a different structure again within schools. How are we going to make sure that the best is taken from one system and applied to another, especially where there is a very high level of overlap? You will have the expertise and you will have people involved in it. Even if it is not in your institution at the moment, the one down the road will know—pick up the phone and find out. It is not that difficult.
When it comes to Amendment 46 and teacher training in further education, we have an awareness programme for schools and those trained in them. It does not include that much, and I think it should be much wider. It is based upon the most commonly occurring problems that a teacher will have to account for. I should have identified my interests: I say once again in this Chamber that I am dyslexic, the president of the British Dyslexia Association and the chairman of a company that organises packages of support for people in work and education. In the school system, there is an awareness package which means that teachers have some basic knowledge of those most commonly occurring conditions. Dyslexia comes at the top of that list, but it is only the top. To highlight how difficult it is for the person providing the training, co-occurring difficulties are almost the norm. For example, it is very common for a dyspraxic student to also be dyslexic. There is a conglomeration of little oddities and changes in patterns of learning which are difficult to meet for both the student and the teacher giving the support. Teachers must have some knowledge, because more of the same is a guarantee of failure in many cases.
To give a little example in the case of dyslexia, if you say, “Oh, if we give him lots of spelling tests, he will learn to spell”, no, he will not. He will just forget more words. Give him the same spelling test a lot, and he will learn a few. That is the tip of the iceberg. Teachers need to work differently and need the knowledge to understand why somebody will not respond in certain ways. They at least need to know that they should find out more. If that degree of knowledge is not provided, there is almost a guarantee of failure or delay. This is fair neither to the person doing the teaching nor to the person receiving it.
Both these amendments call upon the Government to institute actions which have been done in other areas of the education system. They should make sure that they take examples from there. I would like to go further and institute better back-up and support. When the Minister replies, she will undoubtedly have a list of lots of regulations and all the things that should happen, but they do not, because there is no way of going forward and co-ordinating them. I also hope that the Minister from the second-half team for this Bill will carry on from the first-half team in recognising that we are not just talking about high levels of need. We need to make sure that somebody who is in danger of doing less well and possibly failing receives the same attention as somebody who is a dramatic failure. At the moment, requiring that stamp of approval from the plan or the official diagnosis—saying that you are of a sufficient level of severity to need X level of help—means that we are worrying about those on the edge, who might just get through on a good day but probably will not. With small adjustments to their behaviour or the way information is presented to them, those people can actually get through.
I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. I hope I do not have to press either of these amendments, but that is now in the Minister’s hands. I beg to move.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, this is my first opportunity to welcome the Minister to her new role, and, indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, to hers. In my own role as chair of the National Society—which I declare as an interest—I look forward to working with them both on many matters relating to education and the Church of England’s place as a major provider.
Turning to Amendments 44 and 46, which I was pleased to add my name to, I thank both noble Baronesses for the time they gave us recently to discuss them. The need for specific provision to be made to better meet the needs of students with specific learning needs and disabilities at all levels has been made—not for the first time—with great expertise by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and I wholeheartedly support these amendments. Given the range and varied nature of the learning needs among FE students, their lecturers, tutors, assessors and other staff must have the skills to recognise those needs to be able to adapt their own approach to teaching, learning and assessment, and to be able to promptly and appropriately refer students for more specialised or intensive support.
Amendment 44 does precisely what is required and, in addition, poses a challenge. Such high-quality support is very widely available in HE, often in the departments of FE colleges which deliver HE provision and from which it might be made more widely available. Is it not both educationally and ethically desirable that those on FE programmes should have the same access as their fellow students in HE?
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, these are really important amendments from my noble friend Lord Addington, and I hope that the Minister will take note. Again, I would ask her, “Why not?” It is hugely important that in our education system, whether it be in nursery or in university, we are able to identify where there are special needs requirements. Teachers and support staff need that training, because when they are able to identify, they can provide the support that is needed.
I remember as a young teacher going on a very simple course—dare I say it, it was like a couple-of-hours course—on being able to identify children who suffer from dyslexia, but it taught me that if you could identify children who were dyslexic you could then give them all sorts of support. For example, if you handed out worksheets that were in a certain colour—and please correct me if I am wrong—those children could prepare, understand and read in a better way. That is why the amendment is important.
One would hope that children with educational needs would be picked up at an early stage in our education system, but that is not to say that it always happens. It is a very simple amendment. It says that all teachers should have that simple, basic training, and let us hear why not, and that the support needs to be there.
The other amendment also says something that we have been saying for a long time; certainly, my noble friend Lord Addington has been doing so. Why not have this as a definite component in our teacher training that all teachers should be exposed to—that they should learn about identifying special educational needs? Whether they are trained on the intensive Teach First programme, doing a SCITT programme or doing a postgraduate education course, everybody should have a component involving being able to identify individual children who may have special educational needs and understanding their requirements.
I hope the Minister will respond positively.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
These amendments would place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that there is sufficient SEN training for teachers in further education so that there is support for students with special educational needs or disabilities that is of an equivalent standard to that for those with similar needs in higher education. The amendments would also ensure that there is sufficient SEN training for those involved in initial teacher training.
FE colleges, sixth-form colleges, 16-19 academies and independent specialist colleges approved under Section 41 of the Children and Families Act 2014 have specific statutory duties which include the duty to co-operate with the local authority on arrangements for children and young people with SEN, the duty to admit a young person if the institution is named in an education, health and care plan, and the duty to use their best endeavours to secure the special educational provision that the young person needs. These duties require extra training and support, which is key to their successful implementation. We fully support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington. His specialist knowledge and understanding of this subject have identified clear gaps in the current provision that need to be plugged by these amendments to the Bill.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for his advocacy for learners with special educational needs and disabilities. I thank the right reverend Prelate for his words as well. I feel that, across the board, we come from a very similar position, even if the Government’s methods are slightly different.
Turning first to Amendment 46, I agree with the noble Lord that it is vital for our teachers to be trained to identify and respond to the needs of all their learners, including those identified as having special educational needs and disabilities. Where the Government differ is on the best way to achieve this aim. Let me explain our position. The new occupational standard for FE teaching, published in September, has been developed by sector experts who employ teachers. The standard sets out key knowledge, skills and behaviour, including a specific duty that focuses on the importance of inclusion, which—I hope that this vital point will ease the noble Lord’s concerns—will support the early identification of learners’ needs and enable teachers to respond to them effectively.
The occupational standard is the right place to set the expectations of our teachers. We have been clear that we intend to make public funding available only to training programmes that meet the new standard. For the reasons I have just set out, I believe that it would be inappropriate to specify particular course requirements in the Bill when a standard newly developed by sector experts already achieves this. I can assure the noble Lord that our intention is to drive up the quality of FE teacher training so that it can meet the varied and often complex needs of learners in the sector.
Turning to Amendment 44, the Government are committed to driving up the quality of teaching in further education and strengthening the professional development of the FE workforce. To that end, we are already providing significant funding for programmes to help spread good, evidence-based practice in professional development, including provision currently being delivered by the Education and Training Foundation to support the professional development of teachers working with SEND learners. It is also important to note that, under the SEND code of practice, colleges
“should ensure that there is a named person in the college with oversight of SEN provision to ensure co-ordination of support … This person should contribute to the strategic and operational management of the college. Curriculum and support staff in a college should know who to go to if they need help in identifying a student’s SEN, are concerned about their progress or need further advice.”
Ultimately, decisions must be made by providers themselves about what training is relevant and necessary in response to the specific needs of their learners and those who teach them. Of course, students with SEND must get the support they need to benefit from the lifelong loan entitlement. Students with SEND are an important part of our vision for and motivation behind a flexible skills system. We believe that this kind of flexible provision will be of particular benefit to these students. We plan to use the LLE consultation to build our evidence base on how to support all people to access or benefit from the LLE offer.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, mentioned the importance of primary schools and nurseries in picking up pupils who may have problems. The number of primary school-age pupils identified with SEND has increased over the past five years. In 2021, pupils with SEND represented 17.2% of primary school-age pupils. The most common SEND support needs are usually in speech, language and communication. Among pupils with an EHC plan, autistic spectrum disorder is the most common type of SEN. This shows that children with SEND are being picked up earlier, which is so important and means that they can get support from the age of five onwards. I know this from personal experience, because I have a grandson who has mild autism. His support in his state primary school has been second to none, and I know that that will carry on right through for the rest of his education.
There would also be a further issue if this was mentioned on the face of the Bill. The Secretary of State would then have to specify requirements relating to one particular element of the training programme, SEN awareness, even if others were not identified.
I thank the noble Lord again for submitting these amendments and hope he is satisfied with the work being done in these areas. I hope he will feel comfortable to withdraw this amendment and not move his other amendment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, here we go again. They say that they will take out pupils if they spot them, they will really get on with it, but they will not specify that you have the skills to spot them. They will not turn around and say that you are trained to spot that somebody has a moderate difficulty.
Pupils may get to having a plan, but local authorities have spent over £100 million resisting plans and—I repeat this—on a good day, around 85% of appeals are lost, but it is normally about 90%. Only tiger parents with sharp claws get their kids through that process. Most pupils are not picked up because of the education system we have at the moment, from school to college and onwards. Noble Lords should remember that most of those in college were not given the correct support at school, and most are not spotted or are spotted late. Without staff who are in a position to identify them and give support, the only way in which pupils can get support is by getting plans or higher levels of definition, which is expensive, slow and damaging to that person. The person trying to teach them cannot do it, so you have someone who is a pain in whichever part of their anatomy you care to choose in that classroom. That is what happens when people are not given a basic level of training.
I would like the Minister to come back on what I said about support for people in colleges—technical support, including information capture—as she said nothing about it in her reply. Does she have anything in her notes on this?
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
My Lords, I did mean to mention that, so I apologise. There will be details on continuous professional development in the skills White Paper, which is committed to supporting improvements for FE teachers. This will include funding schemes to support educational technology and staff using digital forms of educational delivery, such as the ed-tech demonstrator programme; supporting new and inexperienced teachers by embedding early career support in government-funded programmes such as Taking Teaching Further and enabling access to high-quality mentoring; and running the FE professional development grants pilot, which is supporting collaborative, sector-led professional development approaches in the three key areas of workforce capability to use technology in education, subject-specific professional development, and supporting new and inexperienced teachers.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank the Minister for sharing her notes. It is clear that her department does not get what I am saying. There are higher education institutions that have got this right. Why not simply take that technology which has been set up—if it is not there, you are in trouble—and make sure it is available for people who are slightly lower down the grading system? These people are, after all, trying to get jobs or training at the end of this. Clearly, the Government have not taken that on board.
I feel I must call a Division on this, when the time comes. I would like to divide on both my amendments, but I am prepared to withdraw Amendment 44. I shall seek the opinion of the House on Amendment 46, but I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
“Universal credit conditionality
The Secretary of State must review universal credit conditionality with a view to ensuring that adult learners who are—(a) unemployed, and(b) in receipt of universal credit,remain entitled to universal credit if they enroll on an approved course for a qualification which is deemed to support them to secure sustainable employment.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to ensure greater flexibility for potential students in receipt of universal credit to take up appropriate training that will better equip them for employment.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 45, tabled in my name, and I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for supporting it.
As Members will be only too aware, the £20 uplift to universal credit has ceased. A number of faith leaders, including myself, wrote to the Government alongside many other people seeking for that decision to be reversed. The response was the assertion that helping people back into high-quality, well-paid jobs is now the priority.
Lord Storey (LD)
I will speak on Amendments 62 and 63, and thank the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett, Lord Aberdare and Lord Bird, for putting their names to them. I was taken by a comment in an earlier debate when the Minister used the phrase
“no matter where they live or their background”.—[Official Report, 19/7/21; col. 90.]
That phrase is quite key, and another phrase came in a Statement from the Commons Minister:
“Talent exists everywhere in this country. We have to ensure that we give it every opportunity to flourish, wherever people come from.”—[Official Report, Commons, 1/10/20; col. 541.]
But for people on universal credit, those fine sentiments and words do not ring true.
The right reverend Prelate was absolutely right that universal credit, as well as being a financial support, is a barrier to learning in many cases. He was also right to say that it is incredibly complex. One of the aims at the introduction of universal credit was to remove the 16-hour rule that applied with jobseeker’s allowance, where claimants would lose benefits if they worked or studied more than 16 hours a week. While universities no longer enforce this, time limits have not been discarded. Young people cannot normally claim universal credit if they are studying full-time, which is more than 12 hours. However, they might be able to if they meet certain criteria—for example, if they are responsible for a child, are disabled, are under 21, or are under a non-advanced education course and do not have parental support, for example if they are care leavers. These restrictions might incentivise some young people away from intensive study that would support their chosen career.
If a young person is already claiming universal credit, a decision will be made on whether they can continue to claim that finance while going on a course they have been referred to by a work coach. That seems bizarre. Full-time study is normally allowed where the course lasts a maximum of eight weeks. In April 2021, due to the pandemic, the Government announced that they would extend course length in some scenarios to 12 weeks and 16 weeks on the new skills boot camps for six months. Those receiving universal credit have obligations to prioritise job searches and take available jobs if they are able to, which restricts the opportunity for every unemployed person to receive financial support to study a college course with no impact on their benefit. So we need clarity on these issues. We need to ensure that, to use the Minister’s phrase, whoever you are and wherever you come from, you should be able to access learning.
If we look at Kickstart, again, universal credit is a barrier. We talk about Kickstart as being available for 16 year-olds, but you can apply to go on a Kickstart scheme only if you are receiving universal credit. Can the Minister explain the thinking behind that? Why are the Government advertising Kickstart for 16 year-olds when 16 year-olds are not entitled to universal credit and are therefore unable to go on a Kickstart scheme?
I now turn to the amendment on Kickstart. Kickstart has generally been perceived as a good scheme, with real possibilities to help young people, and I am delighted that the Government announced an extension of the programme—but there have been problems. I understand that any new scheme will have teething issues and will need to be embedded and sorted, but let us look at some of the problems that have existed. These are not my words; they come from employers.
First, they say “Actually, do you know what? We don’t just want a six-month scheme. If we’re really going to develop the career opportunities of those young people, it should be a 12-month experience.” In many cases, companies have not found the experience as easy as they thought it might be: they have found it, at times, very frustrating, waiting months for approval and then with a further delay for roles to go online on the system; referrals that are totally unsuitable for the job specification coming to their business, suggesting that the role-matching automation is deeply flawed; lack of support for any queries, with weeks to receive a reply, and never from the same person; payments incorrect; and late or no record of the young person, despite all the procedures being followed. Small firms—and this is perhaps why so few small businesses have got involved—do not have the resources or time to manage these processes. We need to get those issues right, because it is a good scheme that has the potential to really help the issue of youth unemployment.
I will make just one more statement. We talk about youth unemployment and give an overall figure of, I think, 12.4% now—but of course that is the headline figure. We should look deeper at the figures. For example, among black people aged 16 to 24, the figure was 41.6% unemployed.
So the message is: let people not be debarred from learning because they are on universal credit; and Kickstart is a good scheme—sort it out and let it continue. Be inventive about it: perhaps it could be linked to apprenticeships. The sky is the limit. We are talking about young people’s livelihoods and opportunities—so, Minister, go for it.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 62 from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and I seem to have added my speech to his as well, because I very much echo what he said. I was involved in delivering a rather similar previous scheme, the Future Jobs Fund, to young unemployed Londoners. Based on that, I entirely agree with the noble Lord that Kickstart has the potential to become a really valuable programme. I emphasise the word “potential” because I do not think it has got there yet, but it offers substantial benefits to the young participants it focuses on and to the employers who take them on.
For the participants—most, if not all, of whom are at risk of long-term unemployment—six months is long enough for them to become acclimatised to working life and to develop the employability skills they need for their Kickstart placement and for future jobs. The employers can fill short-term vacancies at a low cost, which might even lead to some Kickstarters being taken into permanent roles at the end of the placement, having proved their capability and worth.
Importantly, the scheme also recognises the need for many Kickstarters to receive extra support and training when they start by providing £1,500 for so-called wrap- around support, which is much needed for those who not only are new to the world of work but might often come from chaotic living circumstances. We used to have to send taxis to pick up some of ours to take them to their work, until they realised that they had to be up and dressed at a certain time in order to be there.
However, despite its excellent intentions, the scheme seems to be falling short of expectations, with only about two-fifths of available Kickstart jobs having been taken up by September, including in sectors heavily hit by the pandemic and now much in need of extra staff, such as hospitality, travel, retail and care. Many of the reasons for this disappointing performance, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, sound rather familiar to me, including delays, bureaucracy and complexity. It can take several weeks for a business, and indeed the specific jobs within that business, to be approved for Kickstart; only then does the rather unreliable process of identifying and recruiting candidates start. These must be referred by jobcentre work coaches, and it might take considerable time for them to come up with enough suitable candidates for employers to interview and recruit.
Again echoing the noble Lord, small businesses in particular, many of which could and do offer highly worthwhile Kickstart places, are often put off by the time, effort and bureaucracy involved. They are no longer required to use gateway providers to get involved in the scheme, but many of them continue to do so to reduce the burden on themselves of the complex administration involved.
It also seems that Kickstart is not as well integrated with other skills programmes, such as the apprenticeships programme, as it could be. Ideally, every successfully completed Kickstart placement should lead to clear pathways to further development whenever possible, including one or more apprenticeship options.
It would indeed be a pity if, just as some of these issues with Kickstart are beginning to be ironed out, and with numbers and outcomes picking up momentum, the scheme came to an end on 31 December—what I thought was its current cut-off date of, but it sounds as if that has possibly been extended. The noble Lord’s amendment would require the Secretary of State to review the scheme’s operation and consider whether its lifetime should be extended, with or without further modifications; for example, relating to eligibility and the link to universal credit. Surely such a review should be seen as an absolute necessity to learn the lessons of the scheme so far and consider whether or how it could be built on or improved.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I rise with great pleasure to offer my support to Amendment 45 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, to which I have attached my name. It is, in a way, the reverse of Amendment 63: Amendment 45 says that adult learners should be able to get universal credit; Amendment 63 says that you should be able to become an adult learner while on universal credit. I am not sure which is the best way round, but I am not sure that it matters or will make much practical difference. Both the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, have clearly outlined the Kafkaesque complications that arise, and the unreasonable unintended traps people can find themselves in when they seek to study and find that the system simply does not allow them to.
I want to come from the other point of view very briefly and think about the overall good of the country. As I was contemplating these amendments, I thought back to hearing an economist talk about how, slightly counterintuitively, having a very short period between people becoming unemployed and finding a new job might not be the best thing, because if you have very low levels of unemployment benefits, as we do in the UK compared to many continental countries, people have to grab the first job they can secure—the first job that comes along. That means that you get an awful lot of square pegs in round holes. You get people who are not best for the job. They are not good for the employer and it is not good for them to be in a job for which they are not suited. If you have a longer period, people are able to assess and improve their skills and then find the right job, stay in that job for longer, advance in it and make real progress. We need to move towards a system that allows that to happen. When we talk about the economy, we talk about how we can solve our productivity problem. These are the base issues that we need to think about. Amendments 45 and 63 address them.
On Amendment 62, I want to offer the Green group’s support. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said nearly everything I was going to say, so I am not going repeat it. It was reminiscent of some of the reports you hear of the green homes grant and employers struggling to get paid. If we are talking about small employers, their cash flow can become a serious problem.
I note one figure that says that the north-east—the region with the highest unemployment in England—is the area with the lowest rate of take up of Kickstart. That is obviously a concern, and it should be looked at in a review, particularly in the light of the Government’s levelling-up agenda.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and all noble Lords who have spoken. In Committee, we had a good debate about universal credit and the various ways in which people are discouraged by the rules from getting the skills that they need. I think the issue is that government policy is not properly joined up. We need to have skills, employment and social security policy fully aligned to make this work.
What is going wrong? I suspect that, at heart, it is an issue of departmental responsibility. DfE basically wants people to get training to increase their skills so that they can engage in productive, sustainable work, but most people cannot afford to train or retrain without financial support. I suspect DfE would quite like them to be able to get benefits while they do it. However, DWP does not think its benefit system is there to support students in education and training; it thinks that is DfE’s job. In general, that works. Most students are supported by loans or grants, and a lot of people on universal credit want to get back into work and universal credit supports them while they do. But there are clearly people who may struggle to get back into sustainable jobs unless they increase, update or change their skills, and it is likely that there will be more of them in the future than there have been in the past.
In Committee, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and other noble Lords identified a number of barriers that get in the way of people wanting to do that. The Minister’s defence was basically twofold. She said, first, that DfE and DWP are working together on it and there is a trial under way for six months. She said that there is flexibility on conditionality, so that if you get universal credit and are part of the intensive work search scheme, you can study full time for 12 weeks, with boot camps and so on—the lot.
Secondly, she said that the benefit system may not be there for education and training for most people, but some people can get help. The Minister mentioned Regulation 14 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013. I went back and refreshed my memory of that regulation. It lists the exceptions, but the only exceptions are young people doing A-levels or the like who are not living with their parents, those who have kids and some disabled people with limited capacity for work. As I read on—the Minister can correct me—I thought that all Regulation 14 does is remove the blanket requirement that you must not be in education to qualify for universal credit at all. I do not think it stops people—even in those groups—having conditionality requirements placed on them in the way that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham described, which might make it impossible for them to take on a training course. Can the Minister clarify that?
It is really quite hard to work out who can get universal credit for training, at what level and where. To that end, can the Minister tell the House whether any or all people wishing to carry out study necessary for a course leading to the lifetime skills guarantee could get universal credit while they do it, as Amendment 63 suggests? If not, how should they support themselves while they do that?
Amendment 45 from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham makes a broader point about the needs of people who are unemployed and need training to get secure, sustainable employment. There is a balance here. The benefits system is not there to fund everybody wanting to retrain, but this amendment could pick up some of those people who are long-term unemployed or may have gone from one low-paid, insecure job to another, perhaps with periods on benefits in between. Might not they and the taxpayer be better served if they could afford to get trained for a secure and sustainable career? How could they be helped under the Government’s current approach?
I turn now to Amendment 62, which would require the Government to reconsider how long Kickstart runs and who is eligible for it. When we debated Kickstart in Committee on 19 July, the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, said:
“I cannot say that we will extend the duration of the Kickstart scheme or change its eligibility”.—[Official Report, 19/7/21; col. 103.]
A summer is a long time in politics because, as we have heard, a Written Ministerial Statement has now announced that Kickstart is running until the end of March. Who knows? By the time we get to Third Reading, maybe eligibility will have been reviewed as well—you never know.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the decision to extend the timescale was driven less by the rhetorical powers of noble Lords—marvellous though those are—and rather more by the fact that Kickstart is nowhere near hitting its targets. There were meant to be 250,000 placements by December. The latest figures I could find were in a Written Answer to my noble friend Lady Wilcox on 21 September in which the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, said that 69,000 young people had started Kickstart jobs as of 8 September. Does the Minister have more recent figures? That Answer also said that more than 281,000 jobs had been approved. If 281,000 jobs have been approved and only 69,000 people have started work, that is worse.
The regional position, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is really significant. I have raised the positions of the north and north-east before—not just because I live in Durham—but that Written Answer said that in the whole north-east of England only 3,170 people had started Kickstart jobs. Something is going wrong.
Can the Minister tell the House what the Government are doing to rescue this scheme? In particular, why is there this lag between jobs created and jobs filled? What is happening to get young people into these jobs? Do the Government expect to meet their 250,000 target by December, March or another date? I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate, the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Aberdare, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady Sherlock, for taking part.
Amendments 45 and 63 from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, broadly seek to enable individuals studying at level 3 and below to claim universal credit—an issue debated at some length in Committee. It is of course vital that students feel supported and have the confidence to come forward to upskill. Where we differ is in how that support is financed.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, talked about, there should be a joined-up approach between the Department for Education and the DWP. Important work is already under way on this subject, as she mentioned. Officials at the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions are working closely together to help address and mitigate the barriers to unemployed adults taking advantage of our skills offer.
There is a new DWP train and progress initiative aimed at increasing access to training opportunities for claimants. As part of this, in April 2021 a temporary six-month extension to the flexibility offered by universal credit conditionality was announced. As a result of this change, adults who claim universal credit and are part of the intensive work search programme can now undertake work-related full-time training for up to 12 weeks, or up to 16 weeks as part of a skills boot camp in England. This builds on the eight weeks for which claimants were already able to train full-time. I am pleased to inform your Lordships that this flexibility has now been extended to run through to the end of April 2022. These measures are truly helping to ensure that UC claimants are supported to access training and skills that will improve their ability to gain good, stable and well-paid jobs.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
I am very grateful to the Minister for her responses and for clarifying the situation. I am very concerned in particular about the gap that exists between now and 2025; come 2025, I think most of her answers would satisfy me, but that is four years away. So, slightly reluctantly, I would like to test the opinion of the House.
“Lifelong learning: review
(1) Within one year of the commencement of either section 14 or section 15, and each year thereafter, the Secretary of State must prepare and publish a report on the impact on the overall levels of skills in England and Wales of the rules regarding eligibility for funding for those undertaking further or higher education courses.(2) The report under subsection (1) must in particular examine the impact of restricting funding for those who wish to pursue a qualification at a level equivalent to or lower than one they already hold.(3) The report under subsection (1) must be laid before both Houses of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on the impact on re-skilling of funding restrictions on those who wish to pursue a qualification at a level equivalent to or lower than one they already hold.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I would like to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Addington
“(2A) Regulations under subsection (1) must include provision to require ITT(FE) courses to include special educational needs awareness training relevant to the students of ITT(FE) courses within an institution.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures there is sufficient SEN training for teachers of students of ITT(FE) courses
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I beg leave to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Lucas
“(e) the mental health and wellbeing of persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution is supported.”Member’s explanatory statement
To ensure that the Office for Students has a sufficiently powerful lever to enforce its policies on student support, mental health and suicide.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, the origins of this, for me, lie 10 years ago, when one of my work colleagues was rung by a friend of her son to say, “I think you need to come down to Cardiff.” That was the first she knew about her son being suicidal. Fortunately, it all ended well, but there are many other such stories that have ended badly.
The universal point in this is that the universities really have not looked after their students well enough. We get platitudes from them, every now and again, about what they will do, but they do not even follow the basic medical procedures of who to contact if they are really worried about someone. Nor do they, in their substance, take care of students in the way that we as parents might hope.
I tried, a few years ago, to see if universities would switch a bit in the American direction and pay close attention to what teachers said about students in their applications. The answer came back: “No, we cannot do that; we never get to know our students well enough in the three years they are with us to judge whether what a teacher said was right, so there is no way that we can build up a system of reputation and ability to judge teachers’ comments in the way that American universities do.” This is changing, and it is changing because of the Office for Students.
The Office for Students has produced an extremely good paper on what it expects universities to do on mental health. It is getting a real grip on access, saying that it is not only about how many disadvantaged people you let in but how you look after them while they are there. The fact that so many of them are dropping out is down to the universities. Universities must not blame what came before or do as the Government did last week and try to blame the examinations that students took before: these are your students; you have admitted them, so you look after them—we expect you to make a success of them. That is an enormously important change, and I really want the Office for Students to be in a position where it can enforce the ambitions that I just set out and make sure that universities come up to the mark.
Reading the underlying legislation, I was not at all sure that that was the case, which is why I put down these amendments. I am assured, in correspondence with my noble friend the Minister, that this is the case and the OfS has the powers it needs. I very much hope that that is what I will hear from the lips of my noble friend, when she comes to reply on this amendment.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, obviously the House is deeply sympathetic to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.
I want to extend those points. The biggest cause of mental health stress for students over the past 18 months has of course been Covid. Over the past two years, a substantial part of their courses has not been physical; indeed, in many cases, they have had almost no contact at all with fellow students. Obviously, in a public health emergency, that situation was substantially unavoidable, although some universities dealt with the situation better than others. It is clear that there was a difficulty in students being able to meet in large groups and have physical contact. However, that is no longer the case.
I know—because they have been taken up with me personally, as I am sure is true of other noble Lords—that there are concerns about continuing restrictions on students meeting and face-to-face tuition. To me, such restrictions seem totally without justification now; if I may put it somewhat undiplomatically, they may be suited more to the convenience of university administrators and lecturers than to the well-being of their students. I know that the Government have been robust in their statements about the importance of returning to the full educational experience in universities, but this is clearly an ongoing issue. I think that the House would welcome a robust assurance from the Minister that universities should now be expected to return to offering the full educational experience; the Office for Students should also be making this clear to them.
On a related point, I find it extraordinary, given the serious diminution in teaching and learning that many students have experienced over the past two years, that universities have still charged them full fees. I was the guy who persuaded Tony Blair to introduce fees in the first place, so I have nothing against fees—we need properly funded universities and properly paid academics —but it is supposed to be something for something. The reason for paying the fees is to get the full educational experience. Indeed, part of the justification for the fees was that they would enhance the educational experience; we wanted universities to be able to staff up properly and offer proper facilities.
The other half of that contract applies too. Where students have not been able to gain the full experience and the quality of teaching and learning to which they are entitled in return for their fees of more than £9,000, the universities should have discounted those fees. I am surprised that the Government did not apply more pressure to them to do so; I assume the reason is that the Treasury was worried that, if the Government applied pressure on universities to discount fees, the universities would come and ask for the money. I have a feeling that what happened here was a kind of Faustian pact: the Government did not pressure universities because they did not want the consequential action of the universities asking them for money. But actually, it would be perfectly possible for universities, like almost every other enterprise in the country, to realign their outlays with their income and themselves take on the consequences of a reduction in fees. The idea that state funding is the only alternative to fee funding is wrong.
If I may say so—I have said this a lot over the past two years, but it still needs to be said—vice-chancellors are, for the most part, grossly overpaid. One of the less satisfactory outcomes of the fee reform, in particular the trebling of fees to £9,000, was vice-chancellors doubling their own incomes and creating a whole swathe of bureaucrats in universities. I went through the figures and was amazed at the swathes of bureaucrats in universities—all paid more than £100,000, and many of them paid more than £150,000—while none of the junior lecturers or PHD students gets any of this largesse. Apart from a few offers of short-term reductions in salaries, I have not noticed any university vice-chancellors taking this opportunity to apply proper scrutiny to the size and salaries of their senior management teams or, dare I say it, leading by example and cutting their own pay as part of a deal to cut student fees in response to the terrible experience that so many students have had to go through during the pandemic.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I added my name to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which is self-explanatory, in a way. The Office for Students must have the powers to enforce its policies on student support and mental health and well-being. We must do our best to ensure that no student feels that suicide is the only way ahead. I have three student grandsons at different universities, and last year bore no relation whatever to the undergraduate experience of the past. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has said, the recent Covid measures meant that many students had a lonely year, with obvious welfare implications. Their welfare is surely of the utmost importance and should be one of the factors that is taken into account for the purpose of assessing universities.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for introducing his Amendment 47. I will comment on that before moving on to my Amendment 48 in this group. Even before the pandemic hit, health and welfare support systems in higher education were experiencing unprecedented demand. More students need more help with problems of increasing complexity. A DfE report in June, Student Mental Health and Wellbeing, found that almost all higher education institutions have been devoting more resources to supporting student mental health over the past five years but, in many cases, were still struggling to meet demand. The pandemic has exacerbated that considerably, as a number of noble Lords have mentioned, so I will not rehearse that.
It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and others on what the OfS can and does do about this. From memory, its new criteria on quality and standards relate to academic support only, rather than to specific non-academic support, but the Minister can explain how the OfS can otherwise work with universities on this.
It has offered some money, of course. It offered £6 million for innovative mental health support projects, although, when I looked at the small print, I found that half of that had to come from the providers doing the work. There are bits of money from outside. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, said recently in a Written Answer:
“As part of the mental health recovery action plan, the government has provided an additional £13 million to ensure that young adults aged 18 to 25, including university students, are supported with tailored mental health services.”
That is really good. I thought, “Hang on; is that all 18 to 25 year-olds?” At a rough guess that gives about £2.50 each, which may not go very far. I wonder whether the Minister thinks enough resources are going to support services in higher education. If not, do they need more external support or should this be coming from fee income?
The second issue is that, realistically, pastoral care in higher education institutions can only ever be a first line of support. It is important that the NHS is there for students who need more than that kind of help. I spoke this week to a senior person from an institution that takes the mental health of students very seriously, and she spoke of being left trying to support suicidal and seriously mentally ill students herself, because there were no mental health beds available and the local community team had little to offer, because it was so thinly stretched. I have also been told about a lack of inpatient beds or even outpatient support for students with severe eating disorders, leaving them with nowhere to go for help. I ask the Minister whether the DfE is working with the Department of Health to ensure that their services dovetail, so that there is adequate support in local NHS services for those students who need more help than university pastoral care can offer.
Amendment 48 in my name seeks to ensure that the way the Office for Students regulates higher education does not jeopardise the goal of widening participation. Noble Lords know that the OfS applies a series of conditions for a higher education institution to be registered, labelled A to E. The most hotly debated are the B conditions, which focus on quality and standards, and especially B3, which states:
“The provider must deliver successful outcomes for all of its students,”
which I always thought was rather ambitious, but they are tested against numerical measures.
The OfS has run two consultations in the last year and is about to start a third, which is specifically on the new metrics for student outcomes. They will presumably, although not necessarily, relate to the current metrics, which are about student continuation, completion rates of degrees and graduate careers. These metrics are controversial, because many in the sector worry that the Government are abandoning contextualisation in setting standards for higher education institutions. It is funny to push back on the noble Lord, Lord Lucas: to declare that everyone should be treated the same does not allow for there clearly being differences in student outcomes between groups that reflect prior experiences, advantages or current circumstances, rather than academic ability.
To take one simple example, we know from the official figures that mature students have lower completion rates. There can be perfectly good reasons for that, which may not relate to things in the gift of the institution at which they study. We would not want institutions that recruit more mature students to find that their outcome measure was not as good and then be deterred from doing so. That would be ironic for a Bill that is supposed to promote learning in later life and part-time study.
I raised this issue in Committee but I am sorry to say that the Minister said very little and really, I got no comment at all on it. The only way I could think of raising it was to table a specific amendment to say that the OfS could not measure outcomes in a way that could jeopardise widening participation for students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.
Clause 17(7) says that the OfS does not have to publish different minimum levels in relation to different outcomes by, for example, student characteristics, type of institution or course. That does not mean that the OfS has to apply flat standards across the board, but it clears the ground for it to do so at will. Many people in the sector worry that that might penalise institutions that serve disadvantaged groups or areas, or even deter outreach activity. Section 2 of HERA means that the OfS has to apply some proportionality, and therefore contextualisation, to any assessment, but can the Minister tell the House how it can do that fairly without any benchmarking? Because I got nothing in Committee, I am really hopeful that the Minister can at least give the House some assurance that the OfS should judge quality with regard to the impact on disadvantaged and underrepresented students. I hope she can reassure us on that front.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to our measures on the Office for Students’ quality assessment. Section 23 of the Higher Education Research Act 2017, which relates to the assessment of quality of higher education provided by registered providers, currently places no restrictions or stipulations on how the OfS might make an assessment of quality or standards.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, pointed out, Clause 17 of the Bill provides much-needed clarity. It puts beyond doubt the ability of the OfS to determine minimum expected levels of student outcomes. These levels would be taken into account alongside many other factors, such as the context in which a provider operates, when the OfS makes its overall and well-rounded assessment of quality.
Turning to Amendment 48 in the name of the noble Baroness, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss widening participation and access in higher education. Equality of opportunity for young people across the country is one of the Government’s highest priorities. Access to higher education should be based on a student’s attainment and their ability to succeed, rather than their background.
The latest figures show that we have made real progress on access to higher education, with a record 24% of disadvantaged 18 year-olds entering higher education in 2020. Disadvantaged 18-year-olds were proportionally 80% more likely to enter higher education as a full-time undergraduate in 2020 than in 2009.
I reassure the noble Baroness and the House that when the OfS exercises any of its functions, it already must have regard to the need to promote equality of opportunity in connection with access to and participation in higher education. That duty applies when the OfS is looking at how disadvantaged students and traditionally underrepresented groups are supported and what they go on to achieve. It includes access, successful participation, outcomes and progression to employment or further study.
As I have set out, the minimum expected levels of student outcomes will form only part of the overall context as the OfS makes rounded judgments, as it is required to do under its regulatory framework. The OfS has a public law obligation to consider wider factors which could include, among other things, the characteristics of a provider’s students where appropriate. In reaching any final judgment, the OfS will balance contextual factors, proportionality and the need to protect students from low quality, including weak outcomes. Section 2 of the Higher Education and Research Act is clear that:
“In performing its functions, the OfS must have regard to … the need to promote equality of opportunity in connection with access to and participation in higher education provided by English higher education providers”.
The OfS is also subject to the public sector equality duty. Both will apply to this measure.
Amendment 47 is in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. Sadly, I echo his reflections on his conversations in Cardiff many years ago. I talked very recently to school leaders who also shared with me stories about students of theirs who have attempted suicide or, sadly, taken their own lives over the last 18 months. I thank my noble friend for raising this important issue both in Committee and again today. His amendment seeks to add the mental health and well-being support given to students to the outcomes against which the quality of higher education may be assessed by the Office for Students. I reassure him that the Office for Students already has a strong presence in the student mental health agenda, with significant levers in this area.
The OfS provides funding, support and guidance to higher education providers to ensure they provide appropriate mental health support for their students. As it stands, the OfS believes that further regulation would not be beneficial in a sector with a diverse range of suppliers and an equally diverse range of students. However, I reassure my noble friend that existing OfS powers under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 are already flexible enough to allow it to impose a condition of registration relating to mental health, if it felt it necessary to do so.
We continue to work closely with the higher education sector to promote effective practice. The sector as a whole has established the overarching Stepchange: Mentally Healthy Universities framework, which is now complemented by the recently launched University Mental Health Charter programme and award scheme. The Government endorse this approach, including setting a clear ambition for all higher education providers to join the programme within the next five years. We also recognise the devastating effect that suicide has. A range of crucial prevention work and the promotion of effective practice are taking place across the higher education sector. We expect all universities to engage actively in this and deal sensitively if a tragedy occurs.
The Minister of State for Higher and Further Education, Minister Donelan, chaired a new round table on suicide prevention with Universities UK in June. The round table highlighted the importance of adopting and embedding the Suicide-Safer Universities framework and promoted good practice in the sector, helping to make sure that students are well supported during their time at university. The outputs include more regular analysis of student suicide data by ONS, including risk factors, which is central to informing preventive action, and the OfS publication of a new topic briefing, setting out approaches that universities and colleges can take to help prevent suicide among students.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked where this sits as a priority for government. She will not be surprised to hear that it is a key priority. I mentioned the round table that my right honourable friend the Minister held recently, but she has also written to vice-chancellors on numerous occasions, outlining that student welfare should remain an absolute priority, and has also convened groups of representatives from higher education and the health sectors and brought them together to address the issues that students are facing during the pandemic.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, when the Minister looks at the record, she may find that she has not been able to answer some of my questions, particularly around mental health. Will she write to me?
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful for my noble friend’s answer, which included just the words that I was after—that the Government are sure that the Office for Students has the powers that it needs to make progress in this area. I am very happy to leave it at that, given the record of the Office for Students to date.
I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the determination that disadvantaged students should not be disadvantaged further by the systems that we put in place. I think that is entirely possible. I hope that we will see from the OfS a system of better admissions, so that universities put some real effort into understanding how best to detect and attract those disadvantaged students who will do well at university; that this is a collaborative effort, a proper national research effort to solve this national problem; and that they will similarly collaborate on how best to look after those students once they reach university. They should expect them to need additional support because, after all, they are disadvantaged. In both those areas, I feel that the Office for Students is determined to see progress. I am confident that with that determination over the next few years we will see it.
I also hope to see some real diversity of thought as well as intake in our universities. I will know that we have achieved it when an Oxford college asks the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to be its next master.
Baroness Barran
“(c) confer functions (including functions involving the exercise of a discretion) on the Secretary of State or any other person.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment expressly allows the inclusion, in regulations made under Clause 18(1) of the Bill (regulations relating to the list of relevant providers), of provision which confers functions on a person.
Lord Clarke of Nottingham
“Provision of opportunities for education and skills development
(1) Any person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to Level 3 supplied by an approved provider of further or technical education, if he or she has not already studied at that level.(2) Any approved provider must receive automatic in-year funding for any student covered by subsection (1), and supported by the Adult Education Budget, at a tariff rate set by the Secretary of State.(3) Any employer receiving apprenticeship funding must spend at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at Levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25.”
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
My Lords, this amendment was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Layard, and myself. We discussed it in Committee, without much response from the Government. I travel more optimistically today and hope that we will get a more favourable reception. We probably should, because it is entirely consistent with the Government’s stated aims on skills and the need for skills development in this country, and with the admirable spirit of this Bill, which I broadly welcome. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said rather forcefully on more than one occasion in Committee and on Report, the Bill is very sound in principle, trying to develop our training and skills system in this country, but a little thin on substance in places. This amendment seeks to add a little more specific substance.
The first two subsections of the proposed new clause hang together and are connected. Proposed new subsection (1) speaks for itself, if one reads it. It deals with those people who have not managed to attain skills up to level 2 or 3, which are quite essential in today’s world and will be for the future, and entitles them to free education of the kind they are entitled to up to the age of 18, as far as school education is concerned, if they, at any stage in their life and for whatever reason, turn to try that level of skill. People do not always take the opportunities available to them in their teens and early years. This subsection would enable people to turn to free education. It takes a step further, and for this particular case is more suitable. I have been listening to all the discussions we have had about the Government’s loan schemes and so on, which I welcome. There is no need to read out the subsection’s terms; noble Lords can read it for themselves. It spells out this entitlement to free education.
Such an entitlement is quite useless if, where you live, there is nobody in a position to provide such courses. That is where proposed new subsection (2) comes in. Although this is a modest amendment, it addresses the rather bigger problem of how we fund further education in this country. From listening to debates throughout the Bill, I see that there is nothing new in the world; we have been debating all this for 50 years. I can well remember that when I was Secretary of State we just acknowledged that further education had for too long been treated as the Cinderella of the education system. There was the great gap left by the failure of the 1944 Act to develop technical colleges and all the rest of it. I am not sure, when we look back on our efforts, that Governments of both parties of the last few decades have made anything like adequate progress.
One of the problems is the way that further education is funded. Proposed new subsection (2) deals with the question of how one would fund the entitlement to free education that proposed new subsection (1) proposes. There is a huge difference between the way courses are funded at schools—at the lower level—at universities and in further education. Schools are paid open-endedly about £5,000, if it is a sixth former, for every student they manage to retain. That is why it has been said several times in the debate that schools sometimes unhelpfully persuade people to stay in the sixth form because it is worth £5,000 a year for the school budget, when from a pupil’s point of view they might very advantageously move to a more suitable course. If you are a university, for every student you manage to recruit for a degree course, of whatever quality you have laid on, £9,500 comes automatically, student by student.
Further education colleges are still subject to cash-limited budgets. Those budgets, like most public expenditure, have been particularly fiercely curtailed in recent years, for necessary reasons in large part. The proposed new subsection makes a straightforward suggestion: if you accept proposed new subsection (1), that you are giving a right to free education to the people whom I have described, then you actually have to provide the funding. It says that the Secretary of State, out of the adult education budget, at a tariff to be set by the Secretary of State, will provide the funding to colleges to provide the courses. It hangs together very neatly.
I cannot think of any policy reason or reason of principle for opposing these two modest suggestions. My hope, were we to get the second in place, is that sooner or later one would face up to the big prospect, which I hope the Chancellor is contemplating in his current public spending round, of moving further education colleges to the open-ended funding that will be necessary to let them play the major part they are going to have to play in the reskilling of our population, providing the skills for our economy in future years.
The third part, which is obviously related to the subject but moves on slightly, is on apprenticeships and the working of the apprenticeship levy. It makes the proposal that, following the introduction of the levy and the intention of injecting powerful financial incentives to get our employers back into providing the apprenticeships, opportunities and training that our workforce requires in future, two-thirds of the levy-funded apprenticeships should be for those between 16 and 25.
This is a marked change from what has actually happened since the apprenticeship levy was introduced, which I do not think anyone foresaw. I am sure that, when the policy was first brought in, the Ministers involved and the general public envisaged that we would see a steady growth of good-quality apprenticeships —because very valuable conditions were put in, such as having off-work training and not just calling everything at work “training”, and so on—that young people would, steadily, have an attractive alternative if the academic education route did not suit them and that we would develop, through apprenticeships, people skilled in the new skills of tomorrow’s economies, which our young people in particular will require if they are to have a satisfactory work career thereafter.
That did not happen because the large companies were, I am afraid—not too surprisingly—anxious to see how they could recover levy money and reduce the impact of what was otherwise a new tax by ascribing to the levy most of the training that they already did for their existing workforce of all ages. It did not have the effect that we all hoped—which would advantage the company as well—of making people contemplate taking on and providing new training opportunities for young people coming out of schools, colleges and universities in order for them to get into the beginnings of their careers.
I know that the Government have got rid of the worst excesses. People without any kind of training, at every level of large companies and in the public sector, including the Civil Service, in order to improve the figures were being described as apprentices. Most of them did not know that they were apprentices but, for the purposes of recovering the levy, quite high-ranking managers were described as such. As I said, the Government have got rid of the worst abuses. At one point, it was possible for a high-flying senior manager to go on a business management degree course at a university and the apprenticeship levy would be recovered against the cost incurred.
Therefore, our amendment seeks to take the policy back to what it was expected to produce when it was first introduced and certainly to what the general public and both Houses of Parliament thought we were talking about when we first introduced the apprenticeship levy. It depends on all kinds of other things, such as explaining it to the public, improving the status of apprenticeships alongside alternative academic and technical routes and so on. But it was mainly an opportunity for the under-25s.
I quite accept that there are older people who can benefit from training or retraining. Indeed, people will have to change their jobs far more frequently in tomorrow’s economy, and plenty of people will, at the age of about 50, find that their existing job is coming to an end, and retraining is important. Because I have seen the Minister’s note, I anticipate that her response, which will no doubt be as courteous as ever, will say, “Well, first, we cannot interfere with businesses; they must decide what training they want”. That rather overlooks the fact that they are doing it for financial reasons, just to minimise what they spend on training anyway. More importantly, she will say, “Training is required by people of all ages”. I have already conceded that, and that will include some people who are sent off on totally fresh training courses by their employers.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 60 on the lifetime guarantee tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, but I shall first say a few words about Amendment 50, which has been so eloquently introduced by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke. It was good to go down memory lane with NVQs and YTS; I remember them well. I am concerned about subsection (1) in the proposed new clause, which requires funding for an approved course
“if he or she has not already studied at that level.”
We have put quite a lot of effort into trying to get funding for people to study at levels equal to or lower than qualifications they already have, if that is going to enable them to get into a new job. To restrict this to people who do not have a level 3 qualification might well be problematic. But oh, how much I agree with him about apprenticeships. In my mind, an apprentice is somebody starting out in work, not a middle manager doing an MBA. Having something to try to ensure that apprenticeship levy funding goes to young people is essential if that system is to work properly.
On Amendment 60, it is important that the lifetime skills guarantee is on a statutory footing if it is to have any impact at all. Both these amendments refer to courses up to level 3. It is important that we do not overlook qualifications at levels 1 and 2, because often they are the gateway to learning for people who have been put off education at an early age, as I have said before. Level 1 learners can be people who are encouraged for the first time to find learning accessible, enjoyable and fulfilling, when at school academic learning and GCSEs had been nothing but off-putting and a source of failure. That is something we need to be sure to support. Once such people discover that a national qualification is within their grasp and their ability, they will often find the confidence to continue to upskill and to gain employment in areas that they previously assumed were unobtainable. If the Government are serious about levelling up, they must start at the lowest levels. Amendment 60 would be a definite boost to that agenda, and I hope the Minister will look on it favourably.
Lord Layard (Lab)
I support Amendment 50, which could transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of our young people. Given the time, I shall make just four points. The problem is much bigger than most people, maybe myself included, have realised. In 2019-20, the proportion of all 18 year-olds who were in no form of education or work-based training was 30%. That 30% of the 50% not going to university are getting no education beyond the age of 17. This is completely extraordinary and shocking. What is the reason? It is that there simply are not enough places for these people to study and acquire skills compared with people going down the academic route.
The lack of places is almost entirely due to the completely different way in which those places are funded. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said, when young people go down the academic route, the funding automatically follows the student year by year, but for the other 50% the budget is simply set by the Treasury. It is capped in total and college by college. The current funding for 2021-22, including recent additions, is still less than half what it was in nominal terms in 2010. This is extraordinary and shows the failure of the system that this sort of thing can happen. It is difficult to think of any case of greater discrimination in any other aspect of our public life. I cannot think of any more extreme class-based discrimination than in that area.
What is the remedy? It is clear that the only approach which is fair to other 50% and which will adequately address the problem is to fund the other 50% the same way as the privileged 50% who go down the academic route—to make the money automatically follow these students. The proposal is that every student up to level 3 exercising the lifetime skills guarantee and taking an approved course—not just anything—should be automatically funded according to a national tariff. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, explained, that is the essential part of the first half of this amendment.
The second half relates to apprenticeships. When I was very young, I worked for the Robbins committee. It established the principle that there should be enough places for anybody who qualified for a place and who wanted to exercise access to it. That has always applied to higher education, ever since the Robbins report. It has never applied to the other 50%; they just have not been thought of in that way at all. That really has to change.
As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said, we now have a severe lack of apprenticeships for young people. There is huge, well-documented excess demand but supply is falling. The system is completely unresponsive and far too much of the apprenticeship money is being diverted to the over-25s. I will give two reasons why I think that is wrong. First, what is the key duty of any system of education and training? The first key duty is of course to get everybody off to a proper start. Good initial training is the central feature of any just, efficient system.
There is an extra, economic fact about the use of resources which I think is very relevant. The Department for Education’s own figures show that the benefit-cost ratio is much higher—in fact, double—for apprenticeships for the under-25s compared with those for the over-25s. For the sake of justice and efficiency, we have to redirect this money to an important degree back to the under-25s.
I would have thought this was a central proposal for any levelling-up agenda. We have a problem which is a major cause, almost the main cause, of our low national productivity per head. It is also a major cause of the spread of low incomes among the lower part of the workforce. If we are looking for items for a levelling-up agenda, surely this should be near the top.
I hope that as many noble Lords as possible will support this amendment and that the Government will also support it. If the Government find that they cannot support this proposal, I worry about the whole future of the levelling-up agenda.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, I agree with every word of what my noble friend Lord Layard and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said. When I spoke in Committee, I gave the figures that show that the number of apprentices under the age of 25 is now lower than it was when the apprenticeship levy was introduced. Rarely has there been a policy which has failed so catastrophically to deliver its objective.
I do not want to repeat what my noble friend and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said; their points about the failure to create apprenticeships in the private sector were very well made. The point I want to address to the Minister and introduce to the debate relates to one of the other really significant failures in the creation of apprenticeships, namely the failure to create apprentices in the public sector. This has been another very long-running and serious failure.
The worst provider of apprentices in the country among large organisations is the Civil Service, which had no scheme of creating apprentices at all before 2015. I met the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, who was the head of the Civil Service then, and some of us worked very closely with him to get the Civil Service apprenticeship scheme going. There was quite a lot of foot-dragging and reluctance to do it. The Civil Service has a graduate fast stream and recruits tens of thousands of graduates each year across the different parts of the organisation, but had no apprenticeship scheme. An apprenticeship scheme was created and I checked before coming into the House where it had got to.
The other remarkable thing about it was the thing that persuaded the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, to go for it: it turned out that the department responsible for apprentices—it keeps changing its name; I think it was then called the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but it may have been something else—had, I think, three apprentices under the age of 21. The department of apprentices was one of the worst apprenticeship providers in the entire country. That was the department, with its Ministers, that was supposed to preach to the private sector about how it should create apprenticeships.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I fully support what the noble Lord, Lord Layard, described as the first half of Amendment 50, but I am rather less comfortable about the approach taken in the second half, requiring any employer receiving apprenticeship funding to spend at least two-thirds of it on people under 25 beginning apprenticeships at levels 2 and 3. That is an aim I entirely support, but I am not convinced that putting the onus wholly on employers to deliver it is the right way of going about it.
One of the concerns employers have regularly expressed about the current apprenticeship system is its lack of flexibility. This amendment would not only reduce the flexibility available to employers but impose extra requirements on them to manage their apprenticeship programmes and an extra level of bureaucracy resulting from the process of enforcing the requirements.
Employers already find it difficult to spend their levy funds, which is why so many apprenticeships go to reskilling and upskilling existing employees. The energy and utilities sector, which has a very good record of employing apprentices, has managed to spend on average only 54% of the levy funding available to it, so it is not as if there is not more money available. All that they do not spend just goes back to the Treasury.
I believe a better approach might be to introduce that extra flexibility into the apprenticeship levy system itself, to make it easier and more attractive for employers to offer more apprenticeships at these levels to younger people. This could be done through, for example, enabling part of an employer’s levy funds to be used for pre-apprenticeship training initiatives in schools to identify and prepare young people who might then be suitable candidates for apprenticeships. I am sure there are other ways of motivating employers to offer more apprenticeships of this type, rather than introducing additional rules that could lead to their providing fewer.
I support two and a half thirds of this amendment, but I am slightly uncertain about the mechanism that the noble Lords are implying to address the third one.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, I have not participated in any of the proceedings on this Bill, partly because I chair the Economic Affairs Committee and we are looking at central bank digital currencies at the moment. But I bumped into the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who pointed out to me that this amendment is entirely in line with the recommendations made by the committee in its report, Treating Students Fairly, which was published in June three years ago. I shall not repeat the arguments so eloquently put by my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke of Nottingham, with every word of which I agree, but it was set out clearly in that report, more than three years ago, that the apprenticeship levy was not working. Indeed, we found that larger employers who were running very effective apprenticeship schemes had simply abandoned it, treating the levy as a tax, and done their own thing.
My noble and learned friend spoke about the way in which all the financial incentives are to keep people in schools and send them on to universities, where they do courses which do not enable many of them to use the skills and achieve the kind of living standards which they aspire to. In short, we probably need more plumbers, electricians, specialists and engineers than we do people who are experts in media studies. I am not saying that media studies is not a serious subject—well, actually, I do think that it is not a serious subject, but that is probably going to get me a lot of abusive emails. I am disappointed that, as this matter was discussed in Committee and as there has been so much about it in the all-party unanimous report, the Government are still dragging their feet on the matter.
When we discuss future topics in our committee, one thing that is regularly suggested is that we look at productivity. We always reject it, on the grounds that it is such a broad subject and so difficult, but this matter is absolutely central to productivity and, even more importantly, offers a future to so many of our young people. So I hope that my noble friend will consider this amendment. I take the point about providing flexibility.
One thing that struck me—and I know that the Government have taken some action on this—was that one of the officials who gave evidence to us proudly announced that the apprenticeship scheme had been used to send her to business school. Of course, that is the antithesis of what the scheme should be. I am not up to date on what has happened since, but there were some 400 different types of rules for different organisations, and the whole thing had become utterly bureaucratic.
The noble Lord, Lord Layard, referred to the Robbins committee. Those of your Lordships who have not read the report should just read the introduction; it is written in the most beautiful prose. It sets out the objectives, from all those years ago, and this amendment is central to achieving them.
When we were looking at treating students fairly, one thing we got in evidence was a diagram showing all the initiatives that had been taken by various Governments for training, and all the changes in names and so on. It is an unbelievably complicated process—not just YTS; there are literally tens and tens of different initiatives. What we need, in the words of Her Majesty the Queen, is perhaps less talk and more doing in this area. This amendment is a very important step forward if the Government decide to accept it.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I had not come to speak in this debate but to listen. However, some things said by my noble friend Lord Forsyth provoke me to make a short intervention. I do so because I am the chairman—I was the founder—of the William Morris Craft Fellowship. Every year, we award craft fellowships to craftsmen working, for the most part, on historic buildings, including stonemasons, plumbers and bricklayers; people who have gone through a proper apprenticeship in the past and who we select because we think they have the potential to oversee a great project. Your Lordships all know the sort of thing to which I refer: a great parish church or cathedral, or a country house in the possession of the National Trust or privately owned. These places are at risk because of the very few people who are coming forward and getting a proper apprenticeship in this modern age.
My noble friend referred to the young woman and the business qualification that she claimed to be an apprenticeship. I have met people who have claimed to have apprenticeships in flower arranging. But I am talking about young men and women—and there is an increasing, though not overall great, number of women— who have spent four, five, six and sometimes seven years learning and mastering a craft. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on the Front Bench opposite, is a great devotee of Durham Cathedral, as I am of Lincoln and indeed all our great cathedrals. Their survival depends upon having men and women who are accomplished and able enough to master these crafts, which go back centuries. And they are in danger.
I am also a vice-president of the Heritage Crafts Association, which represents crafts men and women who very often work individually, at home, producing something, in the William Morris idiom, that is both useful and beautiful. We have produced only recently a red list of endangered crafts. I give you but one example: we are down to the last sporran maker. It might sound slightly amusing, but—
Lord Cormack (Con)
It is serious, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth knows better than most. Not only is it serious but it is outrageous that, to provide sporrans for a Scottish regiment, the Ministry of Defence has recently gone to Pakistan, whereas in Scotland they can still be made.
I will not go on; I hope I have made my point. Apprenticeships are desperately important, and they are not second best. A young man or woman cannot work with his or her hands unless they have a brain that functions—although, rather interestingly, many people with dyslexia are particularly good crafts men and women. We need them, and we must have proper apprenticeships that enable them to become accomplished.
I am very taken by the amendment moved by my old noble and learned friend Lord Clarke. We began in politics together, way back in 1964, fighting in adjacent constituencies. I think he has performed a service to the House by moving his amendment, so ably seconded by the noble Lord, Lord Layard. I very much hope that my noble friend who winds up will accept the thrust and logic of what has been said and give us a comforting reply.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I rise to agree with almost everything that has been said about the importance of apprenticeships. This is the right moment to be pressing for reform, as both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are emphasising the importance of skills in the post-Brexit economy and in levelling up, as the noble Lord, Lord Layard, indicated. However, there are some problems with this amendment as it stands—notably, the lack of clarity as to what it would cost, and exactly where the funding would be found for proposed new subsection (1).
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, the Queen’s Speech promised that legislation would support a lifetime skills guarantee to enable flexible access to high-quality education and training throughout people’s lives. It therefore beggars belief that there is no mention of this flagship policy in this skeleton Bill; indeed, the Bill is silent on the value of qualifications below level 3 altogether.
At present, 13 million adults in the UK currently do not have a level 2 qualification—that is equivalent to GCSE—and 9 million adults lack functional literacy and numeracy skills, leaving them vulnerable to job loss and making it harder for them to secure work. DfE data has shown that the return on investment for qualifications below level 2 is higher than for level 3. Furthermore, lower level qualifications offer many adult learners a key progression route. Without adequate support through the adult education budget for these lower level qualifications in future years, many students will not be ready for and able to progress to levels 4, 5, 6 and up to degree level, which this Bill—or indeed, in the absence of the LLE amendments, its successor—is intended to support.
Amendment 60 in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson would seek to rectify this by placing the LSG on a statutory footing. It is also intended to address concerns that, at present, the LSG does not offer support for subjects outside a narrow band of technical disciplines. Consultation and regular review of eligible courses are therefore key. Our amendment also addresses concerns that the LSG appears to omit reskilling and second level 3 qualifications by retaining the equivalent or lower qualification rule. I will not repeat earlier speeches on the need for ELQ reform, but I urge the Minister to reconsider including flexibility for subsequent level 3 courses in the LSG to unlock retraining for even more people in an area where there is a demand for skills.
I also support Amendment 50, in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, and my noble friend Lord Layard, which would ensure that the LSG and support for courses below level 3 are placed on a statutory footing. Amendment 50 also encompasses apprenticeships, which provide an alternative for able young people to the traditional academic route. It would ensure that two-thirds of the funding is spent on under 25s; this is key to ensure they are properly targeted.
Moreover, as noted by many noble Lords, the sharp decline in apprenticeships is deeply concerning, with 2020 seeing the lowest number of 16 and 17 year-olds starting an apprenticeship since the 1980s. We have seen 189,000 apprenticeship opportunities disappear since 2017, which is why Labour has called on the Government to use unspent funds from the apprenticeship levy to fund 85,000 new apprenticeships for 16 to 24 year-olds, creating opportunities for young people to rebuild from the ravages of the pandemic. More than £1 billion in apprenticeship levy funding paid by employers expired unused between May 2020 and February 2021 alone. It is absurd that businesses are allowing hundreds of millions of pounds of levy funds to expire, when so many young people are unable to access a high-quality apprenticeship. Vast sums of money going unspent is a sign of a system in need of fundamental reform to make it work for learners and business.
Skills and retraining must be a vital part of our economic recovery. I hope the Minister is persuaded of the merits of placing the LSG on a statutory footing, especially given it has cross-party and sector-wide support. After all, it reflects the Government’s policy to try to address the skills gap in this country and to enable individuals to develop skills relevant to today’s and tomorrow’s labour market, in their area. This is an opportunity for the Government to show that levelling up is more than just a slogan or an addition to the name of a ministry.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for their amendments, and all noble Lords who spoke in the debate. I concur with all noble Lords’ ambitions around lifelong learning. This is an important issue with which the Government agree; however, we do not believe it is necessary to specify such a requirement in the Bill.
In April, we launched the free courses for jobs offer as part of the lifetime skills guarantee. This gives all adults in England the opportunity to take their first level 3 qualification for free, regardless of their age. We have ensured that our funding arrangements will allow relevant providers to access further funding if there is higher-than-expected learner demand. Over 400 level 3 qualifications are available, which have been specifically identified for their strong wage outcomes and ability to address key skills needs. Adults in all regions of England have been enrolling since April.
The free courses for jobs offer builds on the pre-existing legal entitlement for 19 to 23 year-olds to access their first full level 2 and/or level 3 qualification—a point raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Wilcox of Newport and Lady Garden of Frognal—which the free courses for jobs offer complements. Through the adult education budget, full funding is also available, through legal entitlements, for adults aged 19 and over to access English and maths to improve their literacy and numeracy, and for adults with no or low skills to access fully funded digital skills qualifications, as we discussed in an earlier group of amendments.
The adult education budget also supports colleges and training organisations to work with adults at lower levels who want to re-engage with learning and/or their local labour market. This includes around 2,000 regulated qualifications and their components, and non-regulated learning, from entry level to level 2.
In areas where adult education is not devolved, the adult education budget can fully fund eligible learners studying up to level 2 where they are unemployed or earning below around £17,300 per year. In areas where the adult education budget has been devolved to mayoral combined authorities or the Greater London Authority, they are responsible for determining the provision to support outside of the legal entitlements.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, asked why the Government will not put the offer of free courses for jobs on a statutory footing. As she will be aware, this policy has been in delivery since April and is already benefiting adults aged 19 and above without a prior level 3 qualification in all regions of England. We do not believe that it is necessary to legislate in order to deliver this important investment in the nation’s skills.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I am most grateful to my noble friend. It is fantastic that she has listed all these initiatives, but it does not really explain why she is not prepared to put this in the Bill. She says that she does not believe that it is necessary. Why?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am sorry; I thought that I was clear in my remarks. We are already delivering the policy and therefore do not believe that it is necessary to have it in the Bill.
Baroness Barran (Con)
If my noble friend will allow me to finish, I will come on to talk about some of the wider issues—particularly in relation to funding, on which I know he is a great expert—further on in my comments.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I do not wish to press too hard on this, but Governments are here today, gone tomorrow, and Ministers change. By putting this amendment in the Bill, it is clear to everyone what the future is; otherwise, we are relying on administrative decisions, which can change.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend is quite within his rights to press me and the Government as hard as he sees fit, but I have set out the Government’s position as best as I can at this stage.
Turning to the other aspects of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, I agree that the list of qualifications—
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
I am sorry—I know that the point has been made—but I find this an extraordinary approach to legislation. Everything that the Minister has said so far has given examples of things that the Government are doing that are compatible with the amendments that we are discussing. She has not raised a single objection in principle to either of the amendments, but she has been given a brief saying that it is not necessary to legislate. What harm is done by legislation, given that so many Governments in the past have, in the end, fallen rather short of their agreements in principle?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I think that the Government’s priority is to see this measure working in practice. Many of your Lordships have far greater experience than I do of how attempts have been made to reform this area, including through legislation, which have not delivered the outcomes that noble Lords across the House violently agree we want to see. So, our focus—
Lord Cormack (Con)
I apologise. We are all on the same side here. I understand my noble friend’s powers personally and understand that she has a big document with “resist” written on it, but why can she not talk to her ministerial colleagues and say, “We’ll seek to come forward at Third Reading with something that reflects the concerns expressed by my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke, my noble friend Lord Forsyth and others”?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I can assure my noble friend absolutely that I am in regular and detailed dialogue with my ministerial colleagues. I will certainly share your Lordships’ concerns with them but, if I may, I would like to progress in responding to these amendments.
Turning to the other aspects of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, I agree that the list of qualifications in the free courses for jobs offer should be updated regularly and reflect labour market need. That is why we keep the list under review and accept suggestions for additional qualifications twice a year from mayoral combined authorities, the Greater London Authority and qualification-awarding organisations. For example, we added hospitality qualifications to the offer in July to ensure that it meets key needs in that sector.
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend kept thanking us all for introducing these amendments, which is very kind of her. I think we all thank her for the skill and courtesy with which she delivered her brief in attempting to reply. Faced as I am with a situation where, as far as I can see, her brief gives examples of things the Government are doing that are entirely compliant with our amendments but provides no reason in principle for opposing them, except that it is not convenient or wise, I would like to take the mood of the House and put my amendment to a vote.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment to Clause 1 at page 1, line 7.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment to Clause 1 at page 1, line 7.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Henig) (Lab)
I call the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to move Amendment 53.
Baroness Barran (Con)
Sorry, this group is for my noble friend Lady Chisholm.
Amendment 53
“CHAPTER A1CHEATING SERVICES PROVIDED FOR POST-16 STUDENTS AT ENGLISH INSTITUTIONSMeaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions
(1) This section applies for the purposes of this Chapter.(2) “Relevant service” means a service of completing all or part of an assignment on behalf of a student where the assignment completed in that way could not reasonably be considered to have been completed personally by the student. (3) References to completing all or part of an assignment on behalf of a student include references to providing material to the student in connection with the assignment where—(a) the student could use the material in completing the assignment or part, and(b) the material—(i) is prepared in connection with the assignment, or(ii) has not been published generally.(4) For this purpose—(a) where, in connection with an assignment, a student seeks the provision of a relevant service, any material provided as a result is to be regarded as provided in connection with the assignment;(b) material is published generally if it—(i) is available generally without payment, or(ii) is included in a publication that contains other educational or training material and is available generally (such as a text book or study guide).(5) A person who provides, or arranges the provision of, a relevant service does so “in commercial circumstances” if—(a) the person is acting in the course of business, or(b) in the case of a person who provides a relevant service, its provision was arranged by another person acting in the course of business,whether the person’s own business or that of the person’s employer.(6) “Student” means—(a) a person who is undertaking a relevant course at a post-16 institution or sixth form in England, or(b) any other person over compulsory school age who has been entered to take an examination relating to a regulated qualification at a place in England.(7) A “relevant assignment”, in relation to a student, is an assignment (which may have been chosen by the student) which the student is required to complete personally—(a) as part of the relevant course which the student is undertaking, or(b) in order to obtain the qualification to which the course leads or for which the student has been entered.(8) In relation to an assignment that is a relevant assignment—(a) “personally” includes with any assistance permitted as part of the requirement (whether or not the assignment, if completed with that assistance, would otherwise be considered to be completed personally), and(b) that assistance is “permitted assistance”.(9) Section (Interpretation of Chapter) sets out the meanings of other terms used in this Chapter (including in this section).”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause defines key terms for the purposes of the new Chapter (Cheating services provided for post-16 students at English institutions).
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
I think we have all been in this Chamber for too long today, my Lords, and the brains are not working. But I do not do the scheduling; if I did, we probably would not still be here.
Group 14 is on essay mills and 16 to 19 academies. I will speak to Amendments 53 to 57, in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. Contract cheating services have been a long-standing concern that your Lordships have rightly raised during the passage of the Bill. We have listened and I am pleased to bring these amendments to the House. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for his unstinting efforts to clamp down on essay mills, where unscrupulous online operators provide assignments and other pieces of work for students in commercial circumstances.
Essay mills threaten to undermine the reputation of our education system, devalue the hard work of those who succeed on their own merit, prevent students from learning themselves and risk students entering the workforce without the knowledge, skills or competence to practise. We have worked with the higher education sector to clamp down on essay mills and to support students who might be targeted by these services. The sector has made great strides to help students understand the gravity of cheating and tackle the problem of cheating services. But, despite this activity, cheating services remain prevalent, with the pandemic leading to a further increase in the number of sites targeting their services at students in England. Amazingly, over 1,000 websites are now listed on uktopwriters.com, a comparison site of essay mill companies.
Our legislation will make it a criminal offence in England and Wales to provide, arrange or advertise cheating services in commercial circumstances to students taking a qualification at a sixth form or post-16 institution in England or enrolled at a higher education provider in England. It will send a clear message that contract cheating services—selling essays to students—are not legal, acting as a strong deterrent to those operating these reprehensible services.
Government Amendment 58 provides the Secretary of State for Education with an order-making power to enable the designation of 16 to 19 academies as having a religious character. It also provides for the Secretary of State to make regulations about the procedures relating to the designation. In addition, it sets out the freedoms and protections relating to religious education, collective worship and governance that the designation provides. I first thank the noble Lord, Lord Touhig—my noble friend—for raising this important issue in Committee. Both the noble Lord and stakeholder organisations such as the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales have been very helpful in their collaboration with officials. I am glad that we have come to this solution.
This amendment will ensure that, when existing sixth-form colleges designated with a religious character convert to become academies, they retain their religious character and associated freedoms and protections. It will also enable new and existing 16 to 19 academies to be designated with a religious character in the future. The Government are committed to supporting existing sixth-form colleges to be able to convert to academy status. I am pleased that a significant proportion of sixth-form colleges have already taken this step and are making a stronger contribution to strengthening the academies sector. This amendment means that the barriers which have prevented sixth-form colleges with a religious character from converting to become academies will be removed.
Government amendments 74 and 75 in my name are tactical and consequential amendments which would expand the Long Title of the Bill. They are a consequence of the government amendments relating to careers information and provider access, the banning of cheating services and the clause relating to allowing 16 to 19 academies to be designated as having a religious character.
We look forward to more sixth-form colleges becoming academies and strengthening the sector with their expertise. We also look forward to the creation of the new 16 to 19 academies with a religious character in the future. I beg to move.
Lord Touhig (Lab)
My Lords, I take note of the point made by the Minister and will not detain the Chamber for long. I am sure that colleagues have been here much longer than I have today—I have been elsewhere. I congratulate the Minister on her appointment and pay tribute to her predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for her hard work on this Bill.
I will speak to government Amendment 58. My interest in the Bill arose because existing legislation prevents Catholic sixth-form colleges becoming 16 to 19 academies without losing their religious character. The colleges currently benefit from several protections set out in the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. These relate to issues such as governance, collective worship, religious education and many others, and they are vital to maintaining the Catholic ethos of these colleges.
Any sixth-form college can of course become a 16 to 19 academy. However, the definition of “school” in the Education Act 1996, as amended by the Education Act 2011, excludes 16 to 19 academies. This means that 16 to 19 academies are currently ineligible for the protections and freedoms needed to remain Catholic.
Catholic dioceses across England that oversee colleges have developed strategies to bring the Catholic community together by creating families of schools within multi-academy trusts. These strategies enable schools to work in partnership and share resources. Many other sixth-form colleges around the country have become academies and are benefiting from the advantages of academy status. The 14—yes, there are just 14—Catholic sixth-form colleges across England would like to gain this benefit.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I rise to speak on the issue of essay mills and contract cheating. I thank the Minister for tabling this amendment. There have been four Private Members’ Bills, three of them from me. The first time, I drew number 2, and then there was then a general election. I then drew number 50, which never got debated, and then I drew number 3—and we have the Private Member’s Bill up and running. I thank Chris Skidmore for putting one in the Commons as well.
More than 45 vice-chancellors and heads of UK higher education organisations wrote to the Secretary of State in 2018. The support and briefings of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education have been fantastic. I also pay tribute to two professors who started this whole thing off before I got involved: Professor Newton and Professor Draper at Swansea University.
When I looked at a particular independent college in Greenwich and saw the effects of contract cheating and essay mills, I realised that this was a very serious problem that we faced not just in further education but in higher education and, increasingly, in schools as well, although this amendment does not deal with that. Some 15% of our students admit to using contract cheating services. Oxbridge Essays claims that it has produced, for cheating, 70,000 essays. This is not just about students being drawn into this situation—many of them are worried about their well-being, their mental state et cetera—it is also about the academic credibility of our higher education system. If we allowed this cancer to grow, it will affect our universities and colleges.
I pay tribute to the Minister’s legal team, which has nailed this properly. I showed the amendment to a number of people, and, as you can imagine, I got some quite important replies. They said that the proposed strict liability offence—whereby there is no need to prove intent—is really important because it means that essay mills will not be able to rely on disclaimers, although they do have a due diligence defence. Getting strict liability offences through Parliament is extremely rare, but it is absolutely critical to this offence having any impact.
I would also like in passing to congratulate the Minister’s press department or PR department. The Minister very kindly emailed me her intended amendment and it said, “Strictly embargoed for four days”. I thought after the third day I would tip off the Times Higher Education Supplement or FE Weekly so I might get a little bit of credit, and they said “Oh, we got it four days ago”. The Government obviously have an eye on publicity as well.
I thank the Government for this amendment. Students, vice-chancellors and universities up and down the country will be very grateful. This is not the end of it, in the sense that we have to make sure that we look at Wales and Scotland, because that is important, and we will at some stage need to look at secondary education as well. When the Minister winds up, will she consider saying that if breaches occur, we will look at how we can tighten up the situation? I am sure that these essay mills, which form a £1 billion industry, will be looking at ways around this, and we need to see whether we can find ways to stop breaches happening in future. I hope the House does not mind, but I am going to depart.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome the amendments tabled in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which seek to address the pernicious effects of essay mills. I must declare an interest as an adviser on skills to the Prime Minister and as an academic employee of King’s College London. That is why I want to take this opportunity to say how important and welcome these amendments are. I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who has been passionate and determined. Without his recognition that this is a major and serious issue which can be tackled, I am sure that these amendments would not have been tabled tonight.
There are a number of reasons why cheating has become a major problem for universities. It is partly to do with the pressure on people to get formal qualifications, the scale of universities and the temptation—you can do things you could not do before. There are two major sources of this. One is plagiarism, where we can fight software with software, and one is essay mills, where we cannot. I am quite sure that there will be a major improvement as a result of these measures: the firms will be unable to operate and students will take much more note of the risks attached to doing something illegal with these measures in place. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, has escaped, so I will send thanks in his direction. I say on behalf teaching academics all over the country that they will be extremely happy to see these amendments to the Bill, because it is almost impossible to know if somebody has used a commissioned essay.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the government amendments and all noble Lords who have spoken. I shall say a brief word on government Amendments 58 and 72, on religious academies. When my noble friend Lord Touhig raised this matter in Committee, my noble friend Lady Wilcox made clear our support for his endeavour, so it is good to see the Government responding positively by bringing forward on Report their own amendments to address the problem. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Touhig. Given how long this has seemingly been worked on, I hope that at least one academy, the Lord Touhig catholic academy, will be appearing any day now to mark his success. I am going to ask him to put his name to my amendments in future, in the hope it will have a similarly positive effect on the Minister on future subjects. I look forward to his support. These amendments are very welcome.
Turning to the remaining government amendments in this group on essay mills, as I made clear in Committee, we fully support the outlawing of cheating services. Having had to research this matter for one of the many Private Member’s Bills proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey—I had only just taken the brief on—I was shocked to find how comprehensive the available services are. I think I have regaled the House more than once with my story about commissioning imaginary essays on Augustine and the problem of evil and various other things, and being astonished to find the precision with which one could request services. There was even a “comparethemarket.com” for it. The whole thing is extraordinary.
I have a small number of questions, and I apologise, but given the amendments have been brought forward on Report, we have not had an opportunity to ask about them, so I hope the Minister will bear with me.
First, one of the conditions is that material provided to a student has to have been prepared in connection with the assignment, rather than published generally. One of the abuses of the current system has been essay mills selling the same essay to more than one student, as the same topic comes up again and again. If material had been prepared for one student and was then resold to 15 more, is that one offence or is each sale an offence?
Secondly, the policy note talks about committing offences in England and Wales. What does that mean? Does it mean that the website is hosted in England or Wales, that the company that owns it is registered there or that the owners and essay writers live there? Who commits the offence? Is it the person writing the essay, the one promoting the service, the staff, the owners or all of them?
I have two other quick questions. We are told that enforcement of the law will fall to the police and the CPS. Given the pressures on both, do the Government have a sense of how many prosecutions, if any, are likely in a typical year or will this rely on deterrence as a way forward?
Finally, the penalty on conviction is a fine. I sought clarification offline as to the likely scale of this and was told simply that this will be determined by the courts in accordance with Sentencing Council guidelines, with no cap on the powers of magistrates to issue fines. When I have had to deal with these things on Bills before, I have normally been given some kind of heads-up about the likely tariff or scale from the Government Benches, so can the Minister give us an idea? Are we talking about £50, £5,000, £50,000 or £5 million, or something relating to the profitability of the company? Can she give us some sort of heads-up or a rough benchmark?
I commend the Government for acting on both these points and look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
I thank noble Lords for their comments. There is clear support across the House for these amendments and I am glad we have reached an agreeable solution on these important issues.
I will have to write on some of the questions raised, but I am able to answer a couple of them. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked whether the legislation will be extended UK-wide. We continue to engage and share our work with the devolved Administrations and would welcome a decision from them to legislate against essay mills in the future.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked if it is one offence or many. If sold 15 times, it is an offence not just once, but every time. I am swamped here; I think she also asked another question.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I will remind the Minister, but I am happy for her to write. My questions were about who commits the offence, what it means for it to be committed in England, the likely number of prosecutions and likely fines.
I ungraciously forgot to put on record my appreciation of the work of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on this over many years, so I take the opportunity to do so now while I am on my feet. I commend him for all his work.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
On how this will work in practice, an enforcement body is not specified on the face of the Bill and therefore any supporting investigations and prosecutions would fall to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service respectively. It is up to them to decide the offence and fine. I will need to write to the noble Baroness on her other questions.
Once again, I thank noble Lords, especially the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Touhig, for their support on these issues. I hope that the House will support these amendments.
Baroness Barran
“Offence of providing or arranging a relevant service
(1) It is an offence for a person to provide, or arrange for another person to provide, in commercial circumstances, a relevant service for a student in relation to a relevant assignment.(2) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine.(3) In proceedings for an offence under subsection (1) it is a defence for the defendant to prove, in relation to any of the matters mentioned in subsection (4), that the defendant did not know, and could not with reasonable diligence have known, the matter.(4) Those matters are—(a) if material is provided to the student as a result of the relevant service, that the student would or might use the material in completing all or part of the assignment; (b) that the student was required to complete the assignment personally;(c) that the relevant service was not permitted assistance.(5) A statement in the form of a written standard term of the contract or arrangement under which the relevant service was provided or arranged—(a) that the student would not use any material provided as a result of the relevant service in completing all or part of the assignment,(b) that the student was not required to complete the assignment personally, or(c) that the relevant service was permitted assistance,is not, of itself, to be taken as sufficient evidence of a matter to be proved under subsection (3).(6) A student does not commit either of the following merely by making use of a relevant service to complete all or part of an assignment—(a) an offence under Part 2 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 where the offence that the student intended or believed would be committed is an offence under this section;(b) an offence under this section committed by aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring the commission of an offence under this section.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause creates an offence of providing, or arranging the provision of, a relevant service as defined in new Clause (Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions) in relation to an assignment which the student is required to complete personally, and provides for defences where the defendant proves certain matters.
“Offence of advertising a relevant service
(1) A person who advertises a relevant service to students commits an offence.(2) It does not matter for the purposes of subsection (1) whether the persons to whom the relevant service is advertised are only students, or only a particular category of students, or include persons other than students.(3) For this purpose a person advertises a relevant service if, and only if, the person makes arrangements for an advertisement in which the person—(a) offers, or(b) is described or presented as available or competent,to provide or arrange for another person to provide a relevant service.(4) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause makes it an offence for a person who provides or arranges (or would provide or arrange) a relevant service as defined in new Clause (Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions) to advertise that service to students.
“Offences: bodies corporate and unincorporated associations
(1) If an offence under this Chapter committed by a body corporate is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to neglect on the part of—(a) a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate, or(b) a person who was purporting to act in any such capacity,that person (as well as the body corporate) is guilty of that offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly. (2) Where the affairs of a body corporate are managed by its members, subsection (1) applies in relation to the acts and defaults of a member in connection with the member’s functions of management as it applies to a director of the body corporate.(3) Proceedings for an offence alleged to have been committed under this Chapter by an unincorporated body are to be brought in the name of that body (and not in the name of its members) and, for the purposes of any such proceedings, any rules of court relating to the service of documents have effect as if that body were a corporation.(4) A fine imposed on an unincorporated body on its conviction of an offence under this Chapter is to be paid out of the funds of that body.(5) If an unincorporated body is charged with an offence under this Chapter, section 33 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925 and Schedule 3 to the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 apply as they apply in relation to a body corporate.(6) Where an offence under this Chapter committed by an unincorporated body other than a partnership is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to neglect on the part of, any officer of the body or any member of its governing body, that person (as well as the body) is guilty of the offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.(7) Where an offence under this Chapter committed by a partnership is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to neglect on the part of, a partner, that partner (as well as the body) is guilty of the offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause contains rules that apply where offences under the new Chapter (Cheating services provided for post-16 students at English institutions) are committed by companies and unincorporated associations.
“Interpretation of Chapter
In this Chapter, the following terms have the following meanings—“assignment” includes an examination and any piece of work;“examination” includes any form of assessment;“permitted assistance”, in relation to a relevant assignment, has the meaning given by section (Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions)(8);“personally”, in relation to an assignment that is a relevant assignment, has the extended meaning given by section (Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions)(8);“post-16 institution” means—(a) a higher education provider, within the meaning of Part 1 of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (see section 83(1) of that Act);(b) an institution within the further education sector, within the meaning of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 (see section 91(3) of that Act);(c) a 16 to 19 Academy;(d) any other institution or person, other than a school, that is principally concerned with the provision of education or training suitable to the requirements of pupils who are over compulsory school age;“regulated qualification” means a qualification regulated by the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation;“relevant assignment” has the meaning given by section (Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions) (7);“relevant course” means— (a) a course of any description mentioned in Schedule 6 to the Education Reform Act 1988, or(b) a course—(i) providing education or training in preparation for an examination relating to a regulated qualification, or(ii) which a person is required to complete in order to obtain a regulated qualification;“relevant service” has the meaning given by section (Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions) (2);“school” has the same meaning as in the Education Act 1996;“sixth form” means a school, or part of a school, that is principally concerned with the provision of full-time education suitable to the requirements of pupils who are over compulsory school age;“student” has the meaning given by section (Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions) (6).”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause defines certain terms used in the new Chapter (Cheating services provided for post-16 students at English institutions).
“16 to 19 Academies: designation as having a religious character16 to 19 Academy: designation as having a religious character
After section 8 of the Academies Act 2010 insert—“16 to 19 Academies designated as having a religious character8A Designation of 16 to 19 Academy as having a religious character(1) The Secretary of State may by order designate a 16 to 19 Academy as having a religious character.(2) The Secretary of State may designate an Academy under this section only if the proprietor of the Academy is a qualifying Academy proprietor within the meaning given by section 12(2).(3) The order must specify the religion or religious denomination in relation to which the Academy is designated.(4) The Secretary of State may make regulations about the procedure to be followed in connection with—(a) the designation of an Academy in an order under this section, and(b) the inclusion in such an order of the specification required by subsection (3).(5) Despite section 568(3) of EA 1996 (orders to be made by statutory instrument subject to the negative procedure), as applied by section 17(4) of this Act, a statutory instrument containing an order under this section is not subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.8B Constitution of Academy proprietor, collective worship and religious education(1) The articles of association of the proprietor of an Academy designated under section 8A must provide for a majority of the directors of the proprietor to be persons appointed for the purposes of securing, so far as practicable, that—(a) the character of the designated Academy reflects the tenets of the religion or religious denomination in relation to which the Academy is designated, and(b) in a case where there is a trust deed affecting the designated Academy, the Academy is conducted in accordance with it.(2) The proprietor of an Academy designated under section 8A may (accordingly) conduct the Academy in a way that secures that the character of the Academy reflects the tenets of the religion or religious denomination in relation to which the Academy is designated (and, in particular, in a way that is in accordance with any trust deed affecting the Academy).(3) The proprietor of an Academy designated under section 8A must ensure that at an appropriate time on at least one day in each week during which the Academy is open an act of collective worship is held at the Academy which pupils at the Academy may attend.(4) The act of collective worship must—(a) be in such form as to comply with the provisions of any trust deed affecting the Academy, and(b) reflect the traditions and practices of the religion or religious denomination in relation to which the Academy is designated.(5) The proprietor of an Academy designated under section 8A must ensure that religious education is provided at the Academy for all pupils who wish to receive it.(6) The proprietor of an Academy is to be treated as complying with subsection (5) if religious education is provided at a time or times at which it is convenient for the majority of full-time pupils to attend.(7) For the purposes of this section religious education may take the form of a course of lectures or classes, or of single lectures or classes provided on a regular basis, and may include a course of study leading to an examination or the award of a qualification.(8) The form and content of religious education provided under this section—(a) must be in accordance with the provisions of any trust deed affecting the Academy, and(b) must not be contrary to the traditions of the religion or religious denomination in relation to which the Academy is designated,but is otherwise to be determined from time to time by the proprietor of the Academy.(9) Notwithstanding section 17(4), in this section—“pupil” means a person receiving education at the 16 to 19 Academy;“trust deed” includes any instrument (other than the articles or memorandum of association) regulating the constitution of the proprietor of the Academy or the maintenance, management or conduct of the Academy.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment makes provision about the collective worship and religious education to be provided at a 16 to 19 Academy designated by the Secretary of State as having a religious character, and about the appointment of directors of the proprietor of such an Academy.
Baroness Barran
“Higher education course fee limits: administrationRelevant date for purposes of fee limit for certain higher education courses
In paragraph 3(3) of Schedule 2 to the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (the fee limit where the provider has no access and participation plan), omit “before the calendar year”.” Member’s explanatory statement
Certain fee limits for academic years of higher education courses depend on whether the provider had a high level quality rating on a particular date. This new Clause changes that date to 1 January in the calendar year in which the academic year begins from 1 January in the previous calendar year.
“Code of practice by Information Commissioner’s Office on data sharing in relation to post-16 education
(1) The Information Commissioner must prepare a code of practice for organisations which collect personal data for purposes connected to post-16 education, including the processing of applications for higher and further education courses.(2) The code must—(a) contain practical guidance in relation to the sharing of personal data in accordance with the requirements of data protection legislation;(b) contain such other guidance as the Commissioner considers appropriate to promote good practice in the sharing of personal data of students and potential students; and(c) have regard to children’s rights in the digital environment as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 25.(3) Where a code under this section is in force, the Commissioner may prepare amendments of the code or a replacement code to reflect emerging technologies and changing needs of pupils, students and potential students.(4) In this section—“good practice in the sharing of personal data” means such practice in the sharing of personal data as appears to the Commissioner to be desirable having regard to the interests of data subjects and others, including compliance with the requirements of the data protection legislation; and“the sharing of personal data” means the disclosure of personal data by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making it available.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment places a duty on the Information Commissioner to prepare a code of practice in relation to the sharing of personal data between students and others.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Storey has dashed off for his train and handed me a sheaf of papers on his amendment on data protection. I am quite good at speed reading but I do not think I am quite as good as all that, given all this material. However, this is an important amendment because data protection is important for students and pupils. It should be protected but the DfE does not have a good record. There is an ICO inspection report from February 2020 that comes out with such things as:
“There is no formal proactive oversight of any function of information governance, including data protection, records management, risk management”
and so on. The report says:
“The organisational structure of the DfE means the role of the Data Protection Officer (DPO) is not meeting all the requirements … There is no clear picture of what data is held by the DfE … The DfE are not providing sufficient privacy information”
and so it goes on. It is a very damning report.
The good news is that the Minister wrote a letter to my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, setting out all the steps that the Government intend to take, and my noble friend is very satisfied with their approach on this. Despite this very damning report about data protection at the DfE, which seems to be absolutely non-existent, there is some hope here. Whether the Minister will accept the amendment I do not know, but I beg to move.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for stepping in marvellously and introducing the amendment so confidently. It certainly seems, especially given the situation with the investigation that she describes, a pretty straightforward and simple way to address the issue, placing a duty on the Information Commissioner to prepare a code of practice in relation to the sharing of personal data. If the Minister is not going to accept this, perhaps she could tell us how instead the department intends to address these problems.
I would like to ask a little question. There have been concerns for some time that both practice and indeed legislation in education are loose in relation to data. Clause 11 makes provision to allow data sharing by and with Ofqual, the OfS and Ofsted as well as prescribed persons, and the provisions relate to technical education functions. Could that include students’ personal data? If so, for what purposes? How widely could “prescribed persons” be interpreted?
Can the Minister clarify whether the scope of Clause 11 extends beyond England? Although the institutions to which the new powers apply are all currently based in England, the people and institutions from which they will obtain personal data under those powers could presumably be at any educational setting across the UK within the scope of the Bill. What consideration has been given to the prescribed persons to whom the institution may pass on the data being based outside England in accordance with their own data-sharing powers?
These days students need and expect consistent controls across their data for collection, for use, for distribution and for destruction when it is no longer required for the lawful purposes for which it was collected. I am aware that institutions have also called for better guidance. Concerns have also been raised that the Bill does not preclude commercial use. Could the Minister comment on that?
Data is a valuable asset and it needs appropriate safeguards and a public interest test, so I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 67 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, but skilfully presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, seeks to place a duty on the Information Commissioner to prepare a code of practice in relation to the sharing of personal data by organisations that collect such data for post-16 educational purposes.
I thank both the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for bringing this issue to my attention. The Government agree that this is an issue that needs addressing, and we share both noble Lords’ aims for increasing assurances around the processing and sharing of personal data for learners and students in post-16 settings.
The department’s response to this issue is to set up an education sector certification scheme, with the support of the ICO, that would allow the department to set standards in a wide range of areas. This would cover the data protection needs of the whole education sector, not just the 16 to 19 age group covered by the Bill. We feel that a certification scheme, rather than a code, gives us flexibility to deliver elements when they are ready. We will not have to wait until all elements are complete, which allows us to be flexible when responding to priority needs. In addition, as technology and the law change, we are able to update specific standards without having to update a full code, allowing us to remain flexible to future changes.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, mentioned, I have written to both the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, detailing the department’s ambition and next steps in tackling this issue, which will include writing both to the ICO and to the ed-tech companies by the end of the year.
I am amused at the definition of “a little question” from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock; it was at least three little questions. If I may, I will write to her on the detailed points. Broadly, the thrust of her questions is that student data should be protected. The department continually keeps its processes and practices under review to ensure that we are taking all necessary steps to protect data, including updates to access controls, audit trails of data usage and reviewing risk as part of our data protection impact assessment. In relation specifically to this amendment, the proposed data certification scheme would formalise these controls across the sector. If I may, I will respond in writing to her other points.
I therefore hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, will consider withdrawing his amendment. I again place on record my thanks to him and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for bringing this to my attention.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
I thank the Minister very much for her reply. We entirely agree that a certification scheme is better than a code and will provide more education expertise and focus and more transparency. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
The effect of this amendment and the Minister’s amendment at page 31, line 20 is that the amendments of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 made by Clause 15 have the same extent as the provision of that Act which they amend.
Member’s explanatory statement
See the explanatory statement for the Minister’s amendment at page 31, line 12.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the new Chapter (Cheating services provided for post-16 students at English institutions) to come into force 2 months after the Bill is passed.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the new clause (16 to 19 Academy: designation as having a religious character) to come into force 2 months after the Bill is passed.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for the new Clause (Relevant date for purposes of fee limit for certain higher education courses) to come into force 2 months after the Bill is passed.
Baroness Barran
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendment to insert Clause (Information about technical education and training: access to English schools).
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the Minister’s amendments to insert new Chapter (Cheating services provided for post-16 students at English institutions) and new Clause (16 to 19 Academy: designation as having a religious character).
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Monday 25th October 2021
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-R-II Second marshalled list for Report - (14 Oct 2021)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, before the Third Reading of this Bill I would like to make a short statement about our engagement with the devolved Administrations. Officials and Ministers have worked closely and collaboratively with their counterparts in the devolved Administrations throughout the passage of the Bill. We are continuing to discuss the requirements for legislative consent from the Welsh Government for this Bill and are grateful for their continued engagement on this issue. I beg to move that this Bill be read a third time.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, it is not my intention to delay the House, given the length of the previous debate on procedure, but I want to make three points. First, in the debate in this House on the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill we have had some exemplary and extremely profound contributions from Members. I want to appeal to the Minister, who is new to her post, to take back to her ministerial team and the Cabinet, as this Bill moves to the House of Commons, the genuine feelings of this House and—as has just been displayed in terms of the procedure issues—to think, reflect and not necessarily to move at the speed to which the Government are currently committed on certain aspects of government policy in relation to defunding qualifications.
I know from previous experience in my dealings with the Minister that she does listen and does care. I say to the officials who do not often get addressed in this House, or for that matter in the other House, that getting something done well is better than getting it done quickly—particularly when those who have put through legislation are rarely around to see the consequences of their own mistakes. Sometimes it would be good if those officials working on Bill committees were able—I have put this forward on many occasions in the past, so this is not a knock at them—to take forward the legislation on which they have worked. It would be an exemplar way of using their talent and ensuring that other people simply did not pick up the pieces of something that has been done before.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I will be brief. First, we are probably facing a renaissance in further education and vocational education, and maybe the starting point is this Bill.
Secondly, I want to thank the Minister—if I could catch her eye—and her predecessor for the thorough and courteous way in which they have handled this Bill. It has been an exemplar of how to take a Bill through this House. Listening is always so important.
At the end of the day, two things matter. One is that the funding is there; the other is that we need to see a cultural change in how society views further and vocational education because if that does not happen, then all our hard work will be for nothing.
I end by thanking my own colleagues, who do not happen to be here, for the support they have given me—particularly when I was away in the Bahamas during Report, but I will keep that quiet. I also thank the Minister’s staff again for the thorough way they have dealt with any requests for information. I hope that the amended Bill—it has been amended by two former Secretaries of State, by Labour and by my Lib Dem Benches—will be agreed by the Commons.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, briefly, it has been a great pleasure for me to participate from the Cross Benches in these debates, along with so many much more distinguished experts and a wisdom of former Education Ministers, if that is the correct collective term. This is a very important Bill and I very much echo what the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Storey, have said. I hope that the Government will listen to the issues raised in our debates and think about them carefully as the Bill progresses. I add my thanks to the Minister, to her predecessor and to the Bill team, not least to the current Minister for going beyond her normal duties to help me with my maths abilities, which clearly need some improvement. I very much hope that this will be the Bill that delivers the skills and post-16 education system we need, unlike so many of its unfortunate predecessors.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I have prepared a few words that I intended to say on the Motion that the Bill Do Now Pass. I thought that the Minister would have moved that but we seem to have got there anyway, by whatever route. I am sure noble Lords will not be too unhappy about that, although perhaps the clerk may be.
As noble Lords have demonstrated over four days in Committee and two on Report, the Bill as drafted was not fit for purpose and required considerable improvement. In addition the Minister herself has introduced three concessions, not the least of which concerns net-zero emissions targets, which of course we welcome. Noble Lords have supported eight amendments; what was most remarkable was the extent to which they were the product of effective cross-party planning and execution. Of course, as noble Lords know, no win in your Lordships’ House can be achieved without some cross-party co-operation. But we believe that the number of noble Lords from the government Benches who made clear their dissatisfaction with various parts of the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has just suggested, ought to give the Minister and her Government pause for thought.
With three of their defeats involving amendments in the names of former Conservative Secretaries of State for Education, the Government need to accept that with regard to the Bill they do not possess a monopoly of wisdom on matters as diverse as universal credit conditionality and the withdrawal of BTECs. My noble friend Lady Sherlock has a unique ability: she can explain universal credit in an understandable manner. I have never found anyone else who can achieve that feat.
It would be unkind to press the Minister any further on the mystical missing amendments on the lifelong loan entitlement, because I suspect that in her private moments, she asks herself the same questions as noble Lords: do they really exist? Will they ever appear? We have been promised them so often that on these Benches the suspense is now killing us. We also await details of sharia student finance for both higher education and further education to be announced as part of the spending review, as well as an announcement on fees, which the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, the then Minister, promised in Committee.
However, I would like to record my admiration for the Minister’s ability to pick up the baton on the Bill after it was, I think I can say, thrust at her midway through its consideration in your Lordships’ House. I should say that the change of Minister caught us on these Benches by surprise, because we thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, had coped admirably up until then—although it would appear that was not the view shared by the Leader of the House and the Chief Whip. On my behalf and that of my noble friends Lady Sherlock and Lady Wilcox, I say for the record that we want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for her work on the Bill and for her openness and willingness to engage with us. I also say on our joint behalf that that is not to suggest that the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Barran—is any less so in that regard.
I also add my thanks to the Bill team for the briefings it facilitated and its willingness to discuss with us, openly and in detail, aspects of the Bill that were unclear or about which we had concerns. It certainly helped to put us more in tune with the thinking on the Bill, even if we were not always convinced by the arguments.
I thank all noble Lords who have been involved with the Bill at various stages. Of course, the Public Bill Office has, as ever, been extremely helpful. All Ministers, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran, Lady Berridge, Lady Chisholm and Lady Penn, have been most helpful and always pleasant to deal with. Given that my team has also contained two noble Baronesses and a female legislative and political adviser, I have clearly been the token male in all this.
I thank my colleagues, my noble friends Lady Sherlock and Lady Wilcox, for their support and advice, particularly last week, when the change of date for the second day of Report made it impossible for me to participate. They achieved five wins out of five on that occasion, which perhaps suggests that I should have absented myself more often.
As noble Lords are aware, Ministers have a vast array of officials behind them at times like this, and rightly so, but, as the Opposition, we have just one person: Rhian Copple, the legislative and political adviser for our team. She has been an endless source of ideas and support in so many ways, not least in drafting amendments and negotiating with the Public Bill Office, representatives of other parties and Cross-Benchers. We all owe her a huge debt of gratitude.
I wish the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill good luck in another place. It will need it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted that the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill is finalising its passage through this House. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, articulated, our debate has been thoughtful and powerful and, above all, has demonstrated our clear shared commitment to a high-quality skills system. I can reassure the noble Lord and your Lordships that I have discussed and will continue to discuss our debates in detail with my ministerial colleagues. This is a real priority for my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and for the Minister for Skills, and I thank them both for attending today’s debate.
This Bill provides key legislation that will enable a transformation of the country’s skills landscape. It will help to provide the skills that employers need today, as well as those of the future, and support our path to net zero. It will also contribute to building a system where all people, regardless of their background or circumstance, have the opportunity to undertake high-quality training that enables them to meet their full potential and get the skills they need for employment. These outcomes will benefit us all by boosting productivity and fortifying the economy.
It has been a genuine privilege to work on this Bill, if only briefly. Its passage has been an exemplary demonstration of the important role that this House plays in the legislative process. I express my particular thanks to Members on the Front Benches, including the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Storey, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Sherlock, Lady Wilcox and Lady Garden.
Of course, as your Lordships have pointed out, we have also benefited from the insight of many former Education Ministers and Secretaries of States in this House, whom I would like to thank. They include the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, my noble friends Lady Morgan of Cotes, Lord Willetts, Lord Baker and Lord Johnson, and my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke. I also thank the many other noble Lords who took part in the debates. The Government have listened to the important points made and will carefully consider the amendments that have been agreed by the House.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]
Monday 15th November 2021
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-R-II Second marshalled list for Report - (14 Oct 2021)
The Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
In my previous role as Vaccines Minister, I set out how as a nation we would work our way back to normality by delivering an incredible vaccination programme—the product of evidence, expertise, commitment and, of course, collaboration. I am now here, I am very pleased to say, as Education Secretary, but I make it clear that my first and foremost aims remain the same. I am determined to focus on evidence, data and delivery, and on realising the huge potential in our most valuable resource: the human resource, our people.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
The Secretary of State refers to evidence and data, which all of us in this House rely on. Given the evidence and expertise from professionals about the move to get rid of the BTEC qualification, is it not time that he rethought that proposal?
Nadhim Zahawi
I hope, as I did in the weekly briefings that I gave as Vaccines Minister, to convince the hon. Lady tonight that that is incorrect. We are not getting rid of BTECs.
I know at first hand how important education is. As colleagues who have known me for a long time will know, I came to this country with my family at the age of 11, without a word of English—and here I am now in this Chamber. With the right education, opportunity abounds.
Unfortunately, we are still feeling the aftershocks of the pandemic and we still have many challenges ahead. We need to recover economically; we need to level up our country. I am glad to say that we are already making headway with levelling up. The Chancellor’s Budget is putting the money where it is needed, with £374 billion of direct support for the economy over this year and last year. The Prime Minister’s plan for jobs is working, with the peak of unemployment forecast to be 2 million lower than was previously predicted. Wages are growing, and we will build on that by having skills at the very heart of our plan.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State to his place; there were many positive elements of his vaccination strategy. I want to ask him about apprenticeships, because he says that he arrived in the UK and has been such a successful individual. Is he disappointed that there has been a 41% drop in apprenticeship take-up? Is that not a bit of a national disgrace?
Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Lady may recall that I first joined the Department for Education as apprenticeships tsar; I hope to talk about that later in my speech. I introduced the standards and the levy, and we did incredibly well in pushing quality ahead of quantity. It is very important for this House to focus on outcomes rather than just inputs.
Skills, schools and families—this is our mantra. Skills are about investing in people all across our country, about strengthening local economies, about productivity, about stabilising the labour market and about global competitiveness. They are about shoring up—and shoring ourselves up—for a better, stronger, more prosperous future. This is not a pipe dream; we are getting it done right now.
In January, our White Paper “Skills for Jobs” set out our plan to reform the skills system. I pay tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), for his work on that brilliant White Paper; I will not repeat everything that it said, because I am sure that hon. Members will have familiarised themselves with it, but I hope to show how we have acted on it.
First, we have significantly increased investment. We are investing £3.8 billion more in further education and skills over the Parliament by 2024-25. As the Chair of the Select Committee on Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), said earlier this month, that is
“a remarkable amount of money for skills.”
I note the cross-party support for the measure in the Bill. Lord Sainsbury, who led an independent panel on skills on behalf of the coalition Government, is a big supporter of our plans. As President Truman once said, it is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit. That is what we are trying to do, and I hope that the Opposition will join us tonight: to work together to level up the skills base across our great country.
We are delivering an extra £1.6 billion boost by 2024-25 for 16 to 19-year-olds’ education, including maintaining funding in real terms per student and delivering more hours of teaching for T-levels. There is an extra hour a week for all students in that age group, who have the least time to catch up from covid. Apprenticeships funding will increase to £2.7 billion by 2024-25 to support businesses of all sizes to build the skilled workforce that they need. We are making vital improvements to FE college buildings and equipment across England, and we are delivering on our National Skills Fund manifesto commitment to help transform the lives of people who have not got on to the work ladder and who lack qualifications.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I welcome the Bill, and I welcome what the Government are indicating that they wish to do, but may I ask a quick question? Only 26% of disadvantaged white British boys and 35% of disadvantaged white British girls achieve five good GCSEs including English and mathematics. What is happening to those young boys and girls who are not obtaining all the qualifications that they need in order to advance themselves and gain employment?
Nadhim Zahawi
The Education Committee did a very important piece of work on that precise subject. We are investing in recovery—investing £5 billion, following the Budget. We are investing in tutoring, and, of course we are investing in the quality of teaching. There cannot be great outcomes without great teachers, and we are providing 500,000 teaching opportunities.
I will now make some headway, if I may. As you quite rightly told me, Madam Deputy Speaker, many other Members wish to contribute tonight.
As well as the National Skills Fund manifesto commitment to help transform the lives of people who do not have the opportunities that many of us in this place have had, we are implementing the policies in the White Paper. For example, we have established eight trailblazer areas across the country where the first local skills improvement plans are being developed by employer representative bodies. They are currently engaging employers, education providers and key local stakeholders to begin the development of these important plans in the context of the skills landscape. The trailblazers are in areas from Kent to Cumbria, and they will generate valuable learning to inform the wider roll-out of these plans across our country.
The Bill also specifies the essential legal framework for our reforms. We are setting ourselves up for success by giving people the skills and education that they need for work by improving the quality of what they learn, and, of course, by protecting our learners from the disruptive impact of provider failure, reducing the risk that they will miss out on vital learning because, for example, the training provider with which they are studying goes bust.
I have seen at first hand the transformative power of education, and I want to take a moment to retell the House about an experience that I had while visiting Barnsley College. It was the first in south Yorkshire to roll out T-levels, and while I was there I met several of its students. I want to tell the House about one of them. I have rarely met a more inspiring individual. He told me that with his T-level—I am quoting him word for word—“I am looking at unis now and thinking which one I am picking, not which one is going to pick me.” Greg is living proof of the transformative effect that our skills programme is having.
I also met students at Barnet and Southgate College, during my first week in my present post, and saw how state-of-the-art facilities were helping those with learning difficulties and disabilities to realise their ambitions. The college is going further by strengthening its ties to local businesses: it has worked closely with its local chambers of commerce to provide a range of services for local businesses as a hub in the college. So our reforms are working, and they are very much evidence-led. They are changing people’s lives and levelling up the country, and the Bill will help to secure them for the years to come.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
This is an excellent Bill which deserves a Second Reading tonight. One college that my right hon. Friend knows well is Peter Symonds, in my constituency, which is transforming lives and T-levels. It has done very well out of the post-16 capacity fund bid, in which, as I found out last week, it was successful, and will build a new 12-classroom block as a result. I wonder whether the Secretary of State, in his new role, will make a glorious return to Winchester to see what excellent post-16 education looks like in the heart of Hampshire.
Nadhim Zahawi
I am well aware of that investment, and I will certainly look at the diary to see whether I can make time for a visit. I know that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart)—the skills Minister—is gagging to get down to Hampshire and have a look at Peter Symonds College as well.
Skills are very much about providing people with fulfilling and productive jobs, and helping them to improve their lot. One of the key parts of the Bill deals with local skills improvement plans, which place employers, through representative bodies, at the centre—the heart—of the local post-16 skills system. Only through really understanding what is needed in a local area and working in a holistic way with employers, education providers and key local stakeholders can we develop a credible local plan to ensure that skills provision meets local needs.
Mayoral combined authorities which have certain devolved responsibilities for adult education are also critical stakeholders, who will be closely engaged in this process. I am pleased to say that we will introduce an amendment to place the role of those authorities on the face of the Bill.
Several hon. Members rose—
Nadhim Zahawi
I will try to give way later. I apologise, but I need to make some headway, because a great many Members want to contribute to the debate.
Local skills improvement plans will help to ensure that the skills system is responsive to labour market skills needs and supports local innovation and growth, with every part of the country able to succeed in its own unique way. This is levelling up in action. As the Prime Minister said at COP26 two weeks ago,
“When it comes to tackling climate change, words without action, without deeds are absolutely pointless.”
In the Bill, we are taking that action by setting out the need to consider skills that support our path to net zero as part of the local skills improvement plans. It is not only good for the planet, but good for business.
Another priority for our skills agenda is for lifelong learning, and delivering on our commitment to the lifelong loan entitlement. The LLE will help to give people a loan entitlement to the equivalent of four years of post-18 education at levels 4 to 6, for use on modules or full courses, in colleges or universities, over their lifetimes. If you had told me when I was apprenticeship tsar under the coalition Government that there would be a Prime Minister who would introduce this measure, I would have bitten your arm off, Madam Deputy Speaker. I cannot emphasise enough that this is a step change in our system, which will revolutionise the way in which we see education, retraining and upskilling in our country. Some 80% of the workforce of 2030—which is not a long time from today—are already in work, so we need to be able to adapt to the future economy and those skills needs.
Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Con)
The fact that we are talking about further education and the skills guarantee is a paradigm shift, and it is very welcome, but what are we doing to ensure that those who do not have a level 2 qualification, or who have difficulty with reading, can access the guarantee?
Nadhim Zahawi
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I will address that level 2 issue later in my speech.
The LLE will give us the flexibility to be—I hope—responsive and agile, and will enable people to succeed at any stage in their lives. It will also give them the option of building up their qualifications over time, with both further and higher education providers. They will have a real choice in how and when they study to acquire new, life-changing skills. The LLE will help to create the parity of esteem between further and higher education that we so desperately want to see and so desperately need.
I am pleased to inform the House that since the Bill’s introduction, the Government have introduced further measures to help eradicate that scourge of honest and faithful academia, essay mills. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) for his work on this topic, and I know that he will appreciate these measures. It is high time that we stamped out a dishonest practice that both undermines our further and higher education systems and puts students at risk of exploitation.
Any reform of our system must also reform our set of technical educational qualifications, to close the gap between the skills gained through a qualification and the skills employers tell us they need.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State to his place. We have worked together on education issues in the past, and I hope to do so in the future. May I press him further on the point my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) made about BTECs? He may not intend to abolish them, but will not effectively defunding them have the same effect? Is that not why so many former Conservative Education Ministers made that point in the Lords?
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, whose opinion I value highly. He and I have worked on education for a number of years on a cross-party basis. The important thing to remember is that the Sainsbury review was clear that for T-levels to succeed, where there is duplication and lower quality, we need to remove lower quality; that does not mean getting rid of high-quality BTECs. I will say a little more tonight that I hope will reassure the House on how we are doing that without kicking the ladder of opportunity away from anyone who deserves that opportunity. I hope I will be able to allay some of his fears.
Going back to the reform of our system, we are extending the powers of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to approve a broader range of technical educational qualifications. The institute will ensure that the independent voice of employers is embedded throughout the process, while working in harmony with Ofqual to ensure quality.
I want to be perfectly clear: the Bill focuses on the approval and regulation of technical qualifications, rather than the funding of technical or academic qualifications. However, when it comes to both academic and technical qualifications, what we are looking for the most is quality. There is no point in a student taking a low-quality level 3 qualification that does not equip them with skills for a job or help them to progress into higher education. That is even more important when it comes to disadvantaged students.
We have more than 12,000 qualifications at level 3 and below. By comparison, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, all widely regarded as having high-performing technical education systems, have around 500 or fewer. Our qualifications review is vital to ensuring that what is on the market is the best it can be. I am clear that T-levels and A-levels should be front and centre of the level 3 landscape, but I am convinced that we need other qualifications alongside them, many of which exist now and play a valuable role in supporting good outcomes for students. It is quite likely that many BTECs and similar applied general-style qualifications will continue to play an important role in 16-to-19 education for the foreseeable future.
Our reforms to the qualifications landscape are rightly ambitious, but we know that we would be wrong to push too hard and risk compromising quality. That is why I am announcing today that we have decided to allow an extra year before our reform timetable is implemented. The extra year will allow us to continue to work hard to support the growth of T-levels and give more notice to providers, awarding organisations, employers, students and parents, so that they can prepare for the changes.
I am a firm believer in T-levels. As I have said before, I want them to become as famous as A-levels, and I want to ensure that we get them right. As many young people as possible should have the advantage of studying for and successfully completing a T-level. We hear consistently that some students are put off taking a T-level because they are worried that they will fail if they do not reach level 2 in English and maths. We want to change that and bring T-levels in line with other qualifications, including A-levels. We are absolutely clear that English and maths should remain central to T-level programmes, but we do not want to unnecessarily inhibit talented students from accessing T-levels simply because of the additional hurdle that reaching level 2 in English and maths represents. That is why I can also announce today that we will remove the English and maths exit requirements from T-levels. That will bring them in line with other qualifications, including A-levels, and ensure that talented young people with more diverse strengths are not arbitrarily shut out from rewarding careers in sectors such as construction, catering and healthcare. The institute is taking immediate steps towards that.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
Fewer than 1% of college students are on a course with coverage of climate change. Unless we embed climate change and the environment into our post-16 education, the Government’s plans to get to net zero will simply not be possible. Bath College is offering some of those courses and doing something about it. Will the Secretary of State commit the Government to putting its weight behind courses that embed climate change into the curriculum?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
We must have very short interventions at this stage, because we have a lot of people who want to contribute to the debate.
Nadhim Zahawi
We are doing much of what the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) asks for, including in the local skills plans, where net zero will very much be part of the planning and development process. I will make some headway, per your instructions, Madam Deputy Speaker, because there is a lot to get through tonight.
I also want to ensure that all students from the first two cohorts are not unfairly disadvantaged by the ongoing challenges that covid presents for T-level delivery. We have therefore recently announced a small number of temporary flexibilities on how industry placements can be delivered for those groups, including allowing some virtual working.
We are working to improve technical education at all levels, including level 2, which has been neglected for far too long. Getting level 2 and below right is key to ensuring that students have clear lines of sight to level 3 apprenticeships and traineeships, and, for some, directly into employment. We will consult on proposals for reform later this year, but we will work at speed.
It is in the interests of learners that we take a fresh look at the system and make it easier to navigate, with better outcomes for learners, employers and our economy. When I was apprenticeship tsar, I saw how clearly people in other countries understood their system and how that made a world of difference. Everyone understood it: the student, their family and their employer.
Since the Bill’s introduction in May, it has been subject to thorough and significant scrutiny in the other place. I express my thanks to all those who contributed, but especially to the Minister for the School System, who took on this Bill just before Report and did so brilliantly. My noble Friend brought forward some Government amendments on Report, including clauses on essay mills and an amendment to allow 16-to-19 colleges to become academies with a religious designation —something I know my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton) will be very happy about. Important and sensitive issues were raised in the other place, and I can be clear that we are listening and taking careful consideration of the proposals made there. Not all changes are right for legislation, but I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of many of the proposals.
It is a privilege to be able to take this Bill through the House. I know there are many exciting and thought-provoking debates ahead of us, but, most importantly, we must remember why we are doing this: to deliver high-quality qualifications, designed with employers, to give students the skills they need. With the support of hon. Members on both sides of this House, the Bill will signify a major milestone in our plan for jobs and our economic recovery. The Bill will set us up for the future we want and, crucially, the future we need. I commend it to the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Before I call the shadow Secretary of State, I will have to impose a time limit. We will start at five minutes.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to follow the Secretary of State.
I place on record my thanks to Lord Watson, Baroness Wilcox and Baroness Sherlock for their work on the Bill. I hope the House will protect some of the improvements made to the Bill, on a cross-party basis, in the House of Lords.
Over the past decade we have repeatedly heard from Conservative Members that skills matter and that further education and training are essential to our economy and our country’s future, and we heard it again from the Secretary of State tonight. We agree, but the result of that rhetoric under successive Conservative Governments, is that we have 188,000 fewer apprenticeship starts, college numbers down 26%, 9,000 fewer further education staff, adult learner numbers down 25%, and funding of adult skills still at only 60% of what it was in 2010. As the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) acknowledged, successive Conservative Governments have left further education overlooked, undervalued and underfunded.
I assure the Secretary of State that we will not oppose the Bill, as amended and improved by the noble Lords, this evening. After a decade of Conservative damage to the sector, I desperately want the Government to get skills policy right. Labour believes in a high-skill economy that delivers the opportunity for workers to train and retrain, and to gain and sustain fulfilling, rewarding jobs in which they take great pride.
That is why my Labour colleagues and I, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), have long championed further education and lifelong learning. In 2019, Labour’s lifelong learning commission set out an ambitious approach that would give all learners the chance to make the most of their learning throughout their life. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) has set out plans to buy, make and sell more in Britain, as it would support industry to deliver quality jobs in every part of the country. And it is why, at our party conference this year, the Leader of the Opposition set out Labour’s plans to ensure every young person leaves education with skills for the future, ready for work and for life.
Labour would embed the digital skills that young people need across all subjects, by providing every child with ongoing access to a device and delivering professional careers advice and two weeks’ worth of work experience. We would reform the citizenship curriculum to give young people the life skills they say they want: how to open a bank account, what “tax” means and what they will have to pay, and how to sign an employment contract—or, as one young person put it to me, how to be an adult. I think we all need a bit of that sometimes.
Labour would deliver this by engaging with employers across the public and private sectors, and I thank those who joined me and the Leader of the Opposition at our roundtable earlier this month. We would work across Government to tackle the challenge of four in 10 young people leaving education today without qualifications essential for the modern economy. At the current rate under the Conservatives, reducing that even to three in 10 young people will take 300 years. Labour will not stand for that.
We would also ensure that every adult has the opportunity to retrain and reskill where necessary, to address technological change and globalisation and tackle the climate crisis that will see the workplace constantly evolve. That level of ambition is lacking in the Bill.
Labour agrees that we need world-class vocational training routes, and we welcome the introduction of T-levels. We want them to succeed, but they will not be right for all students. By forcing students to specialise too early, there is a danger of reducing, not enhancing, student choice. The Department’s own impact assessment demonstrates that promoting T-levels through the over-hasty defunding of most BTECs risks holding young people back from achieving the qualifications they need.
It is welcome to hear the Secretary of State confirm that there will be an extension of one year before the defunding of courses takes place, but he knows that is a very short time for people to come to terms with the new T-level offer. He will also know there was cross-party support in the House of Lords for Labour’s amendment proposing a four-year moratorium on defunding. I urge him to look again at the time needed to enable these reforms to be embedded successfully and sensibly.
I noted what the Secretary of State said about removing the requirement in T-levels for GCSE English and maths, which will open up these qualifications to more students. Will he, or perhaps the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), in winding up, say what support will be on offer to students who lack these important GCSE qualifications, as literacy and numeracy skills will clearly remain important? As the measure may well open up T-levels to more young people, what is being put in place to ensure there are sufficient work placement opportunities with employers to accommodate the potential larger numbers?
It is important that we get these qualifications right, because vocational qualifications change lives. From what the Secretary of State said this evening, and indeed from what we have been hearing from Ministers for some time, we effectively have a planning blight hanging over BTECs. When he talks of some low-level qualifications at level 3 being abolished and replaced with T-levels without specifying which qualifications he means, he undermines confidence among young people, teachers, parents and employers in all the applied general qualifications.
This matters most to students in the most deprived communities. The Social Market Foundation has found that 44% of white working-class students enter university with at least one BTEC, and that 37% of black students enter university with only BTEC qualifications. Removing opportunities for those students does not sound anything like levelling up, so it is important that we have clarity from the Minister about how their interests are to be protected.
I heard the Minister suggest at the Federation of Awarding Bodies conference last week, and the Secretary of State repeated it tonight, that it will be important to keep open routes to university that include vocational qualifications such as T-levels. This comes as a surprise to the Labour Front-Bench team, and I think it will come as a surprise to universities, which have not necessarily signed up to admit students on the basis of T-level results. Will the Secretary of State or the Minister say a little more about how they intend T-levels to be a route to higher education?
Like the Government, Labour recognise the crucial role of employers in identifying skills needs and delivering training, so it is right that employers are key partners in local skills improvement partnerships, but the partnerships must be designed in the context of local economic and regeneration strategies driven by metro Mayors and local leaders. There was cross-party support in the Lords, as the Secretary of State knows, for Labour’s amendment to make mayoral authorities and local further education providers part of the local skills improvement partnerships. I am glad he has agreed tonight that metropolitan mayoral combined authorities should have a role, but he needs to go further. What about authorities outside metropolitan combined areas? What role does he now foresee for local enterprise partnerships in setting the skills agenda?
The Government may have abandoned their own industrial strategy, but at local level there is recognition that the Government and employers need to be co-leads, alongside local colleges and providers, in bringing together knowledge and expertise to meet the needs of the local economy.
I welcome the concession from Baroness Barran, especially following the conclusion of COP26 at the weekend, on local school improvement plans having due regard to meeting environmental goals. I hope we can agree, too, on welcoming the amendment to include special educational needs awareness training that is relevant to students of initial teacher training FE courses.
The Bill has reached us from the other place in an improved state, but the Government must be more ambitious. The Secretary of State spoke tonight of the Government’s plans for the lifelong learning entitlement and the Minister in the other place promised a consultation ahead of further primary legislation. It would be helpful tonight for the House to have a timetable set out for that to happen. In the debate on the Address this year, I raised concerns that waiting until 2025 for the lifelong learning entitlement to come into effect was far too slow for workers who have seen their jobs change or disappear and need urgent support to retrain. With the prospect now of further consultation and further legislation, I fear we will see even further delay.
On the wider question of the lifetime skills guarantee, which we would like to see in the Bill, will the Minister explain in winding up why 9 million jobs, a third of all jobs across the country, are in sectors excluded from the guarantee? Such sectors include retail and tourism, which have been hardest hit during the pandemic and, incredibly, lecturing and teaching. Will he explain why it excludes 65% of people over the age of 16 who already hold a level 3 qualification, preventing their retraining to gain new skills? Will the Secretary of State commit to the amendment originally tabled by Lord Johnson that would ensure a review of the impact on re-skilling of funding restrictions on those who wish to get a qualification at a level equivalent to or lower than that they already hold?
Most concerning—the hon. Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford) alluded to this—is the lack of an offer in the Bill to workers needing support to gain level 2 or other qualifications to get them in the pipeline to progress their learning to level 3 and beyond. Nine million adults lack basic literacy or numeracy skills and, despite the announcements in the Budget last month, those people are excluded from the Government’s flagship policy—why? What are the Government doing to tackle the disastrous fall in apprenticeship starts since the apprenticeship levy was introduced? Why have plans for apprenticeships not been provided for in this Bill?
The prospect of further Government delays to the lifelong learning entitlement brings me, finally, to the wider proposals in the Augar review. Current and future students have seen regular backroom briefings to the press about potential fee cuts to and attacks on the quality of their courses, and regressive changes to their loan repayments that will leave them even worse off. Will the Secretary of State now bring these damaging rumours to an end and come forward with constructive, progressive proposals to support university students, so that all who wish to and can benefit from higher education have the opportunity to do so?
Young people starting work today will still be working in the 2070s and I do not think any Member of this House could claim to know what skills they will need then. It is imperative that we give them the skills to adopt new ways of working and adapt to an ever-changing and uncertain world. At the same time, we must equip our education system with the capacity for adults to train and retrain, move between jobs and industries, and gain new skills and knowledge throughout their lives. As I have said, we will not be opposing the Bill today, but nor do we think it sufficient. I urge those on the Conservative Benches to be more ambitious, to listen to colleges, universities, employers and Labour, and to match the aspirations young people and adult learners have for themselves. The Bill must set out a pathway to the future that is fit for individuals, employers and our economy. The next generation, businesses and our whole country deserve better than this.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
I would like to put on record that I strongly welcome the principles behind the Bill and the additional huge investment—a 42% cash-terms increase—in skills announced in the Budget. For too long, further education and skills have been the Cinderella of our education system. I have always said that it is worth remembering that Cinderella became a member of the royal family and I believe that with this Bill the Government are banishing, or beginning to banish, at least, the two ugly sisters of snobbery around skills and under-funding. We know that funding per FE student aged 16 to 18 fell by 11% over the past decade. For that reason, I ask the Government to consider the amendment tabled by Lord Clarke, which would mean that, as with universities and schools, money would follow the pupil for FE colleges that set up approved courses. In other words, the Government would provide for automatic in-year funding for FE colleges that offer approved level 3 qualifications from approved providers.
Participation in adult skills and lifelong learning is at its lowest level in 23 years. Nine million working-age adults in England have low literacy or numeracy skills, and 6 million adults are not qualified to level 2. The lifetime skills guarantee offers an exciting opportunity for a level 3 qualification to millions of adults, which I really support. Again, I ask the Government to consider funding for those without even a level 2 qualification, but that at least includes a mechanism for progression to level 3.
We must take this opportunity to improve careers education and guidance and I welcome the inclusion of clause 14 on careers. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, just two in five schools were complying with the Baker clause. My Committee’s report on disadvantaged white working class boys and girls, which has been mentioned already, looked at the underperformance and recommended that compliance with the Baker clause be linked to Ofsted inspection outcomes, with schools not given a good or outstanding rating unless they comply with the clause.
Alongside the lifetime skills guarantee and the lifelong loan entitlement outlined in clauses 15 to 18, which I support, and the increase in the level 2 take-up, which I mentioned earlier, I ask the Minister to level up adult learning for the most disadvantaged by also rocket-boosting community learning. Perhaps, as we suggested in our Select Committee, we could have an adult community learning centre in every town.
To further incentivise businesses to train staff, perhaps the Government should also consider a long-term plan to introduce a skills tax credit to revitalise employer-led training. We must do more to boost apprenticeships, on top of what the Government have done. We have had millions of apprenticeships since 2010, with 90% of those who complete getting good jobs and skills after. However, perhaps the Government could consider reforming the existing levy on employers in a strategic way to close the skills deficit and ensure that more young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, can access this opportunity. Lord Clarke has introduced amendment 25 and I ask the Government to look at it favourably, so that companies are more incentivised to hire young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
I also ask the Government to use the Bill to look at the £800 million diversity and inclusion fund spent by universities and re-boot it to ensure that access and participation is prioritised towards students from disadvantaged backgrounds doing apprenticeships. Over the next decade, universities could work towards having 50% of their students undertaking degree-level apprenticeships. My Committee is currently undertaking an inquiry on prison education and the Government could consider changing the legislation so that prisoners can do prison apprenticeships.
I welcome what has been said on BTECs. The Education Datalab found that young people who took BTECs were more likely to be in employment at age 22 and at that age were earning about £800 more than their peers taking A Levels. So these are qualifications with good outcomes and we must make sure not only that T-levels are successfully embedded in the system, but that quality BTECs should remain for all students to access. Finally, I urge the Government to look at the EBacc and ensure that design technology and computer science are included as an option as part of that. However, I look forward to working constructively with them on this excellent Bill.
Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
Having spent most of my working life in further education, I am delighted to speak in this extremely important debate. My constituency of Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough is home to two excellent colleges that are well attended by local people of all ages who undertake qualifications of all types. It gives me no pleasure, however, to report that my constituency also has one of the highest instances of child poverty in the country. It is my firm belief that good education provision is one of the most powerful tools to eradicate poverty, so it is essential that people who live in my constituency can access high-quality education.
I am pleased to hear that, according to the Secretary of State, there is still a promise to keep BTECs, because the previous Ministers and Secretary of State were completely unable to commit to that, but I do have some sense of cynicism about the matter. The roll-back of BTECs would reduce student choice, degrade the variety of qualifications that employers can look for in potential employees and deny existing employees the opportunity to upskill. The education system helps to close the skills gap and also needs to play its part in the levelling-up agenda. I have always been unconvinced that the way to do that is to remove a successful qualification that is being taken by almost a third of 16 to 18-year-old level 3 students.
The success of BTECs as a driving force of social mobility cannot be ignored. The Social Market Foundation found that almost half of white working-class students had at least one BTEC on entering university and that almost two fifths of students from diverse backgrounds enter university with only BTEC qualifications. That clearly means that students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be adversely affected were the proposal on BTECs to go through. Surely pathways should be extended and not closed off.
There are many concerns about what the T-level curriculum will look like and who will be able to access T-levels. If the changes took place tomorrow morning, only 40% of Sheffield College’s 16 to 19-year-old level 3 students would move to a T-level. The rest, who are studying other advanced generals, would be displaced without a full-time level 3 programme.
Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)
The hon. Lady might be aware that T-levels are already up and running, so she has the opportunity to see the depth and breadth of the T-level curriculum. Perhaps she could take the opportunity to see at first hand the benefits it will bring to her constituents.
Gill Furniss
I have spoken to the principals of Sheffield College and Longley Park sixth-form college in my constituency and they are extremely concerned about the proposals.
Four of the five most popular courses at Longley Park sixth-form college are applied generals. Such qualifications can help young people to gain entry to university or, indeed, enable them to access employment or further training. Longley Park is a sixth-form college at the heart of a council-housing estate in a deprived area that ensures that 1,200 young people a year enter adulthood with a level 3 qualification.
It seems that the Bill attempts to solve a problem that many local colleges have already addressed. For example, Sheffield College has 2,500 employer partners. Having successfully built these relationships over many years, the college offers a varied choice of qualifications and employment opportunities to students and prospective students of all ages across the city. That is why it is of great concern that under the Bill the Secretary of State will choose the employer representative bodies. There is very little detail on how the Secretary of State will make such decisions. If the Government are serious about levelling up, the Bill must ensure that local leaders get a say in how local ERBs are formed and who serves on them.
Over the past 15 or so years, the number of adults in further education has fallen by half. Over that same period, funding has been cut by two thirds. Boosting the number of adult learners is key to driving down poverty and fulfilling the levelling-up agenda. The lifetime learning guarantee is welcome, but I agree with the Association of Colleges, which wants to see the scheme broadened to include a wider range of courses and the ability to undertake a second level 3 qualification, so that people can retrain and reskill. There are also concerns that the guarantee has no statutory footing. I urge the Government to demonstrate their commitment to the guarantee and to give it a wider scope on a statutory footing in the Bill.
Ultimately, the post-16 education sector is ready to deliver a boost in skills and to play its part in levelling up. However, the sector cannot do that without the significant investment it has been calling for over the past decade. I hope that the Bill progresses through this House in a collaborative way and that the Government will listen sincerely to Opposition Members who want to help to improve it and to make sure that our education system works for the needs of learners, the economy and local communities.
Gill Furniss
I will carry on.
In conclusion, for the Bill to be successful, the Government must ensure that colleges receive the funding that they need and the recognition that they are experts in their field and are already committed to the skills agenda. The big question is whether the Government share their ambition. I urge the Minister to confirm that they do and to do so with actions, not words.
Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)
We talk about levelling up, and there is surely no better way to level up throughout the country than through investment in our human infrastructure—in the people across communities in the north, south, east and west—and that is what this Bill is all about doing and delivering on. At the heart of that has to be an understanding that employers play a critical role. This is not an issue that we have been debating for just the past five or 10 years; indeed, the Labour party, the Conservative party and the Liberal party have discussed it for the past 100 years. We have recognised that there are skill gaps in our country that we have needed to address and that other countries have had a competitive advantage in the way they have dealt with skills and made sure that their workforce have been better able to respond than ours have.
One key thing is the need to ensure that all the qualifications that are undertaken, whether at colleges or universities, are based on employer-led standards. There should be no shame in saying that what not only our young people but people of all ages learn will equip them with the skills needed for them to walk into work. That is our duty, it is what we want to give to everyone in our country and it is why the Bill is so incredibly important.
If we look at Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and so many other countries around the globe, we see that one area in which they are so much stronger than we are in this country is qualifications above A-level and below degree level—the higher technical qualifications at levels 4 and 5. If we do not plug that gap, we will continually be out-competed by other nations. Some 10% of our workforce between the ages of 18 and 65 have a level 4 or 5 qualification, compared with 20% in Germany and 34% in Canada. We need to address that, which is why the lifelong loan entitlement is so critical. But as well as bringing that forward, we need to get it right.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
I commend the right hon. Gentleman’s point about employer-led qualifications and an employer-led direction. I am sure he will take this opportunity to commend the Northern Regional College, which has just today started a pioneering new project that will bring employers on board with students and lead directly to proper employment with the manufacturing taskforce in Northern Ireland.
Gavin Williamson
I very much join the hon. Gentleman in commending the Northern Regional College for its work. We see such work right throughout the United Kingdom, but the Bill will give us the opportunity to really power that work forward in colleges and, hopefully, universities right across England. That is going to be key. We have to look at how we start to close the competitive gap with other countries. We need to make sure not only that all our qualifications have employer-led standards but that we drive people up the skills ladder as we go. We have the opportunity to do that.
I hope that when my hon. Friend the Minister sums up, he will touch a little on the LLE, which is really important, and that he can reassure me from the Dispatch Box this evening on this point about those who make use of it. One key element of the LLE is the ability to take qualifications, whether a full degree or a level 5 or 4 qualification, in a much more modular way. In the interests of students, it would be useful if the Minister could spell out from the Dispatch Box that students who take a full level 6 qualification, which is done in a modular way, would not be paying any more than £9,250, which is what someone who is taking a classic and standard degree qualification pays. That would greatly reassure many people, and I hope that the Minister is able to do that from the Dispatch Box this evening.
This is not about pitching colleges and universities against one another. An interesting point was made on this by a number of Lords in the other place: for us to be able to deliver on the Government’s aspirations for more level 4 and level 5 qualifications, universities need to play their part. Indeed, they have an incredibly important role to play in that delivery. Putting this skills Bill into statute, making sure that we actually put employers at the heart of decision-making and that they have a clear say would be truly transformative.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I would like to put on record my thanks to my right hon. Friend for his time as Secretary of State and for listening to me pecking his head for years about further education. Was he truly inspired by the colleges and students that he met around the country, since his work was a lot of what got us to where we are today?
Gavin Williamson
My hon. Friend and I went to the same college, and we were both very much inspired by that.
Across the country, so many colleges are doing an amazing job, but what we have been seeing over the past year and more is investment flowing in that direction. None the less, let us not underestimate how important it is that employers are involved in this. They need to have a say and an influence, and they need to be able to design the qualifications. If we look at T-levels, we can see that they have been designed hand in glove with employers to make sure that when those youngsters leave college or school, they can step into the world of work and succeed. That is the hallmark of a great qualification, and that is what we should be proud of.
Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)
To borrow a phrase, “The best way to level up our country is through education”. Education, coupled with opportunity, is how we give our nation’s children the best chance in life. Each young person is different. Under the current system, students can decide whether studying A-levels, T-levels or a BTEC is best for them. Yet, under the Bill, the Government plan to scrap BTECs. That is what is behind this: cut the funding and scrap the opportunity. BTECs have been a lifeline to many young people in my constituency. Indeed, when I was a governor for many, many years—40 years, in fact—it was a joy to see the number of young people who carried on in education when BTECs were introduced. I am sure that the same is true in many other Members’ constituencies.
It is estimated that, currently, at least 30% of 16 to 18-year-old students have chosen to study a BTEC. This Bill will eventually take that choice away. If the Government are as committed to levelling up as they constantly claim, then why are they looking to scrap one of the best tools to achieve this?
BTECs have been the engine of social mobility. Some 44% of white working-class students who enter university studied at least one BTEC, and 37% of black students enter university with only BTEC qualifications. There is no levelling-up agenda if the Government scrap the BTEC lifeline.
Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
I suspect that we may have been listening to a different opening statement from the Secretary of State, because I quite clearly heard his commitment that BTECs will remain where they are high quality and where there is a need for them. Does she remember that being a part of what he said?
Ms Rimmer
The Government are taking the funding away, and it is that that will stop young people getting these qualifications. People need to wake up to what is happening. The Government are taking the funding away. They are not cutting the opportunity straight off—it will just drift away. Young people will not go forward to T-levels. They will drop off and leave at 16. They will not go into further education. That is what will happen and that is what is intended.
T-levels are a welcome introduction, but they are not the same as BTECs. I have been implored by Carmel College in my constituency, one of the finest colleges in the country, to stress the following point: scrapping BTECs will lead to more young people dropping out of education altogether. The hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) seems to be sniggering on the Back Benches, but there is nothing to snigger about. I see young people achieving opportunities now when they did not in the past before BTECs. We cannot treat all young people the same; they are not all the same. For some young people, A-levels are best. For others, T-levels are the way to go. Many also find that BTECs are the route for them. We must protect all three routes. After all, our education system should be there to help young people excel in a way that suits them best. The Government should not be attempting to force them down a path that is not right for them. This is all about ending an opportunity for young people whom the Government do not value as much. There is no chance of levelling up with the Government at present.
Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)
Let me start by thanking the Secretary of State for what I thought was a rather conciliatory speech. Hopefully, it will set the tone for this evening’s debate on a Bill that has already gone through the other place. We have seen a number of amendments tabled, not least the one on essay mills—I am very grateful to the Government for adding it to the Bill. That was the result of a cross-party effort, involving not just myself, but Lord Storey who has led the charge in the other place, I think, for the past five years. I hope that, in this place, we can try to build some cross-party consensus in order to improve the Bill, as the Lords have done.
In that spirit of cross-party consensus, I would like to reflect on the words of the Opposition Front Bench spokesperson, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who set out very clearly the challenge with the lifetime skills guarantee. At present, it is not a guarantee for all those who need lifetime skills. As the Secretary of State clearly set out in his speech, 80% of the adult population in 2030 are already in work. If we wish to grip the challenges that climate change presents and grip the challenges of the systems-based approach that will lead to net zero across all parts of this country, we will need new forms of skills, reskilling and upskilling in green technologies, in retrofitting boilers and in all those things that, at the moment, we struggle to be able to do. We will need those reskilling and retraining opportunities. Those will come only if we take this moment to expand the lifetime skills guarantee and, importantly, as the Secretary of State said, the lifetime loan entitlement, because nothing flows without the finance. We need to ensure that that is available to those who have a level 3 qualification or above. We must look to abolish the so-called equivalent, or lower, qualification rule.
I want to declare my interest as having established a new Lifelong Education Commission with ResPublica. I am not paid for doing it, but I want to make sure that it is on the record that I have this interest in running the commission. The commission has published its first report, which looks in particular at what is needed when it comes to the frameworks. It is very easy to announce the lifetime skills guarantee—it sounds great. It is very easy to talk about a lifelong loan entitlement—it sounds marvellous—but unless we get the partnerships right in order to be able to deliver and implement this locally, they are just words. They are just a framework. I desperately want this to succeed.
I have been in this place for 11 years and, if I am honest, one of the greatest failures of my Government has been the decline in adult and part-time learning due to a lack of funding. We now have an opportunity to learn a lot of lessons from what went wrong there.
Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making a very good speech. Would he consider and welcome the improved approach to collaboration that the Treasury Bench has taken this evening, with the involvement of metro Mayors and combined authorities? Does he also agree that if we want to have a truly locally driven skills agenda, we need to involve local enterprise partnerships? They are often a much better voice for local employers than the chambers of commerce, which can be quite variable— not in the case of Suffolk, I hasten to add, but more generally.
Chris Skidmore
My hon. Friend’s intervention brings me to my second point, which is about the need to take a truly place-based approach to these reforms, if they are to succeed. We cannot necessarily legislate, top-down, and expect the reforms somehow to be successful. We have to involve local communities, because they know what will work in their local ecosystems. Many points have been made today about the role of employers. I would also say that universities are missing from the local skills improvement plans. The former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), made a point about the involvement of universities; they should be written into the Bill as part of the local skills improvement partnerships.
I know that we have had a review of the form and function of local enterprise partnerships. It may be that the levelling up White Paper brings further light on their role. There is enormous variability in the actual skills base of local enterprise partnerships to understand what is needed when it comes to delivering local skills. If we are going to level up, we want to ensure that we level up the capacity and capability of local actors to deliver on the ground, so ensuring that we get the correct place-based approach is important. I do not mind which actors locally are involved in the partnerships. I just think that it should be up to local communities to help forge the approach.
Let us look at what is happening in the Health and Care Bill, for which I have sat on the Bill Committee. We have seen that local approach with integrated care boards and integrated care partnerships. The Government are trusting them to come up with their own membership; it is not prescriptive. We have to try to demonstrate the same level of trust in education at a local level as we are doing with health through that Bill.
Margaret Greenwood
The right hon. Member is talking about the Health and Care Bill and trusting that this will all be okay; it is as if fingers have to be crossed and things are devolved down to a local level. Given the very high number of Members of Parliament with financial interests in private health, this is a dangerous road to go down. Will he revisit the view that he has just expressed? That Bill is a privatising Bill that is going to make it harder for people to get healthcare. It will open up the whole thing to the private sector in a way that we really need to object to.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Before you respond to that, Mr Skidmore, the time limit will be four minutes after you have finished your contribution.
Chris Skidmore
It is not an amendment for this Bill so I am simply not going to respond to that point.
I will finish by reflecting on the wider tone in which we take this debate forward. The former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire, talked about the need for partnerships between universities and further education colleges, and about ensuring that we do not pitch one against the other. That is absolutely right. This is a tertiary education Bill that is meant to be uniting, not divisive.
The Education Secretary, in his opening remarks, talked about President Harry Truman’s comment that it does not matter who takes the credit, as long as something is delivered successfully. I would like to quote another US President, Abraham Lincoln, who said:
“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”
I think that that applies when we look at the role of universities and further education colleges. We need them to work together in a sustainable ecosystem. We cannot allow the Bill to divide and rule, or somehow to allow for FE colleges to be compared unfavourably or favourably against universities.
We need higher technical education to succeed. To do that, we need flexible pathways that will allow the individual learner to move between FE and higher education—and sometimes back again—across the country. We will only ensure that those flexibilities exist if we support every part of the education sector and every institution. It is the institutions and their strengths that will deliver success in this vital Bill.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
I welcome the fresh focus from the Government on skills and further education. FE has long been the forgotten sector in education, with adult education funding having been halved over the past decade. Vocational training and qualifications have for too long been incorrectly treated as inferior to academic qualifications, which is why the Liberal Democrats have long promoted the policy of personal education and skills accounts, also known as skills wallets, which take a grant-based approach to support lifelong learning throughout adulthood. Vocational skills and lifelong learning have never been more important than now, in our post-Brexit—and soon, hopefully, post-pandemic—economy, as our country faces immense skills shortages in a number of sectors. However, I fear that the Bill introduced in the other place lacked ambition and attempted to slip under the radar the devastating assault on BTECs about which we have heard.
I want to touch on three points, all of which concern areas where non-Government amendments were made in the other place. I hope that the Government will not seek to overturn those amendments. As many Members have stated, BTECs are immensely popular, with more than a quarter of a million students taking these qualifications in any given year. They are disproportionately taken up by students from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities, and those with special educational needs and disabilities. It was therefore pretty shocking that the defunding proposals were slipped out at the start of the summer holidays, alongside a shocking impact assessment and in the face of opposition—with some 86% of respondents to the Government’s consultation opposing the plans. Even the former Conservative Education Secretary, Lord Baker, described the plan as “absolutely disgusting” in the other place, saying that it would deny “hope and aspiration” to many people from more disadvantaged backgrounds.
I urge the Minister to retain in full the amendment made in the other place to phase out the funding over four years, rather than over one as the Secretary of State announced today. Withdrawing funding sooner would narrow choice and force students into unsuitable qualifications. The Conservatives claim to be in favour of choice and competition, so I find it surprising that they want to force BTECs out of the market by defunding them. Lord Willetts made a similar point in the other place.
Let me turn to another amendment that I hope the Government will not overturn, regarding the penalty for benefit claimants who choose to continue their education to improve their job prospects. I very much hope that the Government will retain the Bishop of Durham’s amendment on universal credit conditionality, which is now clause 17. In taking away the £20 universal credit uplift and reducing the taper rate, Ministers have made much of the importance of making work pay, and getting people off welfare and into high-quality, well-paid jobs. However, the current system puts in place a range of barriers and disincentives to education for those on universal credit, which flies in the face of the Government’s ambitions. I therefore hope that they will retain the amendment.
Finally, I turn to the local skills improvement plans. I very much welcome the Government’s amendment in the other place to ensure that climate change and the environment are at the forefront of local skills improvement plans. That is critical if we are to be at the heart of the green industrial revolution. However, I urge the Government to keep in full the amendment made in the other place on the involvement of local authorities and regional government in the development of local skills improvement plans alongside ERBs.
I welcome the Bill, but I hope that the Government will go further and maintain a number of excellent amendments made in the other place.
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
It is wonderful to see the focus on adult education in the Bill, but I agree with some of the comments that there should not be an arbitrary distinction between an area that happens to have a Mayor and combined authority and an area that does not. I do not see why Suffolk should not benefit from devolved adult education in the same way as Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, which happen to have a Mayor.
For the skills improvement plans, some areas will have an effective chamber of commerce that can work well, and other areas will not have an effective chamber of commerce but a much better local enterprise partnership. A little flexibility on that point would be welcome. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) about the relationship between further education and higher education and the role of higher education in these plans. Fortunately, we in Ipswich benefit from a very strong relationship between the University of Suffolk and Suffolk New College. In Ipswich and Suffolk, the University of Suffolk has a critical role to play in degree apprenticeships and skills, and it is playing that role through the town deal and other Government support.
On the broader point about having one ecosystem, that is also linked to breaking down the barriers between schools, further education, higher education and business, and getting to the point where there is one ecosystem with no silos. That is ultimately what we want, linking not just young people but all people with local opportunities for higher-wage jobs so that they can get on. In terms of the importance of levelling up, in certain deprived areas, if there is only one, academic, pathway, a certain number of people might crack that pathway, but they often leave the area and never come back. It is vital that there is also a technical route that links in with local opportunities, because a lot of people who succeed in that route will be role models in their area and play a role in levelling up whole communities.
How is Ipswich currently benefiting from this movement in direction and strategy in further education? There are bad things and good things—mostly good. Through the town deal, we have £1.2 million going into a maritime skills academy that will train the next generation of boat builders—a highly skilled profession. In the past, most of the people who worked at Spirit Yachts were from outside the area; now, through the Government project, they will be from the local area, which is good thing. There is also the £2 million tech camp, with net zero, sustainable methods of construction—the first of its type in the country. The University of Suffolk’s £2.5 million integrated health and social care academy, achieved through the town deal, is very much to be welcomed. Last week, we learned that Suffolk New College, which I think is the best further education college in the country, has approximately £4 million of post-16 capacity funding from the overall fund of £85 million. Suffolk New College is one of 39 further education colleges to benefit from that funding, so although I have not had confirmed exactly how much we will get, I suspect that it will be about £3 million or £4 million, if I am being ambitious.
I very much welcome the Bill. We have to have multiple pathways to enable people to get on, and we have to have a proper approach to adult education, but flexibility is a must.
Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)
Having gone to a further education college myself, I am a strong supporter of further education and alternative routes to higher education or skills. As chair of the all-party group on social mobility, I think that both FE and alternative routes are the route to better social mobility. Since becoming a Member of this House in 2015, I have spoken numerous times, including in my maiden speech, about the importance of devolution in England and post-16 education. We need to match up the opportunities that exist in my very wealthy city with the lack of opportunity that too many of my constituents face. It remains a dreadful waste of their human potential.
In terms of supporting FE and apprenticeships, I have served as chair of the APPG on apprenticeships and I run an annual apprenticeships fair because I think that is the route up the ladder. It is a crucial step up, particularly for those who have a poor experience of school or no history or experience of higher education. The lack of a proposal or support in the Bill for lower level apprenticeships is a major mistake. The Government need to think again and try to match up some of those aspirations, particularly around level 2 and level 3.
On BTECs, I cannot say better than what was said by my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) and for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer). BTECs are a hugely valuable bridge of hope and encouragement. Frankly, we cannot keep experimenting with these kids. We would not be doing this with A-levels; nobody messes with A-levels in the way mess with the opportunities for these kids. We need to give them some security, and security of having people to teach it as well, as well as employer confidence.
I have often spoken about how poor career support is. These are confusing pathways for young people, particularly the young disadvantaged, and we need to make that better, but six years on, we still seem to be talking about the importance of career support. I listened carefully to the Secretary of State and await with interest further detail about managing that pathway and making it simpler. I think he understands that and we have to see whether he can deliver it.
As others have said, the Bill has been much improved in the Lords, and I support the amendments made there. On local ecosystems, I agree with my neighbour, the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore). We have heard some interesting discussions about the Secretary of State’s power grab and permissiveness at the local level. The Government have not got this right and there surely is some cross-learning to be done, because what is worrying about this Bill is the Secretary of State’s powers. There are no real criteria for when or how he or she can sack the local chamber of commerce person or the principal of the college if he or she thinks they are not performing. We have a similar problem in the Health and Care Bill. It would be good if the Government talked to different parts of their own side about that.
Fundamentally, we cannot deliver any of these things without a strong further education sector. The problems that we continue to have in Bristol are largely financial involving the college, but it has been “requires improvement” for some time, and that needs to change, because it means we cannot cohere the ecosystem and support other providers, such as the Knowle West Media Centre in my constituency, which I visited last week. Such organisations are at the forefront of digital innovation and supporting young people from the community into these larger providers. I await with interest how local accountability through the West of England Combined Authority will work, because it is clear to anyone that the FE funding model is broken.
With the amendments from the Lords, this is a better Bill for Bristol South, but many questions remain about the criteria for success. What is the Secretary of State’s real involvement? How can we support the local ecosystem? Being caught between the LEP and chambers of commerce is like being caught between a rock and a hard place, so that needs a great deal of examination. Democratic accountability is important, but crucially we need encouragement, support, ease of access and opportunity for our young people and those who have fallen behind at an earlier point in their lives. That is the only way we can ensure better social mobility.
Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Con)
I am delighted to speak today on this very important Bill. With the impact of covid-19, which exacerbated the skills shortage, the need to adapt to meet net zero by 2050 and the opportunity to flourish as an independent trading nation, the need to support skills across the UK is clearer than ever as we try to level up the most deprived areas of the country.
We talk about levelling up, but we are T-levelling up with this Bill. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on T-levels, I and the other members of the APPG heard at first hand from T-level students about the huge impact these qualifications have had on their lives and in assisting them to achieve their career aspirations. We heard from inspiring T-level students from Grimsby Institute, Walsall College, Fareham College, Blackpool and the Fylde College and Cirencester College, showing the huge impact these qualifications are having across the country.
I also had the huge privilege of meeting students at Bury College alongside the former Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan). We attended lessons to discover how students on the college’s brand new T-level courses would benefit from these innovative technical qualifications. Although there is more work to be done, such as ensuring there are no gaps in T-level provision in constituencies across the country, I am delighted that this Government have introduced the new qualification, effectively adapting to the needs of a modernised 21st-century British workforce.
Secondly, I emphasise the importance of improving literacy rates in the UK. Improving skills and introducing T-levels is a great step forward, but how can people access them without literacy? It is vital that literacy skills are embedded in a post-16 skills strategy. Research from KPMG has estimated that literacy failure costs the UK economy £2.5 billion each year. If we prioritise literacy skills in the post-16 space, it could have a significant economic benefit.
A quarter of all 15-year-olds have a reading age of 12 or below. That puts them at a disadvantage in their GCSEs, meaning they are unlikely to get the grades to progress to further education. Literacy should therefore be prioritised in the post-16 skills agenda to give students the vital skills they are missing, which will help them progress to further educational opportunities and enhance their future employment opportunities. That is particularly important when 70% of employers rate literacy skills as one of their three most important considerations when recruiting school and college leavers.
The National Literacy Trust has responded to that research with its flagship literacy and employability programme, “Words for Work”. It gives young people from disadvantaged communities the literacy and communication skills they need to reach their potential. It would be great if the Government recognised the importance of such programmes, which bring schools, colleges and businesses together to give young people the skills they need to succeed in the workplace.
Last, I pay tribute to the College of Rugby in Whitefield, which provides education, skills and training in the setting of a working rugby club. It also provides external qualifications, such as refereeing and first aid. It is great to see such institutions striking a realistic balance between sport and educational development. Will the Minister meet me to discuss what we can do to support unique institutions like that?
I support the Bill, which sets out to deliver high-quality, skills-focused education, eliminate the barriers that hold people back, and provide a ladder of opportunity across the entire country as we build back fairer.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. Tahir Ali will be the last speaker on four minutes. I am afraid that, to get everybody in, we will have to drop it to three minutes.
Tahir Ali (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I share the experience of the Secretary of State, having come to this country unable to speak a word of English—but I was only 13 months old. I am proud to be a product of BTEC, and not BTEC politics but BTEC engineering. I am probably right to surmise that Government Members who hold BTEC qualifications will be lower in number than those who are Etonians.
As a product of BTEC engineering, having secured an apprenticeship, been enrolled on to a course and achieved grades at merit or distinction, I was encouraged to study at undergraduate level at a local university. I was the first in my family to attend university, and my graduation was one of the proudest days for my parents. Thirty years on, my son, Tayab Ali, left school with good GCSEs but did not want to do A-levels. Like his father, he did BTEC engineering, which he completed in 2019 with grades of distinction star, distinction star, distinction. After covid, he secured an apprenticeship and is now studying for a degree paid for by his employer, just like mine was.
Not everyone takes the A-level route of some academics. As someone said earlier, no one would mess with A-levels, so why are we talking about scrapping BTECs and promoting T-levels instead? That risks holding back 80,000 students from achieving a level 3 qualification. My son would not have been able to achieve such a qualification. BTECs are valued highly by employers and universities, with 230,000 students having achieved a level 3 BTEC qualification this year alone.
The DFE wants to remove funding from any BTEC qualifications deemed to overlap with A-levels or T-levels, which seriously risks affecting students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds pursuing those qualifications, and disproportionately impacting those with special educational needs and those from Asian ethnic groups.
It is no surprise that 86% of respondents to the DFE’s consultation disagreed with the plans to scrap BTECs. I urge the Government to abandon their plan to withdraw support and funding for BTECs and to provide the best range of options for all young people to consider.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
I welcome the Bill and the intention to create better technical and vocational pathways for young people and give them clear careers advice, so that they end up on the right route for them rather than on whatever all their mates are doing. The lifelong learning guarantee and finance are hugely important, particularly in these post-covid times of massive skills shortages. With more people changing roles and careers in an ever-changing economy, it will be more important than ever to ensure that we support adults as well as young people to train and upskill. I also welcome the huge boost in funding for technical skills and vocational learning in the Budget. There are some fantastic examples of this in Mansfield. West Notts College and Nottingham Trent University have a partnership around health in particular, where they are joining up post-16 and HE, technical and vocational routes into the local hospital, which is our biggest employer. That is a really great example that we could definitely build on. As a county council, we want to add into that social work and social care, and make sure that we have that output from our local organisations and education providers. That is exactly the kind of example of providers working with business to create the kind of roles that we need in our local area, which I think is really important. Mansfield is benefiting from additional funding, too, at the minute.
The Secretary of State picked up on some of the things I was going to ask, and either my telepathy is working better than I thought or he is as wise as I am. I was going to ask him not to bin BTECs in their entirety, but to rationalise them and to make sure that we keep the best ones as clear routes to post-16 education for young people, which he has committed to do. I was going to ask him to be more flexible about T-levels and the entry routes into them, because clearly we should not be preventing people who want to do a T-level in early years education from accessing it because they were not very good at trigonometry. That really does not make any sense, so I am glad that he has committed to doing that.
If I were to ask anything else of the Minister who is on the Bench at the minute, it would be to talk about the level 3 entitlement. I think that is really important and would be really beneficial, but in communities such as mine, where 25% of people leave school with no level 2 qualification, being able to access level 3 will still be challenging. I wonder whether we could offer any additional support to help people to get into that and expand it to perhaps some of the areas where that is the biggest challenge. If he wants to pilot something, I know a place that would really welcome it.
On some of the powers that the Bill looks at to review provision and how it engages with business, I mentioned the positive example in Mansfield. Nottinghamshire is currently having conversations with Government about devolution and about county deals. We talk about adult skills in that budget. I wonder what scope there is to look at post-16 in that conversation, too, to join these things up—as we are doing at West Notts College with Nottingham Trent University—and to look at how we can embed social care interventions and youth work into that to do something really positive for young people’s life chances. I would welcome a conversation with the DFE about that as part of those talks, but I really welcome the scope and the intent of the Bill, which I think will make a huge difference to the people in my constituency.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
Of course, I welcome the reforms in the Bill that attempt to improve the quality of post-16 education, but the sector has been underfunded and indeed under-appreciated for too long and that must change.
I am relieved that peers have succeeded in amending the Bill to specify the Department for Education must not withdraw funding for BTEC qualifications, as currently planned, until there is strong evidence that they no longer meet employer and indeed students’ demands. Therefore, it is important that this House backs the Lords in that key amendment. BTECs are vital for allowing students to combine practical study with academic learning, and it would be incredibly short-sighted if that opportunity were taken away. I hope the level of support shown during this debate for BTECs will convince the Government to change their mind on this.
I now turn to the introduction of local skills improvement plans; I will call them LSIPs. These are a welcome measure in the Bill that aims to create a stronger link between local skills needs, as identified by employers, and the courses offered by colleges in the area. However, there is currently no reference to special educational needs or to disability employment anywhere in the legislation, which I find rather shocking. Some 21% of all students in general further education colleges have a learning difficulty or disability, rising to 26% among 16 to 18-year-olds. That equates to around 240,000 16 to 19-year-olds with SEND across all further education colleges. There is no mechanism in the Bill to encourage or require employers to use local skills improvement plans to help address the disability employment gap, which stands at nearly 30%. While a requirement in draft guidance for college governors to assess the quality of courses for students with SEND every three years is welcome, that on its own is not enough to have an impact on disability employment rates.
There are three key changes that would significantly improve the Bill for disabled people. First, the Bill must require evidence informing the development of LSIPs to include information directly relevant to improving local disabled people’s employment prospects. Secondly, LSIPs must include positive actions to improve the employment prospects of people with disabilities. Thirdly, members of employer representative bodies must be responsible for creating skills improvement plans that must demonstrate a commitment to equality and diversity, so they can create an inclusive plan for all, especially disabled people. I will be tabling amendments that would ensure the Bill fulfils these three key points to improve outcomes for SEND students and disabled people, and I hope the Government will look favourably on them.
John Stevenson (Carlisle) (Con)
As we all know, the future is all about a good education and having the right skills. If we are to have a prosperous and successful nation, we need our education and training systems to be first class and competitive. The same applies to individuals: if they are to thrive, they must be provided with the opportunities to do so. Education and skills can be a great leveller. A modern economy also demands a much higher degree of skilled workers than ever before. The jobs of the future will require people to be better trained and have the requisite skills, and we must also be aware that the skills and jobs of tomorrow may be very different from those of today.
We also know that rising living standards and greater wealth only come from a more productive economy. Improving our national productivity will require innovation, investment and a skilled workforce. In January, I will be hosting my eighth skills fair in Carlisle. It was first set up at the behest of local employers and training providers in the area and is supported by such businesses as McVitie’s, Nestlé, Pirelli and Center Parcs. The key point is that they wanted a skills fair, not a jobs fair; those and other businesses recognise that it is skills that matter. I therefore fully support the direction in which the Government want to go and the improvements they want to see.
I appreciate that the Bill covers a number of policy and administrative areas, but I want to pick up on just two points. First, it is absolutely right that all pupils and students are made aware of all the training and educational opportunities and possibilities open to them: academic, technical and apprenticeships. We are fortunate to have a quality university sector and the university option is clearly important, but other training opportunities are of equal importance. Indeed it is arguable that technical training and apprenticeships are almost more vital if we are to improve the performance of our economy. That will be required if we are to become competitive in the global economy so it is absolutely right that all institutions have a duty to make sure that students have all options.
Secondly, it is vital that employers, and indeed local leaders, are at the centre of the skills system—and it must be local employers. They know what skills are needed and the training and courses required, they know the local economy and they know where the jobs of tomorrow are likely to be created. A real partnership between business and training providers can be the blueprint for a better skilled and trained workforce that benefits the individual as well as our country.
Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)
Since 2010, Conservative-led Governments have cut adult education budgets by half, damaging the life chances of people right across the country. They have pursued an ill-conceived austerity agenda and our society is the poorer for it.
Being able to read and write is essential to full engagement in society. Illiteracy blights lives. It prevents people from getting decent employment, is the source of immense disadvantage in navigating the various social structures on which we all rely at some points in our lives, whether that be housing, health and care services, education or social security, and it leaves people vulnerable to exploitation.
These profound disadvantages are experienced by the more than 7 million adults in England who, according to National Literacy Trust estimates, have very poor literacy skills. That is 16.4% of the adult population. Tackling the crisis in adult literacy therefore must be a priority for Government.
The Government made an announcement in the autumn Budget about funding for a new UK-wide numeracy programme to improve basic maths skills, but I ask the Minister where the money is to address the crisis in adult literacy. As the Workers’ Educational Association has pointed out, little in the Bill directly supports learners who want to study below level 3. Without targeted support for community learning below level 3, there will be limited pathways for the most disadvantaged learners—those furthest from the workforce—to progress into further education and/or work.
It is also important that the Government consider the barriers potential learners face. When I was an adult education tutor I met many people who wanted to improve their situation and career prospects but who were unable to get the education they needed as they were constrained by social security rules. The amendment tabled by the Bishop of Durham in the other place requiring the Secretary of State to review universal credit conditionality to ensure that adult learners who are unemployed and on universal credit remain entitled to universal credit if they enrol on an approved course is incredibly important. Nobody should be barred from education because of their employment status.
It is really disappointing that the Government intend to press ahead with plans to defund the majority of BTEC qualifications in spite of the high value placed on BTECs by students, employers and universities. Around 230,000 students achieved their level 3 BTEC qualification this year. It is notable that the Department for Education’s own impact assessment concluded that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds will lose out the most from the move to scrap most BTEC funding. At a time when we have deep inequality in the country, more than 14 million living in poverty and a serious depletion of opportunities for adult education as a direct result of Conservative Government austerity, that cannot be right. Adult education has the power to transform lives and to embed in communities a culture of learning that we shouldall be able to enjoy. It is important that the Government ensure that opportunities are available to people regardless of where they live and their employment status, and that financial barriers are removed.
Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)
It is an absolute joy and delight to be here to talk about this Bill, which I wholeheartedly support. It speaks to places such as Great Grimsby. To level up properly, we really need to support technical education. That is something we have needed to do for decades now. Despite the caricature by Opposition Members, I got a BTEC myself and I taught in further education for 22 years, but not all BTECs are equal; some are very high quality, and some are not such good quality. That is why we need to take a really good look at the whole provision.
I taught in further education when new Labour had its mantra of “education, education, education”, and I can tell the House that that actually decimated technical education. HNCs and HNDs virtually died overnight, and towns such as Great Grimsby, which has fantastic further education provision—we have the Ofsted grade 1 Grimsby Institute and the Ofsted grade 2 Franklin Sixth Form College—were utterly gutted by what happened in education then. That proves that this is about not the amount of funding that we put in, but where we put it and where our priorities lie.
It is absolutely key that we put employers at the centre of this policy. That makes employers realise that they have the power, and they will work with our educators to make sure that we are getting the right kinds of qualifications. In Grimsby, our biggest employer is our seafood sector, but we have a dearth of qualifications in that sector. That is why it is fantastic that we are developing our apprenticeships provision, which is utterly needed.
However, I want to make sure that we include everybody in our local skills improvement plans. That includes all types of employer—our large employers, our small and medium-sized enterprises, our sole traders—as well as our educators. I was happy to see in the Bill that we have not specified the type of designated employers’ groups that should come together. As other Members have said, we have some weak groups and some strong groups, and we need to make sure that we are able to account for that. I am heartened that the Secretary of State will sign off the LSIPs, because that will make sure that we align them with the skills we need locally and not the skills that suit the providers, which is what has happened for the last few decades.
As a further education ambassador, I am delighted to work with the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), and I look forward to seeing the Bill go through the House.
Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)
I pay tribute to the staff at Christ the King Sixth Form College, which I have recently been in contact with. They really do go the extra mile to support young people in my constituency with vocational and non-vocational skills and learning.
I am very supportive of the aims of the Bill, but in content it is just too weak to meet the task facing us. It tries to make up for over a decade of neglect with too little action. We have a serious shortage of skilled workers in certain British jobs. Eleven years of short-sighted education policy in this country has contributed to that issue, but education is not the only factor. Due to the disastrous Tory Brexit agreement, we are now experiencing a wide variety of economic issues. Only now are some people realising how important EU migrant workers were. We are all now feeling the effects of the worker shortage and supply chain issues. Only now are some people realising that they were wrong in their attitudes of superiority over that workforce and eating humble pie.
Of course, the Government should be turning their attention to further education to try to fix their crisis, but taking a bulldozer to the current BTEC system is not the answer. BTECs have helped so many students, in my constituency and beyond, to pursue their potential in vocational subjects. It is indeed important to open alternative pathways for young adults who do not feel that the traditional sixth-form education is for them. Sadly, the numbers show that pupils with different skills and interests from the standard academic subjects have been failed by successive Tory Governments. A staggering four in 10 young people are currently leaving education without level 3 qualifications. When we consider that those Governments have slashed further education by a third since 2010, it is not that much of a surprise.
The Bill is not popular across the board. Some 86% of respondents to the Department for Education’s consultations were against the proposals for qualifications to overlap A-levels and T-levels. The Secretary of State said that he will look at the data, but he is obviously not looking or paying attention to that data. Even Margaret Thatcher’s Education Secretary, Lord Baker, has spoken out against the proposals, so why are the Government persisting with scrapping the BTEC system when students and professionals alike are so against that?
If the Government really want to strengthen the workforce of the future, they will invest more money, more resources, more teaching, more child and adolescent mental health services, more student choice and more financial support for students. Let us improve what we have, not defund it and not move towards scrapping it all together.
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
I, too, warmly welcome the Bill, with the emphasis it places on lifelong learning. Although 50% of people go to university, all of us will be working for something like 40 to 50 years, so it is very important that people have the opportunity to acquire new skills during their lifetime. I therefore join voices from across the House in whole-heartedly welcoming the direction of travel in the Bill.
I particularly welcome the Bill’s emphasis on place and local economic links, with links to local employers and a greater emphasis on local governance. My local schools with sixth forms will also welcome the Secretary of State’s announcement this evening of the extension of funding for certain courses to 2025. One local high school has written to me to emphasise that its students value taking courses in sport, business, travel and tourism, sound engineering and IT. This is, therefore, a very positive Bill.
I want to use my time to raise a local case, which the Minister was kind enough to discuss with me recently, where the direction of travel is completely wrong: the case of Malvern Hills College. It is a wonderful college, which has been in the town of Malvern for nearly 100 years. About five years ago, it was acquired by Warwickshire College Group. Warwick, of course, is quite a long way from Malvern. The group, which has a lot of disparate sites, took the unfortunate decision to close the college. The college has been going for nearly 100 years and is very valued by the local community. The community has put in place a covenant on the site, which is that it should be used for educational purposes only.
I urge the Minister, in his response, to see whether he can use the powers in the Bill to examine that very unfortunate decision and push back on Warwickshire College Group’s plans to close an institution that for nearly 100 years has been enhancing the skills, the lifetime learning and the life chances of people in Malvern. There will be a demonstration to show support for the college, and 5,000 signatures have already been added to the petition.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I speak as a vice-chair of the all-party group on sixth-form education and as a proud governor of Luton Sixth Form College.
Under the Conservative Government, further education and training have been treated as an afterthought for over a decade. Post-16 and further education budgets have been slashed by a third since 2010. According to the Learning and Work Institute, last month’s Budget will restore funding to only 60% of the 2010 level, leaving a £750 million gap. Students make choices at 16 that will affect the rest of their lives. Sixth forms and colleges are there to guide them by recognising their strengths and shaping their development, including helping with appropriate choices about the right course of study.
BTEC qualifications are a key option available to students. They allow students to shape their learning, combining academic learning and practical skills and a range of assessment types. For example, the health and social care BTEC is a practical, work-related course that provides students with the option of formal study in future to become a nurse, midwife or social worker or of a more practical option through an apprenticeship or becoming a healthcare assistant. In towns such as Luton, the ecosystem is excellent: people can study a health and social care BTEC, study at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton and then progress to work at the Luton and Dunstable University Hospital.
Defunding—in effect, scrapping many BTECs—will leave many students without a viable pathway after GCSEs, hampering their progression to higher education or skilled employment. Disadvantaged young people are most likely to suffer. The Department for Education equalities impact assessment concluded that
“those from SEND backgrounds, Asian ethnic groups, disadvantaged backgrounds, and males”—
are—
“disproportionately likely to be affected.”
I am fully aware of how the proposals will impact on students at Luton Sixth Form College, where over 70% of students are not white and 70% receive bursaries, such as free school meals. UCAS data from 2020 shows that 92% of BTEC students accepted university offers.
Fundamentally, this is a class issue. Working-class students who are more likely to study BTECs and do not have the personal networks to support a future career will lose access to a route to higher education and employment. BTECs are engines of social mobility. Research from the Social Market Foundation found that 44% of white working-class students who enter university studied at least one BTEC, and 37% of black students enter with only BTEC qualifications.
It is impossible to square the Government’s stated ambition to “level up” opportunity with the plan to get rid of most BTECs, including all larger versions of the qualifications that are deemed to overlap with A-levels or T-levels. In his closing remarks, will the Minister explain how this ill thought out decision fits with the Government’s claim to level up in education?
Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)
This is a very exciting Bill and I support it, but I think that the Government are missing a big opportunity here if we are waiting until post-16. Only 49.9% of young people achieved a GCSE in English and maths of grade 5 and above in 2019-20, with many being forced to take them over and over again in post-16 education, so I am really pleased to hear the news today that that will stop. By that stage, many of them are already disengaged and we will have lost many of them from education and skills training.
I think we should be looking at a 14 to 18 curriculum across the board in the Bill. We already have university technical colleges, which follow that model. I point out that UTC Portsmouth has 34 local business partners that are already helping to shape its curriculum and that, last year, 100% of leavers got jobs. It is getting young people into what they are really interested in learning from 14 rather than making them fit into our present assessment system until they are 16.
We have a shortage of skills, which is keeping our economy back and making us less productive and less competitive compared with our international peers. Most, if not all, of our competitors do not pause education at 16 with exams, which incidentally take out six to seven months of what should be a productive learning year, so why do we?
We should get rid of GCSEs and replace them with a school leaving certificate at the end of schooling or training at 18. It should include academic, technical and vocational qualifications, with a wider spread of learning to equip young people for the skills that we need today. Training young people from the age of 14 will make sure that they are engaged, because they will know that what they are studying will help with future employment. We need to put technical and vocational education on a par with academic qualifications, making sure that we work with businesses, universities and young people to design a curriculum that works for everybody and helps young people to contribute to the community, as well as preparing them for the life of work.
Charities such as Oarsome Chance in Gosport are taking young people from the age of nine who are at risk of exclusion and disadvantage, including some from Meon Valley, and giving them skills for future employment, including life skills. These young people struggle with attaining GCSE level 2, but the charity gives them an alternative education provision that re-engages them and helps them to find a route to employment. That should not be left to charities, however; it should be in our mainstream education system.
Failing at 16 has a major impact on any young person, so I plead that the Government look again. The Bill is an excellent start, but skills learning for young people’s employment future should start at 14, not 16.
Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. As a strong supporter of further education and community adult education, I am pleased to be holding a jobs and skills fair in Roehampton on Friday, to which I invite all hon. Members including the Minister. I also invite the Minister to come and speak to schools and to South Thames further education college, because I feel that there is a huge disconnect between what I have been hearing from them and what has been stated about the Bill.
I went to South Thames College this morning to talk to teachers and students. They are extremely worried about the significant pay gap of £9,000 between further education teachers and schoolteachers, which affects recruitment, retention and the ability to employ industry experts for technical subjects. However, their main concern is about the scrapping of BTEC qualifications. Going ahead with those plans will undermine the ambition of the Bill fundamentally, so they need to be revisited. The Secretary of State says that he will extend the transition period and change the requirements for English and maths; those measures are welcome, but they are absolutely not enough to make up for the difference between BTECs and going on to T-levels.
We need a two-route model for technical education, keeping T-levels with BTECs alongside them. Let me set out some reasons that schools have given me. First, T-levels have too high an entry barrier simply to replace BTECs. South Thames College has 4,500 students, but 2,000 would not have the qualifications for T-levels. What would happen to them? Scrapping BTECs is taking the rungs out of the ladder of opportunity, mainly for disadvantaged students in our communities.
Another fundamental difference is that BTECs are made up of units. That enables learners to take English and maths alongside the course, which will simply not be possible with T-levels; it also enables learners to work alongside their studies, which will not be possible with T-levels either, meaning that many students will be shut out of further education. BTECs can have a good impact on mental health because of the varied assessment outcomes and measures, which will not be possible with T-levels.
T-levels are not deliverable at the scale needed by the schools and colleges that I have talked to, because of the number of work placements required. They will cut off a route to university that is currently taken by many medical students, and they will undermine some apprenticeships. I urge Ministers to stop this hammer blow to social mobility, stop the biggest threat to post-16 education, and keep funding for BTECs in the long term, alongside T-levels.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
We are very lucky in Loughborough, because we have a thriving education sector. In many ways, education is our industry, and productivity and outputs are second to none. I consider that the Bill will ensure that the opportunities that we already strive for in Loughborough are spread throughout the country.
One aim of the Bill is to place employers at the heart of our skills system, establishing a skills accelerator to enable employers and education providers to collaborate to ensure that skills provision meets local need. Loughborough already owns the T-shirt on this, from A-levels, university courses, apprenticeships, BTECs, traineeships and the lifetime skills guarantee to the town deal-funded careers and enterprise hub in the centre of town. Loughborough College is also in the process of building a T-Level centre—thanks to Government funding—and we are hoping that the joint bid with Loughborough University, Loughborough College, Derby University and Derby College will be successful and enable an institute of technology to be established. Our local providers aim to skill young people and upskill adult workers specifically for our businesses and organisations.
Last week I met the BTEC uniformed services students at Loughborough College and saw the skills they were gaining and the development path they were on, just as it was when a member of my own family completed the course. Every one of them is a credit to their course and will go on, I am sure, to be highly competent professionals in areas such as policing and the armed services and in other related roles, following their lifetime ambitions and goals and helping to fill the crucial roles that our country needs. I wish them all the very best for the future. I therefore welcome the confirmation from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that the Government continue to recognise the importance of BTEC qualifications.
The Bill will also make it a criminal offence to arrange contract cheating such as essay mills, and I particularly want to thank Loughborough Students’ Union for all its work and campaigning in bringing about that amazing reform.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
This Bill is an opportunity for us to give further education the attention that it deserves, but if we are to realise the full potential of further education, we must make up for years of cuts under successive Conservative Governments. It is the worst-funded sector in our cash-strapped education system, particularly for adult learners. We have already had many debates on this subject. Jayne Davis, the new principal of the excellent Bath College, told me that further education in this country was at a “tipping point”. The sector does not need catch-up funding; it needs a long-term funding strategy.
Further education must be at the front and centre of our covid recovery, creating a workforce that has the skills we need to fill the gaps in our national and local economies. I need no excuse to talk once more about the fantastic efforts of Bath College, Bath Spa University, Bath and North East Somerset Council, and the Institute of Coding. Together, they were quick off the mark in response to covid, to get the I-START project up and running. The project enables our workforce to upskill through blended, flexible modules. Those who have spoken today about a flexible education system should look no further than Bath for an example of what can be achieved through collaboration between our local authorities and all parts of our education sector.
A key opportunity for further education is to be at the forefront of our efforts to reach net zero. Currently, fewer than 1% of college students are on a course with broad coverage of climate education. Unless we embed climate and environment in our post-16 education curriculum, the Government’s plans for net zero will simply not be possible.
Bath College is doing that already, and now the Government must step up as well. This Bill should be helping students—their voice must not be lost along the way—but the Government’s proposals to defund BTECs, about which we have heard a great deal tonight, will leave many students without a viable pathway at the age of 16. Current estimates suggest that at least 30% of students in England currently studying at level 3 are pursuing a BTEC. Withdrawing support from BTECs could lead to those students studying for a qualification that was not right for them, or dropping out of education altogether.
T-levels are a welcome development, and I hope they will give future generations the technical skills that they need to succeed in their careers, but BTECs do that as well. Creative subjects such as performing arts are among the first courses that fill up in our local college. BTECs are important to those who study for them, and they are also important to Bath. We must not take choice away from students.
Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse). While she was speaking, I was struck by something that she did and so many others have done during the debate: she paid tribute to the educational establishments in her constituency. This is what is bringing us all together. We all want this to work. We all know how important skills are to our future and our future generations.
I am proud to support the Bill, and I will pick two main reasons—I could go on, but we have a time limit. The first element is the Bill’s commitment to ensuring that skills, education and training respond to the needs of the local economy, something my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) referred to. For Milton Keynes, that means delivering new skills in our local industries, such as tech and finance. I have talked at length about the robots, the driverless cars and the e-scooters that make Milton Keynes the wonderful place it is. Basically, we will be enhancing and future-proofing our reputation as a hub for innovation and technology.
The second element is the introduction of the lifelong learning entitlement or LLE, which will open so many doors to people across Milton Keynes. It will allow people to pursue a career that was previously out of reach: if we add in that first element of ensuring that we are on top of future skills requirements, it will allow people to pursue careers that we have not even thought of right now.
I am proud to say that Milton Keynes is already leading the way on this matter, as we are home to the wonderful Open University. Previous speakers have mentioned modular learning, including, I think, the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson); the Bill is an amazing step towards our goal, but in my remaining minute I will share a few concerns.
First, I am keen to see provisions relating to local school improvement plans take into account the role of online and nationwide skills providers such as the OU in Milton Keynes. The OU is one of the top five skills providers in 90% of the English parliamentary constituencies and plays a formidable role in our levelling-up agenda, so it is important that those plans are as inclusive as possible.
Secondly, the funding provided by the LLE, while welcome, must address the disparity between those who can study full or part-time in a traditional sense and those who can only undertake modular study. I urge the Government to produce further guidance on that.
I would be remiss if I did not mention—I hope the Minister knows this is coming—that as part of how this Bill sits we need a new university in Milton Keynes. I ask my colleagues at the Department to reconsider and re- engage with the idea of Milton Keynes university, MK:U.
Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)
I begin by paying tribute to everything that Wirral Met College in my constituency does to equip young people with the skills they need to thrive in a fast-changing world. Even during the darkest days of the pandemic, when colleges across our country were forced to shutter their doors, educators never wavered in their commitment to their students, but our colleges and sixth forms simply cannot be expected to survive on goodwill alone.
Since 2010, the post-16 education sector has been decimated by sweeping funding cuts. Further education budgets have been slashed by a third, while spending on adult education has fallen by more than half in real terms. Even with the recent announcement of additional funding in last month’s Budget, Government spending still falls way short of what it was when Labour was last in power. The Government can talk as much as they like about the importance of lifelong learning, but their promises will always ring hollow while spending levels remain so woefully inadequate.
I hope the Minister will soon come before the House to explain what steps the Government will be taking to undo the catastrophic legacy of 10 long years of austerity on this critically important sector. I know that many of the young people I represent feel deeply concerned by the Government’s proposals to defund the vast majority of BTECs. Those qualifications have proved a precious resource for the hundreds of thousands of young people who complete them each year, and no one has benefited more from their introduction than young people living in the north end of my constituency, one of the most deprived areas in the whole UK.
Ofsted and the Government’s own equality impact assessment have warned that those are the young people who stand to lose the most from the Government’s reckless plans to replace BTECs with unproven T-levels. That is why I warmly welcome Lords amendment 29, which will maintain approval for BTECs until such time as T-levels are fully rolled out. With employers, educators, trade unions and a host of former Education Secretaries calling for the retention of BTECs in their entirety, the Minister must explain why he is so intent on pushing ahead with these reforms when there is such broad consensus about the damage they will cause.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
I welcome this Bill. Some may say it is not before time, but it provides the means both for addressing the problems that have hung over the UK for too long and for meeting future challenges. It is, in many respects, a landmark Bill, and thus it is important that we get it right so that it can herald the start of a new era that provides people of all ages, whatever their background and from wherever they come, with the opportunity to realise their full potential.
As we have heard, amendments have been made in the other place, often on a cross-party basis. I urge the Government not to seek to strike them out too hastily, as many of them improve the Bill. Such is the strategic timing of the Bill that, from my perspective, the amendment in the names of the noble Lords Clarke and Layard, to place the lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing, is well merited.
With the welcome reduction in the taper rate of universal credit announced in the Budget, the Government have placed much emphasis both on the importance of making work pay and on the current high level of job vacancies. Unfortunately, many people are currently some distance from the workplace and are not able to take advantage of these opportunities. However, many of them would be able to do so if universal credit conditions were reformed so that they could more readily access education and training. With that in mind, I urge the Government to consider carefully the amendment tabled by the Lord Bishop of Durham.
The opportunities that the Bill provides are immense, but they will not be realised without proper investment in our often unsung but nevertheless impressive national network of colleges. The funding announced in the comprehensive spending review is welcome, but it should be viewed as only a start.
In recent years, one of the great success stories in north Suffolk and east Norfolk has been the significant progress made by East Coast College with its campuses in both Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. The college is a pivotal player in the strategy to remove pockets of coastal deprivation and to realise the full potential that the zero-carbon economy presents in sectors such as offshore wind and nuclear at Sizewell C. To play this role fully and properly, East Coast College and colleges across the country must be properly resourced. A resilient college network is vital if we are to achieve the aims of this Bill.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the Secretary of State, the Minister and the Government for this Bill, which is a positive step in the right direction. It is England-centred, and therefore it will not affect us directly in Northern Ireland, but in my intervention on the Secretary of State I referred to the underachievement of disadvantaged white British boys and girls, which has been replicated in Northern Ireland.
My colleague Peter Weir MLA was an assiduous Education Minister, and he introduced a strategy to address the underachievement of young protestant males in our school system. They were failing to be educated, and they left school without qualifications. We must be cognisant of targeted need, and we must respond to that need appropriately. Peter Weir sought to do so and, before he left his post as Education Minister, he launched the “A Fair Start” report and action plan to address it. Across the UK, we need to ensure that every child, regardless of their background, class, creed or colour, has a fair start, and I commend the report to the Minister.
I support the Chancellor’s decision to support apprentices with a £3 billion investment to build a high-wage, high-skill economy. It builds on the Prime Minister’s lifetime skills guarantee, which directly invests in 16 to 19-year-olds and will see the numbers double and the number of skills bootcamps quadruple. It is a positive strategy, and there is funding to make it happen.
I have served on Glastry College’s board of governors for 34 years, and I have seen many boys go through the school, both those who are academically qualified and interested, and those who have more practical skills. Many who struggle in academia excel with their hands. We need the skill of the steelworker to form the bolts and screws, and we need the skill of the surgeon to complete the hip replacement. We also need those who are educationally disposed to take other opportunities. Both are essential for success, so we need to build up both forms of education, academic and practical. I am very supportive of the enhancement of apprenticeship places and incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises, the employers, to take on apprentices as a way to combat the underachievement in those fields that must be targeted. I believe that the Minister needs to work alongside colleagues in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to make sure that our young people have the skills for tomorrow that we wish them to have.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
On Friday, I had the great pleasure of speaking to and listening to about 200 businesses at the Warrington Business Exchange. It was the first time they had come together for about two years. The No. 1 issue they raised with me was skills, and I was delighted to say to them that we have an oven-ready Bill to satisfy all of their needs.
Having worked as an employer for many years, I can say that one of the greatest issues that businesses face is finding individuals who have the skills to take their businesses forward. Most of us who have watched the news over the past six months or listened to the radio know that we have a skills issue in this country. That is not new. The challenges of preparing young people for that giant leap from education into the world of work have been there for many years, so the Bill is very welcome. It really does address some of the key issues that employers and young people face, which is why I welcome many of the reforms it introduces.
In particular, we need to make sure that the 50% of young people who do not go to university are not deprived of the chance of a great education, a vocational education, that will help them to be the best that they can be in their life. This Bill and policy sit at the heart of levelling up; this is part of the outcome that will drive opportunity for young people around the country.
Let me spend a moment talking about some of the things that Warrington is doing with its towns fund deal. The Government have allocated £22 million to Warrington. A proportion of that is going to help with skills for specific sectors, with £1 million going to tackle the skills shortage in the health and social care sector, with an academy being set up at the Warrington & Vale Royal College; and £3.3 million going to set up an advanced construction and engineering academy in Warrington, specifically business-led, to broaden the offer and help to ensure that we get young people trained up for our local economy.
Finally, I wish to touch on T-levels. So much has been said about phasing out BTECs, but I want to talk about phasing in T-levels. Warrington’s Priestley College has led the introduction of T-levels in the north-west of England, and I talked to the senior team there who have worked on T-levels. They have introduced courses on science, healthcare, education and childcare, and digital production, and they are absolutely committed to ensuring that they go further and faster with T-levels, because they have seen the difference that this makes to young people. So when I hear Opposition Members talking down the opportunity that T-levels bring, I say to them, “Go and look at some of these colleges and see the opportunities that they bring forward.”
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I congratulate the Department for Education, Ministers, former Ministers and the former Secretary of State on their work to get the Bill over the line. I have been amazed to listen to Opposition Members rewrite their education history. Labour’s “Education, education, education,” sounded good, but it actually focused on getting 50% of kids into university, regardless of the degree, and forgetting about the rest. It made jobs bad and uni good. The reason I know that is because in the 1990s I left home at 15; I did not do very well at school and did not go to uni, and I was made to feel bad about that. Time and again, I was told that I would not succeed, but now I am here, causing you lot trouble.
I cannot describe what a difference it makes for young people in Stroud to hear that their training courses are being discussed by Ministers now. Which skilled people did we miss during the lockdowns and realise that we cannot live without? It was local chefs, beauticians, hairdressers, carers, brickies, childminders and creatives, every single one of whom got their education at colleges. My wonderful South Gloucestershire and Stroud College and the Association of Colleges recognise the significance of the Government’s now recognising colleges’ central role at the heart of our economic recovery. We are using colleges to address long-term regional inequalities and the transition to net zero. This has not happened before.
When the Minister sums up, I would like to hear more about putting the lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing and extending it to include level 3 courses, as my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) said. I would like to know whether the Government are looking at the creation of maintenance support systems, as proposed in the Philip Augar report, and whether they will create a duty for schools and universities to collaborate with colleges and employers in the development of skills plans. Stroud is already modelling putting employers at the heart of FE: the growth hub and the GFirst local enterprise partnership are already based in our college, and our wonderful University of Gloucestershire already collaborates with colleges and employers.
As I said in my essay for the Conservative Environment Network, I believe there is a green skills emergency. I meet vocational FE students in Stroud all the time and they want to create the businesses that fix our planet, our homes and our cars. Currently, only 5% of mechanics can fix electric vehicles; we have to change that. The think-tank Onward knows that we need 170,000 more green-skilled workers to qualify for retrofitting and renewable heat each year. This has to change: if we do not have the skilled people, we will not be able to save the planet. It really is that simple. I am therefore pleased to note that the Government are considering amending the Bill to require the local skills plans to include the UK’s net zero target and other environmental goals. That is really important if such plans are to be approved. The Government are genuinely changing lives with this Bill, and I thank the Secretary of State very much.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to wind up for the Opposition after a good debate on this Bill, with some excellent speeches and important contributions from Members in all parts of the House. I repeat the tribute by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) to our colleagues in the House of Lords, who adopted a constructive, cross-party approach to the Bill.
I hope that the Minister has taken note of the contributions to this debate, because much of real value was said by Members on the Opposition and Government Benches. Indeed, two contributions from Conservative Members were—I suspect inadvertently—very revealing. The right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) revealed that adult education funding is currently at its lowest level for 23 years. That set me thinking about what might have happened 23 years ago that meant that adult education funding was at such a low level but improved substantially over time, only to reach its nadir now. Of course, a Labour Government happened 23 years ago, and it has taken 11 years to unwind that Labour Government’s investment in adult education to the current nadir.
The former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), also made a revealing contribution: he said that levelling up is all about investment in human beings—people in every area throughout the country. Of course, he was one of the Secretaries of State who was in power while there was a 40% reduction in adult education. He presided over that. I absolutely agree that if levelling up is to mean anything, it has to mean investment in people, which is precisely what we have not seen under this Government.
A number of Members spoke powerfully about the role of BTECs. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) spoke of Lord Baker’s description of the defunding of BTECs as “act of educational vandalism”. My hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) spoke up for her local college and about the number of students at that college who would miss out. My hon. Friends the Members for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) and for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) spoke of the importance of the BTEC pathway, particularly for disadvantaged students. And my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) spoke passionately and movingly about his own journey as a BTEC engineering student who went on to be the very first person in his family to go to university, and his pride at seeing his son follow in his footsteps.
This question is really important, because the Government have set out to trash the reputation of BTECs and then come back and said, “Actually, we’re only going to get rid of some of them—only the low-quality ones.” The damage is being done already. Students are on those courses now: 230,000 students who are doing level 3 BTECs are being told that those are poor-quality qualifications. Why make that announcement and create all that uncertainty and then say, “Oh, we’re going to do a review and then we’ll look at the evidence.”? This whole approach has been wrong. I welcome the more conciliatory language that we are hearing from the new Secretary of State, but the damage has been done, and we need to quickly hear from him which of those courses will be carrying on, which ones will not and what is the plan for those students who will not be doing T-levels.
The real worry is that this will result in fewer students from more deprived communities achieving vocational qualifications at level 3. Pulling up that drawbridge will, without question, restrict opportunities, particularly for white working class and black, Asian and minority ethnic students from those communities. The Secretary of State repeated the description of BTECs as a low-quality qualification, so if we are hearing a change of tone, we need to know whether we are seeing a change of policy.
There was a lot of discussion about local skills improvement plans. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) spoke about the extent to which special needs students are missing from LSIPs, which is an important point. We very much welcome the Secretary of State’s climbdown on the subject of metro Mayors and their responsibility in terms of LSIPs, but if the responsibility of those elected to local government in metro Mayor areas is accepted, as was said by the hon. Members for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) and for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), what of areas that do not have metro Mayors? Why is there no local democratic accountability for those areas? It occurs to me that the vast majority of my right hon. and hon. Friends represent areas that have metro Mayors, but the majority of Government Members do not, so they will have no democratic accountability whatsoever. The point made by the hon. Member for Ipswich about the variation in chambers of commerce—some are very good and some are much less good—was well made.
Mr Perkins
Let me crack on. If I have time, I would be very happy to hear from the hon. Gentleman.
The Government have indicated that they will seek to overturn Lord Baker’s amendment on careers guidance, which would have allowed a range of educational and training providers access to every student in years 8 to 13. The House will be aware that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) has committed a future Labour Government to guarantee face-to-face professional careers guidance for every pupil, and compulsory two-week work experience. The Government should seek to match that ambition.
The hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) spoke about students considering careers that they had not even heard of previously. That is incredibly important. It is one of the reasons why careers guidance is so crucial. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton South spoke about the fact that poorer children do not have the networks on which the more affluent children are able to rely.
We absolutely support the Government’s intention to introduce a lifetime skills guarantee. It is a return to what students would have been able to enjoy under a previous Labour Government. However, as has been said, there are currently 9 million jobs in our economy that will be excluded. Anyone who has a level 3 qualification already and wants to retrain in the future will be excluded from doing so. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) and the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore), who is growing very nicely into his beard—[Interruption.] It is always a pleasure to see someone who has aged almost as much as I have in the past 11 years. He made what I thought was a mature point, bestowing on us his status as a greybeard, that this is not actually a guarantee. The fact that it is not on a statutory footing means that it is only an aspiration. It is an aspiration that we welcome, but the word “guarantee” means something. If we cannot guarantee that this will be available to so many students, as I have already laid out, it is not a guarantee at all.
We welcome the funding changes that the Secretary of State announced, but one of our key criticisms of the Bill is that much of it is ill-defined and not fully thought through. The fact that we have an announcement that there will be an extension while the Government work out which courses are needed and which ones are not is exactly why these announcements should not have been made until the Government had done their research.
Christian Wakeford
T-levels are obviously a fantastic idea. We have already heard from the Secretary of State that there are more than 12,000 qualifications. Does the hon. Member agree that that is far too many and that, based on international comparisons, fewer than 1,000 would be really sensible?
Mr Perkins
It is an interesting point. The Government have said that there are too many qualifications. They have spoken about scrapping BTECs and are undermining them by saying that they are low-quality qualifications. Now they are going to go away and find out which ones they want to get rid of. That approach seems like it is the wrong way around. Why do the Government not identify the poor-quality qualifications and then start announcing their policy? That is where they have got it wrong.
Let me turn to the need to have maths and English as an exit-level qualification for T-levels. The Secretary of State is right to change his approach to the issue, as we have been calling for, but given that maths and English were an entry requirement for all students who are currently doing T-levels, the pilot is going to be misleading. The people who are doing T-levels currently—we will be investigating their outcomes in the pilot—will be different from those who will be able to study T-levels after this change. It is important that that is carefully considered.
The hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) was absolutely right to speak about the universal credit amendment. We keep hearing the Government talk about the importance of people on universal credit being able to get into work. If we want universal credit to be a pathway towards helping the country to solve the skills crisis, people need to be able to afford to develop their skills. The hon. Gentleman was therefore right to say that the amendment should seriously be considered.
There were a couple of other very relevant contributions. My hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) raised the important issue of FE lecturers’ pay. So many really good-quality FE lecturers have been forced to leave the profession because of real-terms pay cuts over many years. The skills drain has had a massive impact on our further education sector.
The hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) told us that he has been racing around employers in his constituency and telling them that there is an oven-ready Bill that will address all their skills needs. Well, he might be well advised to move office and not tell people where his new one is, because they might end up disappointed that he has slightly overpromised in that regard.
The hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) blamed the Labour Government for the fact that she was made to feel bad when she left school at the age of 15. I notice that she was 15 in 1996, so it was a Conservative Government who made her feel bad. I am sorry that she had that experience, but she is knocking at the wrong door.
The hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) addressed the problem faced by many hon. Members—a reduction in the time limit—by doing a seven-minute speech in three minutes. In the event that he ever loses his current job, he might want to consider being a horse racing commentator. But he had a lot to say and it was important.
My hon. Friends the Members for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) and for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) spoke about the scale of the cuts, and the collapse in investment in further education and adult education.
This is a small Bill, which is limited in scope. It leaves out apprenticeships and is silent on the role of independent training providers, which provide the majority of workplace learning. It lacks strategic vision, and is undermined by its lack of scale and urgency. There are some aspects that will make small improvements—we are not hostile to all that is in there—but it lacks the scale of reform and investment required to deliver the promised skills revolution.
The skills Bill is in danger of going down as an historic missed opportunity. The Government should recognise that the amendments introduced by their lordships strengthen the Bill; recognise that apprenticeships are central to skills in this country, and do more to increase the numbers studying and offering them; encourage a collaborative approach that recognises a role for all communities, whether they happen to have a metro Mayor or not; and address the chronic underfunding that has characterised the last 11 years in further education. If this Government took the approach that Labour is calling for today, they would have a chance of enabling England to compete with the very best skills systems in the world. It is the very least that English workers and employers deserve.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
As someone who has spent the majority of his life in education or education policy, it is a real honour to be presenting this Bill on Second Reading. The Bill forms a cornerstone of some historic reforms that we are bringing to the skills agenda in our country: reforms that will help us more closely align skills training with the needs of employers; reforms that will help us to help all students, at all ages and stages, find more reliable routes to employment; and reforms that will help us level up our country and build back better.
This has been a long journey, and I want to thank some of the people who have been involved in it: not least, in the other place, Lord Sainsbury and Baroness Wolf, who have done enormous work to get us here, but also my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), the former Secretary of State, who gave such an impressive speech, and my hon. and glamorous Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), the former Minister for apprenticeships and skills. I also feel the need to mention another noble Lord in the other place who wrote a report for the Government in 2012—Lord Lingfield, who is genuinely one of the unsung heroes of education reform over the past 30 years. I put on record my debt to him and to his thinking. All of their work—the cross-party work that we have heard so much about tonight—has shown us the importance of building a skills system that can work for everyone.
There have been some powerful speeches, many delivered at high speed, and some important arguments made. I will try to deal with as many as I can in the time I have available. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said at the outset, our reform agenda is about both local prosperity and global competitiveness. It is about the needs of labour market and the needs of the student, and it is about our collective need for a more prosperous future. That is why this Government are putting the money down to get the job done: £3.8 billion more for FE and skills over the Parliament, the biggest increase in over a decade; £1.6 billion more for education at 16 to 19; £554 million for adult skills, a 29% increase in real terms over four years; and £2.7 billion for apprenticeships by the end of this spending review period—all this and more, to give people the skills the economy needs.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chair of the Education Committee, said that skills had often been the Cinderella service; well, tonight it continues its journey to the ball. But if it is Cinderella, I wonder who the fairy godmother is. Is it my right hon. Friend himself, is it the Secretary of State, or is it the Chancellor, who provided this money? The Opposition have talked about the state of funding over time. I taught history for quite a long time, and one of the things we learn when we study history is that the left loves to rewrite it—when it is not destroying it. Some Conservative Members remember why there was a need for austerity in 2010. Indeed, in a powerful speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici) talked about a time when the Opposition were in power and things were not quite so rosy as they seem to remember.
Kate Green
This is not rewriting history but merely to point out to the Minister, who may not remember, that when Labour left office in 2010 the economy was growing, and what happened then was that it was thrown into reverse by the Government of the time’s austerity policies.
Alex Burghart
Rewriting history yet again: everybody knows that the last Labour Government left the economy of this country in the gutter and it required a Conservative Government to pick it up and to create the jobs miracle that we saw before the pandemic.
We want the skills system to become more responsive to the needs and knowledge of employers, creating dialogue between skills providers and industry. That is why the Bill establishes the employer representative bodies and local skills improvement plans.[Official Report, 19 November 2021, Vol. 703, c. 6MC.] Employer representative bodies will hold the ring locally on the needs of local employers, finding out what skills they are looking for and working with colleges to make sure that those skills are built up. For the first time, employers in an area will know exactly who to go to when they want providers to respond to that need. That is what I have heard when I have gone around the country in my first few weeks in this job. The other day I went to Doncaster and heard the people who are masterminding the first LSIP say that for the first time people know to come to them in order to speak to providers and get skills put on the table.
Using that sort of intelligence, ERBs will produce local skills improvement plans to nudge local learning in the right direction. An ERB is a body with a plan to help the next gigafactory, the next offshore wind farm, the next nuclear plant and the next electric vehicle factory to find the workers with the skills they need; a body to help the retrofitters, the digital networkers and the constructors of HS2 to get the skills that my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) talked about in terms of the green revolution and our net zero plans; and a plan to help local areas get the skills they need to harness the talents of the people to build the infrastructure of tomorrow, led by employers, supported by Government and driven forward by our excellent further education colleges.
However, our work to align the needs of the economy with the desire of students for modern skills does not stop there. To do all this, we need technical qualifications that meet the needs of employers. T-levels—the new gold-standard qualification at level 3—have been drawn up with the input and expertise of more than 250 employers to ensure that they provide students with the right skills for the workplace—skills that will be relevant and recognised in the real world. This, we must remember, was done following the recommendations of the Labour peer, Lord Sainsbury, to whom I again pay tribute.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) spoke—I refer to him because my father-in-law was from Birmingham, Hall Green— powerfully and movingly about his experience and his son’s. I have no doubt that he and his son would have been able to do a BTEC in engineering, flourished through it and been able to enjoy some of the great advantages I have seen when I have visited colleges in south Essex, Walsall and south London, where students are studying T-levels and thriving.[Official Report, 19 November 2021, Vol. 703, c. 6MC.]
The hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) made a very good speech. Putney does not have T-levels yet, but she should visit one of her neighbours that does. She will see teachers and students who are inspired, working with employers, getting excellent work placements and seeing their destination as work. These are high-quality qualifications that will meet the needs of the local community.
I was pleased to hear the Opposition support our changes on level 2 English and maths as an exit requirement for T-levels, because we want these new gold-standard qualifications to be open to as many people as possible. What we see emerging is a new pathway to work for everyone at 16-19. For students at level 3, there will be world-class qualifications designed with employers leading to degree-level apprenticeships, work and, yes, higher education, because more than 50 universities already accept our T-levels. For students who are at level 2 at 16-19, there will be, thanks to our forthcoming consultation on level 2 and below, world-class qualifications designed with employers leading to traineeships, apprenticeships or work, or, indeed, the opportunity to take up the Prime Minister’s lifetime skills guarantee at level 3 and get the skills they want, that they might not have had the chance to gain at school.
I say to the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) that there will be choices for everybody and opportunities for everyone to progress towards work. Skilling up will not end when someone leaves college. We have bootcamps of the type I have seen in Salford and Doncaster. We have the multiply programme for numeracy skills—the great half-a-billion-pound project initiated by the Chancellor at the spending review. For literacy, which was understandably raised by a number of Members, I remind the House that full funding for adults who do not already have a GCSE pass is already available. We also intend to help people who have level 3 to progress. That is why the Bill lays the foundations for the lifelong loan entitlement, which gives adults who want to get a higher technical qualification the opportunity to invest in their future, to retrain and upskill.
This is a landmark Bill that will further the cause of skills in this country. It will give students the skills they need and that the economy wants, and I commend it to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords] (Programme)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7)),
That the following provisions shall apply to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]:
Committal
(1) The Bill shall be committed to a Public Bill Committee.
Proceedings in Public Bill Committee
(2) Proceedings in the Public Bill Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Tuesday 7 December 2021.
(3) The Public Bill Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.
Proceedings on Consideration and Third Reading
(4) Proceedings on Consideration shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which those proceedings are commenced.
(5) Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.
(6) Standing Order No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on Consideration and Third Reading.
Other proceedings
(7) Any other proceedings on the Bill may be programmed.—(Steve Double.)
Question agreed to.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords] (Money)
Queen’s recommendation signified.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 52(1)(a)),
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords], it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of:
(1) any expenditure incurred under or by virtue of the Act by the Secretary of State; and
(2) any increase attributable to the Act in the sums payable under any other Act out of money so provided.—(Nadhim Zahawi.)
Question agreed to.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords] (Ways and Means)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 52(1)(a)),
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords], it is expedient to authorise the charging of fees under the Act.—(Nadhim Zahawi.)
Question agreed to.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill (Second sitting)
Tuesday 30th November 2021
(2 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 30 November 2021 - (30 Nov 2021)
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 10 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 10 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 10 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Chair
I remind the Committee that with this we are discussing the following:
Amendment 1, in clause 1, page 3, line 6, after “evidence” insert “, including the views of relevant community groups including those representing the interests of disabled people,”
This amendment intends to ensure that the evidence informing LSIP development includes information directly relevant to improving the employment prospects of disabled people.
Amendment 2, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) identifies actions to be taken to reduce the disability employment gap within the specified area.”
This amendment intends to ensure that the LSIP is used as a vehicle for improving the employment prospects of disabled people.
Amendment 28, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) identifies positive actions to reduce the disability employment gap within the specified area.”
This amendment intends to ensure that Local Skills Improvement Plans identify positive actions to reduce the disability employment gap within the specified area covered by the Plans.
Amendment 34, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) lists specific strategies to support learners who have or have previously had, a statement of Special Educational Need or an Education and Health Care Plan into employment, including but not limited to provision for supported internships.”
This amendment would require that local skills improvement plans list specific strategies to support learners who have or have previously had, a statement of Special Educational Need or an Education and Health Care Plan into employment, including but not limited to provision for supported internships.
Amendment 3, in clause 2, page 3, line 23, at end insert—
(iii) the body is composed of employers who demonstrate reputable practice in relation to equality and diversity in employment, including in relation to disability, and”
This amendment intends to ensure that members of the body with primary responsibility for creating the LSIP have sufficient understanding of and commitment to equality and diversity, including in relation to disability, to enable them to create an inclusive plan.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I was coming on to discuss amendment 34, in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington, which adds a new line to clause 1:
“lists specific strategies to support learners who have or have previously had, a statement of Special Educational Need or an Education and Health Care Plan into employment, including but not limited to provision for supported internships.”
Supported internships have huge potential. I saw an excellent example when I visited Derbyshire Education Business Partnership, which serves my constituency of Chesterfield, and witnessed its supported internship programme in Derby at first hand. Supported internships are incredibly important in supporting people who may be further away from the labour market, but they currently have a tiny take-up. Everything that can be done to drive up the number of supported internships should be done. They support people who might not be ready to go into the world of work right away but who, with the benefit of a programme like this, can get to know an employer really well; the employer can get to know their strengths as well as their challenges, and they can get into the world of work.
We tabled amendment 34 not only to encourage the Government to insist that strategies for those with special educational needs are expressly considered in local skills improvement plans, but to talk specifically about supported internships, which would make a real difference. Many of us are concerned that chambers of commerce and employers, who are experts in the needs of their workplaces and what skills they need, will not necessarily be aware of the challenges faced by those who are furthest from the labour market. They might be less likely to have strategies of that kind in LSIPs. However, if colleges had a more central role in the plans, chambers of commerce and employers would absolutely recognise the need for programmes of this sort.
I share the belief of my hon. Friends the Members for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, and many others who put their names to the amendments, that employer representative bodies should have the required training, knowledge and understanding of the educational and health needs of people with disabilities in general and of how people with disabilities can best be supported within a local area in particular. I hope that, when he responds to this group of amendments, the Minister will commit to ensuring that people with disabilities are not forgotten in the Bill, and signal that the Government have specific strategies to ensure that employer bodies have a duty to represent the needs of people with disabilities and support them into the workplace, so that they are not excluded any more.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I rise to speak in favour of amendments 27 and 28 in my name, and amendments 1, 2 and 3, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham. I want highlight that the Library briefing on the Bill states that 18% of the learners currently in the FE and skills sector have a recognised learning difficulty or disability. When we talk about people with disabilities, we are not talking about a very small minority; we are talking about 18% of those people. The amendments that I and my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham have tabled are very similar. They all basically try to do the same thing: to ensure that the voices of disabled people are heard and recognised in the Bill. They also address the disability employment gap. Mr Efford, I should have mentioned that I am vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on SEND, which is where a lot of my interest comes from. I know from the work of the APPG and on the amendments that there is a lot of cross-party support for these measures, which we also saw in the Lords. This is not a party political issue. I hope the Minister takes it seriously.
Recent figures show that disabled people have an employment rate that is 28.4 percentage points lower than people who are not disabled. There is a huge disability employment gap and the amendments hope to address that. I recognise that the issue is complex and that there are a number of Government initiatives to address it, but it would be a missed opportunity not to use the Bill and the new process of skills planning that it brings about to help ensure that people with disabilities can contribute to their local economy and that their voices are heard in the discussion of what that local economy should look like. All too often, people with disabilities feel that their voices are not heard. The amendments aim to ensure they are listened to and recognised, and that some action is taken on the disability employment gap. That is the aim of all the amendments in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I welcome you to your place, Mr Efford. I want to lend my support to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle and others on this group of amendments. They seek to ensure that the LSIPs take the needs of disabled people and those with special educational needs into account.
Currently, further education caters for a large number of students with such needs, which can be complex. The latest data shows that roughly half of disabled people are in employment—just 53%—compared with just over four out of five non-disabled people. The employment rate for disabled people with severe or specific learning difficulties was 18% back in 2019, the lowest rate of any impairment group. The House of Commons Library briefing notes that 52% of disabled people were in employment, down from 54%, which is really concerning.
The Workers Educational Association notes that
“adult learners in community provision are those with low or no qualifications, who require the most support in order to progress to higher level qualifications.”
Learning disabilities add to that complex state of affairs, which justifies the inclusion of an amendment to provide more support for people with learning disabilities. In its evidence to the Committee, Engineering UK said:
“38% of respondents…reported a lack of role models to be a barrier for pupils with special educational needs”.
One of the employers in my region, the National Grid, is doing extraordinary stuff in engaging and giving work opportunities to young people with complex needs, through its EmployAbility scheme. It is an exemplar project that it has been running for several years.
Those are some of the reasons why the amendments are important to the Bill. The Government’s impact assessment says that those from SEND backgrounds are “disproportionately” likely to be affected, and it is therefore a cruelty not to legislate where possible to mitigate that disproportionate impact. We think it is vital that such provisions be written into the Bill, which is why the amendments have been tabled. We need to highlight the challenges and make sure that we are as inclusive a society as possible, and that we allow for the needs of people with SEND in skills provisions.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I rise to speak to amendments 1, 2 and 3 tabled by the hon. Member for Rotherham, amendments 27 and 28 tabled by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, and amendment 34 tabled by the hon. Members for Chesterfield and for Warwick and Leamington.
Those amendments all relate to LSIPs and the importance that we all place on improving the employment prospects of people with disabilities. The criteria for designation of employer representative bodies in the Bill are intentionally focused on the key characteristics and capabilities required for that specific role. We do, of course, want all employers to demonstrate good practice in equality and diversity in employment, including in relation to disability. The Bill is clear that LSIPs should draw on a range of evidence, but we do not consider it appropriate to list all that evidence in the Bill. Instead, I assure Opposition Members that we will set out further details in statutory guidance and continue to engage key stakeholders representing learners with special educational needs and disabilities as that guidance is developed.
The guidance will make it clear that employer representative bodies should absolutely engage groups that can help them to understand the needs of learners with disabilities and the barriers they face, and consider how people with disabilities can be supported to progress into good jobs that meet local skills needs, thereby supporting activity to reduce the disability employment gap. In the work I have been doing in the run-up to the Bill, among many other stakeholders, I spoke to a specialist college in Kent, which had a very powerful message for me. They said that they had catered for a lot of young people whom they believed had a bigger role to play in the local economy, which would be good for employers and the economy, but particularly important for the individuals themselves. That very much reflects my own experience.
For eight years, I was vice-chair of governors at a special school for children with autism in west London. It was an excellent school, not because of my vice-chairmanship but because we had an exceptional head and exceptional staff. It started as a primary school, but went on to become an all-through school. The work the school was engaging in when I left to enter politics was to make sure that it could help young people—often with really profound needs—to transition into the workplace. The alternative for too many people is a life of isolation and loneliness.
I commend the work that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle is doing on the APPG. I am sure that the APPG will want to look at the statutory guidance when it comes out and feed back to us, and we welcome that conversation. There are great opportunities here for dialogue between the ERBs, local providers, and local disability groups to make sure that the needs and the talents of young people with special educational needs are reflected.
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that it is actually the most logical fit for businesses to embrace and be accessible to those who have learning disabilities? As we know, they are often among the most unconventional, creative and brilliant thinkers.
Alex Burghart
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. That is absolutely right; something I will come on to in a moment is that when we help young people with special educational needs overcome the barriers to employment, and when we help employers overcome some of the barriers that they may feel exist to employing those young people, it is an extraordinarily mutually beneficial relationship.
Emma Hardy
I want to push the Minister a little more on the guidance. He has mentioned that it will be statutory, which I welcome, but I wonder whether it will include some of the wording that is in this amendment, which looks specifically at what action will be taken to reduce the disability employment gap. Will that be seen in the statutory guidance?
Alex Burghart
Obviously, we are very keen to reduce the disability employment gap, and we are always mindful of ways in which we can achieve that. I am sure that it will be in the Secretary of State’s mind when he considers the statutory guidance.
Local skills improvement plans are not the only solution to this issue. Colleges already have a duty to use their best endeavours to secure the special educational provision called for by a student with special educational needs, as set out in the SEND code of practice. That should include a focus on preparing the young person for adulthood, including employment.
In addition to the duties on providers in relation to LSIPs, clause 5 introduces a broader duty for colleges and designated institutions to review how well their whole curriculum offer meets local needs. The duty requires governing bodies to consider the needs of all learners, including current and future learners, and those with special educational needs or a disability.
Mr Perkins
I appreciate the tone of the Minister’s response, but he has not really given us any detail on why he does not think it appropriate to have the wording in the Bill. Instead, he asks us to take it on trust that we will like the guidance when we eventually see it. We have to vote on the amendment. We have no idea what will be in the guidance. He has not said, “It’s written. It’s going to look like this—I just can’t show it to you.” There will be guidance and at some point we will see it, so can the Minister explain why it is not appropriate that we simply have a commitment in the Bill that LSIPs will have a strategy around supported internships?
Alex Burghart
On supported internships, I was very interested to hear about what the hon. Gentleman has seen going on in his constituency. I assure him that we are continuing to work to improve supported internships in England, including updating our guidance and, through our contract grant delivery partnerships in this financial year, developing a self-assessment quality framework for providers and helping local authorities to develop local supported employment forums. I respect his desire to see supported internships improve and go further. We share his ambition, but we are not putting every particular intervention that we favour in the Bill, so we will not single that one out for special treatment.
Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)
We already know that these kinds of activities are happening. I declare an interest as the chair of the apprenticeship diversity champions network. Employers are recognising that they need to offer these skills and support already. I am sure that the Minister knows that that is already happening.
Alex Burghart
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. The Government are also developing an adjustments passport that aims to smooth the transition into employment and support people changing jobs, including people with special educational needs and disabilities. That goes back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich made. When I was on the Work and Pensions Committee with the great Frank Field, that was exactly the sort of thing that we were calling for. I am very pleased that this Administration have seen it go out.
The 12-month pilots of the adjustments passport that are under way in HE and post-16 provider pilot sites are capturing the in-work support needs of the individual and we hope that they will empower individuals to have confident discussions about adjustments with employers. It goes back to my point about breaking down barriers both for the individual and for the employer. More broadly, the Government’s national disability strategy sets out how we will help disabled people to fulfil their potential through work, to help reduce the disability employment gap further.
Emma Hardy
With respect to the comments made by the hon. Member for Great Grimsby, if everything were all fine and dandy as it is, we would not have a 28 percentage points disability employment gap. The Minister talks about the statutory guidance. Will there be some sticks as well as carrots in the guidance? If employers and people do not feel that they are being represented, and they are not taking effective measures to deal with the disability employment gap, will there be sanctions?
Alex Burghart
As I said in the previous sitting, statutory guidance is a powerful tool. If employer representative bodies do not adhere to statutory guidance, they may lose their designation. That is in the essence of statutory guidance. Given the significant amount of work already under way in this space, we do not believe that the amendments are necessary, but we agree with the direction in which they push.
Mr Perkins
I appreciate what the Minister has said. He has not really given us any detail on why he does not think that it is appropriate. I take his point on supported internships being one strategy: our amendment acknowledged that. However, in terms of amendment 1 on people with disabilities, we are not talking about a fractional thing that is not worth mentioning because there are so many other things that could be mentioned, but about a substantial body of people who have often been missed out by education providers. This is an opportunity to ensure that when the chambers of commerce, or whoever the employer representative bodies are, are writing their local skills improvement plans, those people do not continue to be left out.
I still think that amendment 1 should be accepted, so we will press it to a vote. I am willing to not press the other amendments in this group to a vote, but will look very carefully at the statutory guidance. I think that many people—such as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle and the cross-party group, which was very supportive of this—will listen to the Minister’s response and still wonder why the amendment is not appropriate. For future amendments, it would be useful if we had a bit more of a response as to why the Government are against it, rather than just the fact that they are.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
I might try to give the hon. Gentleman a clue on that question. We spent much of the morning arguing about why this policy needed to be locally led, why we wanted devolved authorities to take more control over it and why local government should have more of a say in it. Does the hon. Gentleman recognise how asking Government to dictate what must be in it conflicts with the arguments he has already made today?
Mr Perkins
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but what kind of devolution is it if we say “Well, look, it is up to local chambers of commerce to decide whether or not they have a strategy to support those who are disabled or furthest from the labour market”? If we have a document that must be signed off by the Secretary of State—so on the devolution argument, it is more “devolution of a sort”—what is wrong with saying, “And by the way, for that document that you sign off, we’d better know what the strategy is around disabilities”?
I do not think that the devolution argument is a strong one. Maybe, at a future point in the hon. Gentleman’s career, he will argue for devolution in some kind of role and say, “But trust me, I won’t be having any strategies for disabled people”. I cannot imagine that he would do that, or that any others would. Amendment 1 is just about making sure that those employment representative bodies understand the importance of this issue; that is why we will press it to a vote.
The Chair
We will come to a vote on amendment 1 after the next group of amendments. Do you wish to withdraw amendment 27?
Mr Perkins
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 33, in clause 1, page 3, line 4, at end insert—
“(iv) Local Enterprise Partnerships and the skills and productivity board,”
This amendment would require that local skills improvement plans draw on the views of Local Enterprise Partnerships and the skills productivity board, in addition to those bodies already set out in the subsection.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 38, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) takes account of a provider of designated distance learning courses that are undertaken by residents of the specified area.”
This amendment would ensure that local skills improvement plans take account of distance learning providers.
Amendment 39, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) these conditions to include the requirement for the LSIP to give due regard to a national strategy for education and skills, which is agreed across the Department for Education, Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and the Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities.”
This amendment would require Government to have a national strategy for education and skills, which is agreed across DfE, DWP, BEIS and DLUHC for which LSIPs would have to take account of.
Amendment 40, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(7A) The Secretary of State must prepare and publish guidance setting out the criteria used to determine the boundaries of a specified area for the purpose of this section.”
This is a probing amendment regarding the criteria the Government will use to determine what constitutes “local”.
Amendment 41, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(7A) Before local skills improvement plans are introduced outside of trailblazer areas, the Secretary of State must publish guidance relating to their implementation, subject to consultation of all Mayoral Combined Authorities and, where there is not one, the relevant local authority.”
This amendment seeks to ensure that local and combined authorities are consulted on the Government’s plans for the roll out of local skills improvement plans and are in a position to highlight any issues before publication.
Amendment 44, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(7A) Colleges and other providers may propose revisions where they consider that the plans do not appropriately reflect the full diversity of priorities across the locality.”
This amendment would allow colleges and other providers to propose revisions to LSIPs if they consider that plans do not reflect the full diversity of priorities across the locality.
Mr Perkins
I will go through these amendments relatively briefly. Amendment 33 is a probing amendment on the subject of the role of local enterprise partnerships and skills productivity boards. As I said at the start of this debate, those of us who were here in 2010 heard a huge amount from the Government about the role of LEPs. We have subsequently heard about the roles of SPBs, and they both sounded very similar in expectation to what we are now hearing, on a local level, for employer representative bodies.
It therefore strikes me that the Government do not have a great deal of confidence in the LEPs that they created, nor in the SPBs. If I was a chief executive of a LEP, I do not think I would be taking up any credit agreements right now. They must be looking at this Bill and wondering what the future holds for them.
I am interested in the Government’s response to this. Why is it that local enterprise partnerships, which—as we will all remember—were put forward as the way for business and Government to work together on a local basis on a variety of measures to drive economic growth, particularly around skills, are now seen as entirely superfluous in this Bill? Is this the beginning of the end of local enterprise partnerships?
I am interested in whether the Minister feels there should be a duty for employer representative bodies to work in collaboration with them, and what this says about the future of those organisations. Does he accept that it is a failure of Government policy to have set up these organisations that now appear to be being ignored at a time when there is a function that we would naturally think would fall to them?
Amendment 38 relates to designated distance learning. If the covid crisis has taught us anything, it is that more and more has gone online. In the skills arena in particular, that has been hugely transformational for the sector and for many learners. It creates opportunities that were not there previously. We are very concerned that designated distance learning is absent from the Bill, and that is why we have tabled amendment 38. Again, we are keen to hear the Government’s view on that.
Amendment 39 is about Government Departments working together; I think we have all been conscious, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish said previously, that that is not a particular strength of this Government. We saw that more than ever during the covid crisis when, on the one hand, there was a real lack of strategy around increasing apprenticeships at a time when we knew there was a boom in youth unemployment and, on the other hand, we had the Department for Work and Pensions introducing the kickstart scheme, which was much more expensive than apprenticeships and offered much less to young people. There was no sense that the different Government Departments were working together.
Our amendment would require the Government and any future Government to have a national strategy for education and skills that is agreed across the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and of which all local skills improvement plans would have to take account. Our particular concern is the lack of cross-departmental work between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education; that is something the Labour party takes very seriously, and there have been regular meetings between teams to work on that whole area.
Amendment 40 asks the Government to publish guidance setting out the criteria used to determine the boundaries of a specified area. There is a real lack of clarity about what is meant by “local area”, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle referred to, in different parts of our forms of local government. What is our local area keeps changing. Again, that is not specified within the Bill and I think there will be real concern that we now have this document, which is of tremendous importance to an FE college; it could be the reason why a chief executive loses their job—
Emma Hardy
I mentioned to the Minister before that I have a lot of sympathy for the Government trying to work out what constitutes a local area. I was talking to a local Conservative MP and we were having a bit of a laugh about it ourselves, because in our area we have Humberside Police, Humberside Fire & Rescue Service and a police and crime commissioner for Humberside, but then we have the Hull and East Yorkshire LEP, and the regional schools commissioner, who has a different geographical area from the LEP, which has a different geographical area from the area that Ofsted covers. Apparently, they are creating a pan-Humber organisation, after the LEP was removed, to look at skills in the area. Good luck to the Minister in trying to work out what exactly the local area looks like, because it is incredibly complicated when we have a myriad different organisations with different geographical boundaries.
Mr Perkins
I think we are all dying to know who this Conservative Member of Parliament was—I have a suspicion who it may have been. My hon. Friend makes a really important point. If it is, “Good luck to the Minister”, more importantly, it is “Good luck to employers” in actually working out where they should go, which area they are a part of and which local skills improvement plan is responsible for them if they have two sites that are 10 miles apart and there are different providers they have to engage with. This is something that puts businesses off engaging in this kind of skills arena. We have seen it with apprenticeships and the barriers that have been put in the way for businesses to take up apprentices; making it difficult for businesses to engage guarantees that they will not do so. That is a really important point and it is why we have moved this probing amendment.
Mr Perkins
As I said previously, we support the principle of local skills improvement plans. Having something that everyone understands is of real value. We are not saying that there should not be any localisation. This is a probing amendment to help us understand. Colleges tend to have a specified area. The Government decided that the local enterprise partnerships would all have their own area. We cannot be, as we used to be in Chesterfield, across two different local enterprise partnerships. We are in one area. The Government have attempted to put firm lines around it, but it has been made slightly more fuzzy.
Emma Hardy
I think the hon. Member for Great Grimsby has misunderstood. When creating a local skills plan, we need to define a local area. As the hon. Member for Great Grimsby, whose constituency is opposite mine on the south bank, will be fully aware, the chamber of commerce is actually a pan-Humber organisation, but the LEPs are separate organisations. I am pointing out to the Minister that, if we are looking at creating a local skills plan for a local area, quite obviously we need to work out what that local area is.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend puts it very well.
Amendment 41 asks the Secretary of State to publish guidance relating to implementation, subject to consultation with the metro Mayor or relevant local authority. Under the terms of the Bill, the Secretary of State has the potential to amass new powers, which could be used without appropriate consultation or due diligence. We can see the hand of the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson) right through the Bill. I am confident that if the Bill had been devised when the current Secretary of State had been in place for a year or two, it would look very different. The sense of a man who had lost control and was desperately trying to get back control runs right through the Bill.
Our amendments seek to establish a clear duty for the Secretary of State to consult with combined and local authorities before local skills improvement plans are finalised in areas that do not have metro Mayors, ensuring that the relevant local representative bodies are part of the formation of a board. It is about bringing together the various different organisations that would make up a strategic approach to skills. We are saying that, if there is not an employer representative body that is able to broadly represent private and public sector employers, further education colleges, independent training providers and such, the Government should appoint a board made up of those in order to deliver that local skills improvement plan, rather than the current approach, which is just a single body. Amendment 44 says that colleges and other providers
“may propose revisions where they consider that the plans do not appropriately reflect the full diversity of priorities across the locality.”
I am keen to hear the Minister’s response to the amendments.
Matt Western
My hon. Friend has given a thorough analysis on all these amendments; I will just pick up on a couple of points. On amendment 33, I want to highlight how important the skills and productivity board is, given where the country finds itself in terms of its poor productivity relative to most of our economic peers—not just in Europe, but across the globe. We have to work much more closely with that board; that is what amendment 33 is driving at, and that is why it is important to include it.
I will talk specifically about amendment 38, which is on distance learning. There are 70% fewer new part-time graduates entering and accessing higher education every year compared with a decade ago. Distance learning is really important; it is a brilliant way of encouraging people to pick up part-time study. The Open University has 72% of students in full or part-time employment. We are seeing a very concerning regional picture; the Open University’s statistics show a 40% fall in higher education participation in the north-east of the country, and a 32% fall in the north-west and Yorkshire. If the Government are really serious about their agenda, surely we have to provide and invest in more and better opportunities for distance learning—that is why amendment 38 is important. The cost of study is obviously one of the biggest barriers to adult learning. If we consider the needs of distance learners, that barrier is eradicated.
We all know that the Open University is a great institution, started in the 1960s—we will claim that as a terrific Labour success. I do not think any of my colleagues were around at that time, so none of us can claim it in particular. However, it was a great success, and I think that societally, culturally and economically we have benefited greatly from that particular institution. It is one of the five biggest higher education providers in 90% of parliamentary constituencies. It is really important that all of us remember the contribution that it makes. The Open University is also the largest HE provider in 63 of 314 English local authorities—that is 20%. It is also worth highlighting that it is a substantial provider in what might be called higher education “cold spots”, where there is limited face-to-face provision. The importance of distance learning in our education provision must be underlined.
Amendment 41 makes sure that local and combined authorities are consulted on the LSIP before roll-out. I want to echo the previous calls on the importance of including our health boards in the process. In the pandemic, we have seen the importance of local public health provision in regions, and the skills needed to be able to provide that are absolutely essential. We must be clear about how important it is to achieve the regionalisation of drawing those skills. In the visits that have been making up and down the country, that is something that has been made loud and clear to me by colleges and HE providers.
Devolved responsibilities are important but so too is the national strategy. That strategy should be extended across the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Department and what I would call DHCLG – the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government as was. The Association of Colleges wrote to say that it wanted to
“enshrine the creation of a national 10-year education and skills strategy sitting across government to deliver on wider policy agendas and to give stability to all parts of the system.”
It added:
“there is a lack of a comprehensive, long-term education and skills plan that brings together all parts of the system towards the same vision…this means that the role of education and skills in addressing wider policy priorities and strategies are not always recognised, for example the role of colleges in welfare, health and net-zero policies.”
I spoke about health a moment ago, but let us consider net zero policies. The Government understand their importance but I want to centre on two things that are massive national issues right now and should be critical to the skills strategy. The first is the delivery of an electric vehicle infrastructure plan, on which we way off the pace. We need to get the skills out there to put in place the necessary infrastructure. We have a growing market for electric vehicles—potentially for hydrogen vehicles as well but EV is the critical one. Manufacturers are making the vehicles, but we do not have the necessary public charging points. We are behind the curve compared with our European neighbours and other leading global economies. That is the sort of stuff that a national strategy could help to deliver. If we are serious about the sustainability agenda, the amendment can help to deliver it.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington said about amendment 39, particularly the need for a national strategy for education and skills. It is perfectly reasonable to expect such a strategy. The driving force for it must come from Government, and monitoring of progress across the country must also come from Government. In that way we can ensure that every part of England is firing on all cylinders, narrow the gap and properly ensure that every part of the country is performing as it should.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the productivity gap, because that is a serious problem not just across the country and for the national economy, but within different regions and sub-regions; some are performing very well, others less so. We need a concerted effort across Government and all Departments. If we are serious about levelling up, obviously the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities must be at the heart of that along with the Department for Education, BEIS and, I would argue, the Treasury. If we do not have buy-in from the Treasury to ensure that economic growth is spread fairly across the country, any national strategy is doomed to failure.
I am a devolutionist as well; I want to see strategies developed locally that meet the needs of the locality. That was put perfectly when we talked many years ago about health devolution and Greater Manchester in particular, which had responsibility for health devolved to it. Of course, it remains part of a national health service, just as any local strategy would remain part of the national skills strategy. The “what” is set at the centre, but the “how” is determined locally to meet the needs of that locality. That is exactly what the amendment is designed to achieve.
Matt Western
To illustrate that point, clearly in the health sector we need to assess what the challenges are for our communities and populations. While there is a national picture, there will be different needs in a city such as Coventry, which is close to me and has one of the youngest populations in the whole of the UK, versus a pleasant coastal area, which might be an area that people retire to and will have particular needs as regards the provisions for health.
Andrew Gwynne
Absolutely, and the same is true even at the level below that, within a city region. I can speak with experience about my own city region, where there are divergent trends between those living in the north of Greater Manchester, where there are fewer opportunities, and those living in the so-called arc of prosperity around south Manchester. We need to finely tune our local skills strategies to reflect the different make-ups of particular areas.
Talking about how we define areas, I think amendment 40 matters. We are talking about defining “local” which matters for several reasons. First, I am a bit of an obsessive compulsive disorder neurotic and I like things to be neat and tidy. For clarity of purpose, it makes sense to have coterminosity, wherever possible, with other organisations and bodies.
Again, unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, I am lucky that my local enterprise partnership, my chamber of commerce, my combined authority and all 10 local councils in Greater Manchester all cover the same boundaries.
Andrew Gwynne
Things get a little bit messy. I was nervous when my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington mentioned health trusts, because my own health trust, Tameside and Glossop, crosses the county boundary, although that will be sorted out by the Bill currently going through Parliament. That is the only bit of non-coterminosity I have.
These boundaries matter because if we draw up strategies, plans and proposals, and we want to collaborate with business, education providers, local government and the wider public sector, then we have to have a defined set of boundaries. The closer those boundaries match, the easier it will be to get a strategy in place.
Lia Nici
Employers and jobs are not coterminous in a particular area. In southern Humberside and Lincolnshire, we want to ensure that our local skills plans cross those borders, because that is where the jobs are. Coterminosity with local government and quasi-local government does not work, and it will not work for employers. Realistically, it needs to be where the jobs are and where people can travel to.
Andrew Gwynne
I know it is probably an unpopular thing to say of her neck of the woods, but I think the hon. Lady has just made the case for Humberside.
Andrew Gwynne
I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman’s bit of Warrington is in Cheshire or Lancashire based on the old boundaries.
Andrew Gwynne
Boundaries matter. I say that as a patron of the Friends of Real Lancashire.
Coming back to amendment 40, the cleaner these boundaries can be, the better. I get that local economies can spread across artificial local government boundaries. I know that because just down the road from where I live is Glossop, in the High Peak in Derbyshire. To all intents and purposes, Glossop is a Greater Manchester town. It looks to Greater Manchester, all its transport links are into Manchester and its healthcare is currently part of Greater Manchester. I get that there is always going to be a degree of “This boundary does not work,” but if we are looking at a particular strategy and then having to engage with a whole range of public bodies in developing and signing off that strategy, it gets overly complicated if we end up having a mismatch of different boundaries, in the way that my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle has already described.
Emma Hardy
To return to the conversation we were having about SEND and disabilities, and the disability employment gap, we will have to collect data to know whether the skills plan is delivering on its objectives and addressing the disability employment gap, so we will need some kind of boundary or defined area from which to collect that data. The Minister said that the guidance would include information on the disability employment gap, but unless there is a boundary, we cannot accurately collect data and we cannot judge whether the plan is a success.
Andrew Gwynne
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, but it is more than that; we also need to ensure that the strategy works for the entire area. However we define the geographical area, there will be a strategy for it. If there is a mismatch of different public bodies and local authorities in that area, we may well find that one local authority thinks the strategy is working brilliantly in its area—it may well be—but the neighbouring local authority, whose area might be only partly covered by the strategy, might feel like the poor relation without a voice. I am worried about that. I want clarity and for things to be tidy, which is why I support amendment 40. Before I sit down, I promised to give way to, I hope, a fellow Lancastrian.
Andy Carter
I think the hon. Gentleman will find that I am in Cheshire—[Laughter.] I understand the point that he is making, but it is not a clear situation. Warrington is a really interesting area because, although many people who live in Warrington work in Manchester or Liverpool, the skills strategy is set by Cheshire and Warrington local enterprise partnership. We are a mid-way commuter town, and although we might want to set a skills strategy for Warrington, the employers that people look towards are in the two major cities that sit either side. His OCD situation may well find that challenging, but it is not as simple or as clear for many areas around the country.
Andrew Gwynne
The hon. Gentleman has made a great case for north-west regional devolution in that case. I get what he says, but if Greater Manchester is to have a strategy, the Greater Manchester chamber, which will lead on the strategy, and the combined authority and Mayor, who have to be consulted on the strategy, cover the whole of Greater Manchester—that is nice and tidy. If he wants to make the case for Warrington to become an 11th borough of Greater Manchester so that we can placate my OCD-ness, I am more than happy to welcome Warrington into the club.
Mr Perkins
The hon. Member for Warrington South also made a powerful argument for an amendment that he had a chance to vote for a while ago, which would have ensured that the strategy is for residents. We would then have a strategy based on all the people resident in the area, regardless of where they end up working.
Andrew Gwynne
Absolutely; my hon. Friend could not have put it better. The views of residents matter as well because, as we know, although public bodies, local authorities, LEPs and chambers of commerce operate within defined boundaries, people do not. They do not necessarily know where parliamentary constituency boundaries or council ward boundaries are, and they do not always know where council boundaries are—people are fluid throughout. My hon. Friend is right that there was an opportunity to include the views of residents in the development of the plans. Unfortunately, that amendment was not passed.
Alex Burghart
I rise to speak to amendments 33, 38 to 41, and 44. I will start with amendments 33 and 38 in the names of the hon. Members for Chesterfield and for Warwick and Leamington.
Amendment 33 would require that local skills improvement plans draw on the views of local enterprise partnerships and the Skills and Productivity Board. We have been clear that local skills improvement plans should be informed by the work of the national Skills and Productivity Board and build on the work of local enterprise partnerships and their skills advisory panels. We will reiterate that in statutory guidance.
Emma Hardy
This is a quick one on statutory guidance. To clarify, will that statutory guidance state “act in accordance with” or “have regard to”? We all know that statutory guidance that states “have regard to” means “read and ignore.”
Alex Burghart
I am horrified to hear the hon. Lady’s attitude to statutory guidance. Our intention will be set out in statutory guidance, so that local skills improvement plans will be informed by the work of the national Skills and Productivity Board and build on the work of local enterprise partnerships and their skills advisory panels.
Mr Perkins
The Minister talks about speaking to local enterprise partnerships, but he must see the point that this is precisely the kind of role that was envisaged for local enterprise partnerships when they were invented. The very fact that he now says that we will go to the employer representative bodies, which we assume are likely to be chambers of commerce, rather than to local enterprise partnerships, must make people wonder, “Is there a future for local enterprise partnerships?” Will he tell us why he thought that local enterprise partnerships were not the right organisation to be the employer representative body in such cases?
Alex Burghart
We have been clear that we want to have an approach that is completely employer-led. Local enterprise partnerships, which have much to recommend them, are partially informed by employers, but they are public-private partnerships and we want an employer-led process.
Amendment 38 relates to local skills improvement plans taking account of providers of distance learning. I very much acknowledge the remarks made by Opposition Members about the importance of distance learning and how valuable it is to many members of the public who are studying. All relevant providers that provide English-funded post-16 technical education or training that is material to a specified area will have a duty to co-operate with the designated employer representative body for that area in developing a plan. That will be true even if they are based elsewhere and offer the provision by distance or online learning. That will help to ensure that the views of distance learning providers are taken into account.
Amendment 39, tabled by the hon. Members for Chesterfield and for Warwick and Leamington, would require the Government to have a national strategy for education skills that is agreed across DFE, DWP, BEIS and DLUHC, and of which LSIPs would have to take account. The Government have already set out their strategy for skills reform in the “Skills for jobs” White Paper published in January last year, which was agreed by all Departments—not just the ones listed in the amendment. The proposals set out the aim to support people to develop the skills that they need to get good jobs. They form the basis of the legislation we are discussing.
On the local skills improvement plans, we have been clear that they should take account of the relevant national strategies and priorities related to skills, as well as being informed by the work of the national Skills and Productivity Board. The specific strategies and priorities will evolve and change over time. We think the best place to do that is in statutory guidance.
Amendment 40, tabled by the hon. Members for Chesterfield and for Warwick and Leamington, relates to the publication of guidance setting out the criteria used to determine a specific area. The specified areas for local skills improvement plans will be based on functional economic areas. The Government are working with local enterprise partnerships to refine the role of business engagement in local economic strategy, including skills, and to ensure that the structures are fit for purpose for the future. That includes looking at geographies—
Alex Burghart
I am sure that the Secretary of State, as he engages in the process, will be mindful of the muddle that is Hull and, indeed, mindful of the many economic areas in which hon. Members find their constituencies.
Emma Hardy
I want to clarify that, whatever boundary it might be, defined boundaries will be set. If we do not set a defined boundary of any type, I cannot see how it will be possible to collect the data and the intelligence to know whether a strategy is working.
Alex Burghart
We are clear that these will be based on functional economic areas, that they will have a defined geography and that we will ensure that no part of the country is left out.
Mr Perkins
Will the Minister also clarify this? Is it possible that an area could be in two different local skills improvement plans? For example, Chesterfield was originally part of both the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire local enterprise partnership and the Sheffield City Region one. Both were considered functional drive-to-work areas. Is it possible that an area such as Chesterfield might be in two different local skills improvement plans, or is it the case that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle says, there will be a defined area and everyone will just be in one?
Alex Burghart
We are working on the basis that there will be a defined area for each one, but we will be mindful of the fact that in some areas the geography does not neatly fit reality. That goes to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South was making.
We will consider this work, alongside evidence from the local skills improvement plan trailblazers, before making final decisions about the specified areas that local skills improvement plans will cover. However, let me reassure members of the Committee that through the designation process, the Secretary of State will ensure that there are no gaps in the coverage of local skills improvement plans across the country.
I turn now to amendments 41 and 44. Amendment 41 relates to consulting local authorities and mayoral combined authorities on guidance for the roll-out of local skills improvement plans. We regularly engage mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority, for example in relation to this Bill and the LSIP trailblazers, and we will continue to do so as we develop our plans for the wider roll-out of LSIPs and the accompanying statutory guidance. We will also engage the Local Government Association and other key stakeholders and make use of the evidence collected from the evaluation of our trailblazers.
Amendment 44 aims to allow colleges and other providers to propose revisions to local skills improvement plans. The Bill already places duties on relevant providers to co-operate with employer representative bodies in developing the plans and keeping them under review. That will give providers the opportunity to propose revisions and help to ensure that the plans are evidence-based, credible and actionable. We expect local skills improvement plans to focus on key priorities for change to make provision more responsive to local labour market skills needs, but it is important to note that those will be changes that providers themselves will have had a role in specifying.
Once an LSIP has been signed off, a provider will be required to have regard to it. The plan will not tell providers what to do. Providers will remain responsible for making decisions as part of their business planning, but they will have the benefit of those decisions being informed by a credibly articulated and evidence-based statement of priorities from business that they will, in turn, be empowered and incentivised to respond to.
Mr Perkins
We have heard the Minister’s response on those issues. Amendments 33 and 38 to 40 were probing amendments through which we sought to understand the role of the different organisations and how Government would define the different areas. I understood the Minister’s response to mean that no area would be left out, but also that no area would be in two LSIPs —I think that that is what he was saying. That is quite important because if an area ends up being in two, because it is in two different functional drive-to-work areas, that will make the data collection aspect impossible.
There has been a lot of important narrative in this debate about recognising that areas may well look in two different directions. The point that the hon. Member for Warrington South made about looking towards Liverpool and towards Manchester, as well as towards the rest of Cheshire, is important. If Warrington does not end up being in one area or another, the data collection will become impossible, in terms of the success of those particular areas. We will obviously look to the statutory guidance and, if I have misunderstood what the Minister has said, he has the opportunity now to put me right. I think that it is really important to understand whether an area could be in two different local skills improvement plans.
On the basis of the responses and the fact that the amendments were probing, I propose to withdraw amendments 33 and 38 to 40. We would like to put amendment 41 to a vote, because we believe that it is not only consultation with combined authorities that is relevant; we are very concerned that areas that are outside a combined authority will have no democratic oversight whatever. We think that people within those areas will also want to know that there has been some consultation.
Emma Hardy
I know I am not intervening on the Minister, but I wonder whether a proposed map of the different areas will be put out for consultation before they are agreed and set by Government, and whether there will be an opportunity for local people to influence what the geographical areas will be.
Mr Perkins
It is the boundaries nightmare all over again. The Minister will have heard my hon. Friend’s question, and I am sure that he and his officers will think carefully on it. Again, we will put only one amendment in this group to a vote. We will not press amendment 44, but we will divide the Committee on amendment 41. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave withdrawn.
Amendment proposed: 1, in clause 1, page 3, line 6, after “evidence” insert
“, including the views of relevant community groups including those representing the interests of disabled people,”.—(Mr Perkins.)
This amendment intends to ensure that the evidence informing LSIP development includes information directly relevant to improving the employment prospects of disabled people.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Alex Burghart
I beg to move amendment 10, in clause 1, page 3, line 10, after “any” insert “English-funded”.
This amendment limits the post-16 technical education or training about which a local skills improvement plan must identify actions that can be taken to such education or training that is English-funded.
Alex Burghart
Officials in my Department have engaged closely with counterparts in the Welsh Government, and we believe that we have reached a satisfactory position from a devolution perspective. Government amendments 11, 12, 13 and 14 provide further clarification as to the definition of ‘relevant providers’ that may be in scope of the duties relating to local skills improvement plans in clause 1.
The amendments make it clear that those duties can only apply to institutions within the further education sector in England, English higher education providers, and independent training providers that provide post-16 technical education or training in England. Local authorities, 16-to-19 academies and schools in England may also be subject to the duties in the future should the Secretary of State exercise their power to make regulations under clause 4. Relevant providers will only be subject to the duties relating to local skills improvement plans if they provide English-funded post-16 technical education or training that is material to a specified area in England, including by distance or online learning.
Government amendments 10, 15, 16 and 17 provide further clarity in relation to the scope of local skills improvement plans. Amendment 10 limits the post-16 technical education or training about which a local skills improvement plan must identify actions that can be taken to such education or training that is English-funded. Education or training should be treated as English-funded where amounts are paid directly to providers in accordance with the regulations made by the Secretary of State under certain legislation, including, for instance, payments made in respect of student loans.
Mr Perkins
I do not intend to detain the Committee for long. The only question I wanted clarification on, given the conversation we have just had about areas, is about what thought had been given to the responsibilities of providers that are close to borders and provide services across them. We are supportive of Government amendments 11 to 14 and the clarifications established by Government amendments 15 to 17.
Alex Burghart
As I made clear in my remarks, it depends on whether provision is English-funded; that is, whether the money comes from England. That is how we explain the jurisdiction.
Amendment 10 agreed to.
Amendment proposed: 41, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(7A) Before local skills improvement plans are introduced outside of trailblazer areas, the Secretary of State must publish guidance relating to their implementation, subject to consultation of all Mayoral Combined Authorities and, where there is not one, the relevant local authority.”.—(Mr Perkins.)
This amendment seeks to ensure that local and combined authorities are consulted on the Government’s plans for the roll out of local skills improvement plans and are in a position to highlight any issues before publication.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Alex Burghart
It will be a great pleasure for everyone to hear that after three and a quarter hours of debate, we have nearly completed clause 1 of our 39-clause Bill. I will try not to detain the Committee for more than 45 minutes at this point.
With local skills improvement plans, clause 1 provides an important vehicle to give employers a more central role in local skills systems, working with providers, mayoral combined authorities and other key stakeholders to reshape provision to tackle skill mismatches and respond better to local labour market skills needs. To develop those plans, designated employer representative bodies will need to engage the widest possible range of employers and draw on a range of evidence, including existing analyses of skills supply and demand.
Local skills improvement plans will give providers an evidence-based summary of the skills, capabilities and expertise required by local employers, helping them to prioritise and focus investment in skills provision. The clause places a duty on providers to have regard to the plans, once developed, when making relevant decisions in relation to the provision of post-16 technical education and training in the area.
The clause will ensure the information, knowledge and expertise possessed by employers, providers and stakeholders is utilised to agree priority actions to align provision to better meet employer needs and support learners. The Bill is about making sure that we have qualifications, designed with employers, that ensure students get the skills the economy demands. Clause 1 is absolutely central to that mission.
Mr Perkins
I regret that the clause will leave this Committee in less good shape than when it arrived. The amendments agreed by the House of Lords were entirely sensible. They had cross-party support; they were agreed to only because they were voted for by Conservative Members who have tremendous knowledge and experience of these matters and who are much respected, alongside others. It is a matter of great regret that the Government have failed to take on board those helpful amendments, which were added in entirely the right spirit.
We believe that local skills improvement plans are an innovation that is of value, but we are very concerned that the way they are envisaged will make it difficult for them to achieve what might have been achieved. When we come to clause 2, we will get into the debate about how local skills improvement plans might be more representative. What will happen in the event that things go wrong with the employer representative bodies is important. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on those points.
We support clause 1 standing part, but we are disappointed that it leaves the Committee in less good shape than when it arrived.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 1, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 2
Designation of employer representative bodies
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 35, in clause 2, page 3, line 22, after “the” and before “employers” insert “public and private sector”.
This amendment would specify that employers operating within specified areas for the purposes of section 2(1)(a) can be both public and private sector.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 45, in clause 2, page 3, line 22, leave out “reasonably”.
This is a probing amendment to test how the Secretary of State will determine what mix of employers is considered “reasonably representative”.
Amendment 36, in clause 2, page 3, line 22, after “employers” insert
“, local Further Education colleges, independent training providers, local authority (including Mayoral combined authorities) and Local enterprise partnerships”.
This amendment would add local Further Education college, independent raining providers, local authority (including Mayoral combined authorities) and Local enterprise partnerships to those of which employer representative bodies much be representative, in order to be designated as a representative body by the Secretary of State.
Amendment 46, in clause 2, page 3, line 23, after “area,” insert
“including the interests of small and medium sized enterprises, the self-employed and public and voluntary sector employers,”.
This amendment seeks to ensure that employer representative boards include a wider range of local employer interests including small and medium sized enterprises, the self-employed, and public and third sector employers.
Amendment 37, in clause 2, page 3, line 23, at end insert—
“(iii) in the event that there is no body in the local area that is representative of the organisations listed under subsection (1)(a)(ii) the Secretary of State will instruct the Local Enterprise Partnership or Metro mayor to bring together a board which is representative of all the organisations outlined in subsection (1)(a)(ii), who will take on responsibility for drawing up the local skills improvement plan.”.
This amendment places a duty on the Secretary of State, in the event that the Secretary of State is not satisfied that an eligible body is not reasonably representative of the employers operating within the specified area.
Amendment 42, in clause 2, page 3, line 25, at end insert—
“(c) the Secretary of State has received in writing the consent of the relevant local authority or Mayoral Combined Authority.”.
This amendment provides for local authorities to give consent in the designation of employer representative bodies.
Mr Perkins
We appear to have raced on to clause 2. Amendment 35 is important, because so much of the Government’s narrative makes it clear that when they talk about employers, they really mean private sector employers. There are huge skills shortages within the public sector. The public sector is an important employer, and it is of particular importance in some of the most deprived communities. Labour’s approach to the Bill will be about asking the Government to place employers and those responsible for education at the heart of a skills strategy.
It is essential that employers in the public sector, including those in health and social care, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington mentioned, be consulted in the formation of local skills improvement plans. Employer representative bodies must ensure that LSIPs fully reflect both private and public sector employers.
Amendment 45 is a probing amendment designed to test how the Secretary of State will determine what mix of employers is considered “reasonably representative”. The Bill refers to the Secretary of State being
“satisfied that…the body is reasonably representative”.
I think it would be interesting to define what exactly is a reasonably representative mix of employers on LSIPs. It is highly likely that chambers of commerce will be the employer representative body by default in most LSIP areas. We have had representations from organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses, which has concerns about the powers to be handed to those chambers.
The Minister has said that ERBs that are not performing could be sacked and potentially replaced, but there are not numerous organisations that have the capacity to undertake that kind of work. Indeed, there is some question over whether many chambers of commerce will immediately have that capacity, but they will have the responsibility either way. As has been said, some areas have an active and vibrant chamber of commerce, and our proposals should not be viewed as being hostile to them. There are many excellent professionals in chambers of commerce and many really excellent chambers that make an incredibly important contribution to our local economies and to skills. However, it is important to recognise that membership and attendance can vary greatly within localities. The priorities of some chambers can be dominated by a small number of particularly loud voices. It is important that there are safeguards to ensure that any ERB is representative. I look forward to the Minister’s assurance that that will be the case and that ERBs will consult widely in the formation of the LSIP.
What mechanisms are in place should the Secretary of State consider that an ERB is not representative? What mechanisms are in place to deal with complaints from others, such as further education colleges, which may consider that an ERB is not representative?
Emma Hardy
Much as I hate to return to the boundary issue, our local chamber of commerce is the Humber-based chamber, which may not end up being the geographical area represented by the skills body. To return to small and medium-sized enterprises, and the concerns of the Federation of Small Businesses to which my hon. Friend referred, in areas where most employment comes from SMEs or the public sector, how can we ensure that they are heard when the skills plan is developed?
Mr Perkins
That is a really important point. In some cases, chambers of commerce and branches of the Federation of Small Businesses have constructive relationships; in other areas the relationship is less constructive. To place the role of one above the other in respect of an ERB is potentially exclusive.
Amendment 36 would add local further education colleges, independent training providers, local authorities, including mayoral combined authorities, and local enterprise partnerships to those of which employer representative bodies must be representative to be designated as a representative body by the Secretary of State. We are seeking to ensure that colleges, independent training providers, local authorities and LEPs are not shut out of LSIPs and that all form part of the consultation when LSIPs are drafted by ERBs.
Amendment 46 seeks to ensure that ERBs include a wider range of local employer interests, including SMEs, the self-employed, sole trader businesses, and public and third sector employers. In some sectors such as construction, a huge number of those responsible for ensuring that a new generation of people come into the sector are self-employed or sole traders. Historically, they would just have taken on a young apprentice to work with them; they will now potentially be excluded from doing that. We have seen the danger in the way the apprenticeship levy was introduced. Big business was very much in mind when it was introduced, and the way it was designed has massively reduced the number of small businesses offering apprenticeships.
There is a danger of SMEs being excluded from the measures in the clause, particularly in smaller town communities where there are not the major employers that there are in larger cities. We are really concerned that SMEs, alongside charities, community organisations and others, will be excluded from the decision-making process in the formation of LSIPs. Amendment 46 would ensure a role for them, alongside the self-employed, in the drafting of LSIPs.
Amendment 37 moves towards the heart of what a Labour local skills improvement plan would look like. The other amendments attempt to ensure that there is proper consultation by the employer representative body. Given that the Bill gives wide-ranging, undetermined powers to the Secretary of State, we want to ensure that local enterprise partnerships and metro Mayors have their role in local decision making enshrined in the Bill. Amendment 37 therefore proposes that, if no suitable employer representative body is found that can represent all aspects, the Secretary of State be required to set up a board in that area, which would have wider representation from organisations like FE colleges, metro Mayors and local authorities.
Emma Hardy
I recall the Minister saying that the Secretary of State will have the power to take control from chambers of commerce if they are seen not to be working properly. I wonder whether the Minister would seriously consider our amendment as a model they could use. If there is only one chamber in the area, and that chamber loses control or oversight, who are we going to use instead? Does the Minister anticipate that there will be some form of inspection to check the competency of chambers? Will there be key performance indicators, or some way of flagging whether the chamber is successful or deemed to be failing?
Mr Perkins
Those are all important questions. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are significant warnings to employer representative bodies in the Bill about failing to satisfy the Secretary of State. In the event that they are dismissed, as the Bill makes clear may happen, who is responsible for the local skills improvement plan after that? Many Members have said that some chambers are really strong, others have different strengths and others are not so strong. Putting all our eggs in one basket, which the Bill pretty much does in the vast majority of geographies, is a cause for concern.
Amendment 42 would place a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to consult and seek consent from local authorities and combined authorities on the formation of employer representative bodies. Given that ERBs will be responsible for the formation of LSIPs, which will have budgetary commitments, it is vital that they have the confidence of local authorities and combined authorities, and that organisations are working in collaboration rather than in opposition, as we have said time and again would be the Labour approach.
Andrew Gwynne
I rise briefly to support the amendments. The nub of what my hon. Friend has set out to the Committee could easily have been resolved in our earlier deliberations, when the Minister promised genuine collaboration between the local chamber of commerce and a whole range of public and private sector bodies in developing the plans. The list in the Bill of those public and private sector bodies has been struck out by the defeat of the Lords amendments, so it is right that we have another go here.
Emma Hardy
I hope that when the Minister responds, he defines whether there is going to be a transparent judgment or transparent criteria. Will the criteria be judged and evaluated? Who will do that judgment and evaluation to determine whether a chamber has failed? It surely cannot be at the whim of the current Secretary of State, whoever that may be, to decide whether a chamber is seen as successful or failing.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is right. There has to be a fair arbitration process as well, because it may well be that the chamber of commerce does not agree that it is failing, in which case we will have a problem in trying to resolve the matter. I do not want to focus on possible failure, but we have to legislate for it, just in case. I want each and every one of these bodies to be a success but if, for whatever reason, one is not, we must know what the mechanisms are to ensure that the skills strategy for a given geographical area is carried on and made successful. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield’s amendment seeks to get that information from Ministers on what happens if, for whatever reason, things go wrong.
Lastly, I come back to the issue of how boundaries matter. If, for whatever reason, the boundaries for the skills strategy are different from those of whoever takes over that responsibility in the event of the chamber of commerce failing, we need to make sure that it is clear that the replacement covers the same area as what went before it.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairship, Mr Efford. I rise to support amendments 35, 45, 36 and 46, which were well presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield. It is particularly important to reflect the points well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish about public and private employers. Much has been said about the potential for formulating the employer representative body from the chamber of commerce. The clue is in the name: it is about commerce and business, as much as employers.
That leads me on to the bit in between: our strong and vibrant voluntary sector. Recently, we have seen the greater rise of commissioning over many years by many public sector organisations. They have had 10 years of cuts, to be frank, so they have thought of innovative ways to deliver what I believe to be public services still. They have commissioned the voluntary sector, and it is vital for the voluntary sector—as suggested by amendment 46 —to have a seat on that employer representative body, whether as a collective in an overarching grouping or as key individual employers in the designated area, whatever it might be. Equally, we must ensure an interrelationship with other significant public sector bodies—put well by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish. Not being explicit is not recognising what the employment market looks like.
Emma Hardy
When the Government design the LSIP areas, I wonder whether it would be helpful to produce some data on the respective public-private employer difference in each area. Each area will look different, so I imagine that the employer representatives would be reflective of that particular labour market.
Rachel Hopkins
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Exactly that—this is an employer representative body. The Bill must be open and explicit about ensuring that the public and voluntary sectors, and others—small businesses, the self-employed—have a seat at the table, through whatever mechanism. It is for them to outline how they wish to do that, but perhaps through something like the Federation of Small Businesses. I think that is vital, because otherwise it just gets lost in the grain. If the measure is to be a success in pushing forward on the skills agenda, we need to be explicit about who is at the table, who is shaping the plans and which areas. I hope that the Minister addresses my comments in his response.
Matt Western
Briefly, the amendments seek to reflect the reality on the ground, as we have heard. Let us think about HS2 and what has been happening. We have had years—decades—of plans for HS2, but we have seen skills sucked out of the regions so that we cannot get normal construction projects completed. That is because there has not been the co-ordination that there should have been. How was that allowed to happen? The result has been a huge impact on our regional economies.
Amendment 35 looks at the inclusion of public and private sectors as employers on the ERB. How can we not include the national health service, for example, and yet are able to include Virgin Care or Circle and others? It is bizarre that the public sector is not included.
On linking to the public sector, amendment 46 also seeks to include other employers, such as SMEs, the self-employed—as my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield said—and public and third-sector employers. Right2Learn, in a written submission, stated:
“We believe it is critical that local skills and training strategies need to look far more widely at including third sector organisations, as well as HE and FE providers. There must be far more opportunities for the direct involvement of SME clusters and organisations and the so-called gig economy which the Taylor Commission highlighted, including co-operatives and self-employed.”
I have said before, we must include charity-heavy provision and I gave the example of the Workers’ Educational Association.
Amendment 46 states that we need to include the third sector and the local health boards. As I said, we have seen how good that can be through the pandemic. Local primary care networks and public health in our localities really stepped up and showed that what they do is what they know, which is their regions, their populations and their geographies, to deliver good services. The same would apply to the provision of skills across our regions.
Alex Burghart
I rise to speak to amendments 35 to 37, 42, 45 and 46. Amendment 36 would require designated employer representative bodies to be reasonably representative of a broad range of local stakeholders. We have already been clear that we want local skills improvement plans to be employer led, which means led by genuine employer representative bodies, but we have also been very clear that designated employer representative bodies should work closely with key local stakeholders to gather intelligence and consider their views and priorities when developing local skills improvement plans.
That includes local post-16 technical education and training providers and mayoral combined authorities, which, through our Government amendment, are already specified in the Bill as playing a key role. It also includes local authorities and local enterprise partnerships, among others. This will be covered in more detail in the statutory guidance.
Amendment 45 seeks to test how the Secretary of State will determine what mix of employers is considered “reasonably representative”. When making a judgment on whether an ERB is reasonably representative, the Secretary of State will take into consideration the characteristics of its membership compared with the overall population of employers in the area. That speaks to the point that a number of Opposition Members have made.
We certainly expect designated employer representative bodies to draw on the views of a wide range of local employers of all sizes, reaching beyond their existing membership and covering both private and public employers. They will also need to draw on other evidence, such as other representative and sector bodies, to summarise the skills, capabilities or expertise required in a specified area. That type of engagement is already happening, and happening brilliantly, in our trailblazer areas.
Amendment 35 seeks to ensure that designated employer representative bodies are reasonably representative of both public and private sector employers. The Bill already ensures that that is the case. Clause 4 gives a definition of “employer” for the purposes of interpreting clauses 1 to 3 that covers public authorities and charitable institutions—to the point made by the hon. Member for Luton South—as well as private sector employers.
Amendment 46 seeks to ensure that designated bodies represent the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises, the self-employed, and public and voluntary sector employers. Public and voluntary sector employers are also already covered under the definition of employer in the Bill. Designated employer representative bodies must of course represent the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises in order to be reasonably representative.
Many existing employer representative bodies already do this effectively. For example, SMEs comprise the vast majority of the membership of local chambers of commerce. In drawing on other evidence, designated ERBs may also need to consider the key skills needs of the self-employed in order to effectively summarise the current and future skills required in the area, and that will be referenced in statutory guidance.
Amendment 37 concerns a scenario where the Secretary of State is not satisfied that there is an eligible body within a specified area that is reasonably representative of local employers. We have thought about that, but we really do not think it is likely to happen. Although the “Skills for Jobs” White Paper mentioned accredited chambers of commerce, there are other employer representative bodies with either a national or local presence. We saw evidence of that from the expressions of interest process we ran to select the local skills improvement plan trailblazers, for which we received 40 applications despite only looking for six to eight trailblazers. Many hon. Members today have spoken about chambers of commerce, but the Government are entirely open to representatives from the Federation of Small Businesses and other geographically based organisations that could also be eligible.
Mr Perkins
To clarify, how many of the trailblazer organisations were not chambers of commerce?
Alex Burghart
All eight trailblazers were chambers of commerce. However, I believe there were expressions of interest and applications from others. For the record, we are not saying that this is solely the preserve of chambers of commerce. We are supporting the trailblazers with £4 million of funding this financial year, and we will continue to support ERBs as they are designated, so that they can develop credible and robust local skills improvement plans.
Mr Perkins
I appreciate the Minister’s response. I remain of the view that public and private sector employers should feature in the Bill, so I will press amendment 37, which spells out Labour’s much more collaborative approach to this matter, to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment proposed: 37, in clause 2, page 3, line 23, at end insert—
“(iii) in the event that there is no body in the local area that is representative of the organisations listed under subsection (1)(a)(ii) the Secretary of State will instruct the Local Enterprise Partnership or Metro mayor to bring together a board which is representative of all the organisations outlined in subsection (1)(a)(ii), who will take on responsibility for drawing up the local skills improvement plan.”—(Mr Perkins.)
This amendment places a duty on the Secretary of State, in the event that the Secretary of State is not satisfied that an eligible body is not reasonably representative of the employers operating within the specified area.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill (First sitting)
Tuesday 30th November 2021
(2 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 30 November 2021 - (30 Nov 2021)
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Chair
Before we begin, I have a few preliminary announcements. I encourage Members to wear a face covering, except when they are speaking or if they are exempt. That is in line with the Commission’s recommendations. Hansard colleagues would be grateful if Members could email their speaking notes to the usual address. I remind Members to switch electronic devices off or to silent, and that tea and coffee are not allowed during sittings.
Today, we will first consider the programme motion on the amendment paper, and then a motion to enable the reporting of written evidence for publication. The programme motion, which stands in the Minister’s name, was discussed yesterday by the Programming Sub-Committee for the Bill.
Ordered,
That—
1. the Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.25 am on Tuesday 30 November) meet—
(a) at 2.00 pm on Tuesday 30 November;
(b) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 2 December;
(c) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 7 December;
2. the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 5.00 pm on Tuesday 7 December.—(Alex Burghart.)
Resolved,
That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(Alex Burghart.)
The Chair
Copies of written evidence that the Committee receives will be made available in the Committee Room and will be circulated to Members by email in the usual way.
The Committee will now proceed to line-by-line consideration of the Bill. The selection list for today’s sitting is available on the table; it shows how the selected amendments have been grouped together for debate. Amendments grouped together are generally on the same or a similar issue. Please note that decisions on amendments take place not in the order in which they are debated, but in the order that they appear on the amendment paper. The selection and grouping list shows the order of debates. Decisions on each amendment are taken when we come to the clause to which the amendment relates.
A number of newer Members are present, so I will go through this for clarity. A Member who has put their name to the leading amendment in a group is called first. Other Members are then free to catch my eye to speak on all or any of the amendments in that group. A Member may speak more than once in a single debate.
At the end of a debate on a group of amendments, I shall call the Member who moved the leading amendment again. Before they sit down, they will need to indicate whether they wish to withdraw the amendment, or seek a decision—a vote. If a Member wishes to press any other amendment in a group to a vote, they need to let me know. I am not a mind reader—bear that in mind.
Clause 1
Local skills improvement plans
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
I beg to move amendment 4, in clause 1, page 2, line 21, leave out “subsection (6)” and insert “subsections (6) and (6A)”.
This amendment is consequential on Amendment 5.
Alex Burghart
May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller? I have no doubt that you will guide us, chivvy us and harry us through the six sittings ahead of us. It is my pleasure to speak to amendments 4 and 5 in my name, relating to local skills improvement plans and the involvement of mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority in their development.
Mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority play a vital role in supporting local communities, developing local economies and strengthening local skills systems. The Government recognise the importance of their work in their area as a commissioner and convenor with devolved adult education functions. As part of devolution, a sizeable proportion of the national adult education budget has been transferred to them. Their views and priorities therefore need to be brought to bear in the development of local skills improvement plans to help ensure that they are effective. That is already happening in our trailblazer areas, which deliberately feature a number with mayoral combined authorities. In recognition of their important role, the Government are bringing forward amendment 5, which will place on the Secretary of State a duty to approve and publish a local skills improvement plan only when satisfied that the designated employer representative body has, during the development of that plan, given due consideration to the views of the mayoral combined authority or Greater London Authority, where it covers the specified area.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I would like to take a moment at the start of these proceedings to talk about the importance of the Bill and the approach that the Labour party will be taking to it, alongside Government amendments 4 and 5.
The skills Bill is of tremendous importance. We recognise that there has been, for a significant time, too little investment in skills and in the next generation. In particular, the drastic funding cuts during the past 11 years have had a dramatic impact on our further education sector and on the skills of the nation. It is recognised by many businesses, employers and players in the further education sector that we have fallen behind.
The Bill represents the Government’s approach to addressing the backlog, and they tell us that this approach places employers at the heart of the skills strategy and skills agenda. When I first heard that, it sounded familiar to me, having been a Member of Parliament for the past 11 years. I thought, “Where have I heard it said before that employers will be at the heart of the skills strategy?” I believed that I had heard that from a previous skills Minister, so we did a bit of research in my office, and it turns out that we have heard it from almost all of them.
Back in January 2011, the then skills Minister, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), said of the Government’s approach to skills and apprenticeships:
“The entire focus of our Skills Strategy is in building a training system that is employer led…Indeed helping meet those skills needs, in businesses across the country, will make a major contribution to economic growth.”
In 2015, the apprenticeship levy was introduced, and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, told us that we now had a system in the hands of an employer-led institute for apprenticeships, and that his levy would be a
“radical, long overdue” new approach to apprenticeship funding. He said in this place that it was
“to raise the skills of the nation and address one of the enduring weaknesses of the British economy.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2015; Vol. 602, c. 1370.]
His skills Minister at the time, former Tory MP Nick Boles, said:
“At the heart of the apprenticeship drive is the principle that no one better understands the skills employers need than employers themselves.”
By 2017, the Government were telling us this:
“The Apprenticeship Levy is a cornerstone of the government’s skills agenda, creating a system which puts employers at the heart of designing and funding apprenticeships to support productivity and growth.”
In 2018, the then Education Secretary, now the Minister for Security and Borders, told us that local enterprise partnerships were
“business-led partnerships…at the heart of responding to skills needs and building local industrial strategies that will help individuals and businesses gain the skills they need to grow.”
The rhetoric behind this Bill is exactly the rhetoric that we have been listening to for the past 11 years. Indeed, if the approaches of the past 11 years, which we were told placed employers at the heart of skills policy, had worked, we would not need this Bill. The Government are once again returning with the same prescription for the same ailment. They are once again failing to meet the size of the challenge, and in some cases are heading in the wrong direction altogether.
We have a new Secretary of State in post, of course. He is at great pains to tell people that there will be a change of tone and approach. The Bill was the brainchild of the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), if that is not an oxymoron, who was his predecessor—a man who believed in seizing as much power for himself as possible. Since the appointment of the new Secretary of State, we have been told there will be a change of tone and approach, but the Government’s approach to the cross-party amendments brought by their Lordships is not promising.
We entirely support the amendments in this group, which are about the mayoral combined authorities, but it is remarkable that the Government needed to introduce them; that demonstrates that the Government produced the skills Bill without any recognition of the issue.
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman has identified a key challenge that the Government are looking to tackle. It will clearly be difficult, but we hope that they will be successful. Does he agree that part of the reason why the challenge is so significant is that the previous Labour Government almost entirely ignored technical education and skills, with their obsession with universities and a 50% target?
Mr Perkins
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman raised that question. That has long been the lament. I speak to my colleagues who were involved in skills policy under the Labour Government, and their retort is that the investment in skills under the Labour Government was far greater than what we have seen in the 11 years that followed. There is nothing contradictory in wanting a strategy that allows as many people who want a university education and who are capable of it to have one, and that also has a real commitment to investment in skills.
Over the 11 years of this Government, we have seen the trashing of the idea that universities should be an aspiration for everyone. Alongside that rhetoric—an example of which we have just heard from the hon. Gentleman—we have seen a massive reduction in the investment in skills, and we have seen policies that do not work. The apprenticeship levy led to a massive reduction in the number of apprenticeships. What is said is one thing; what is done is quite another.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Back in the mid-2000s, did not the Labour Government, who predated my time here, introduce national skills academies? The whole point of them was to develop skills across the piece and drive the development of courses that could run in colleges across the UK.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend makes an important point. We feel very strongly that we need investment in skills, but we also need a strategic approach that brings in different Government Departments and recognises that skills are the responsibility of not just the Department for Education, but of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Treasury. There has to be recognition that this is about the kind of economy, as well as the kind of skills system, that we are looking to build. My hon. Friend makes a powerful point on the Labour Government’s approach, and the investments they made.
Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)
I was a college lecturer in the era that the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington mentioned. Curriculum 2000 was an absolute, unmitigated disaster. AVCEs—advanced vocational certificates of education—were withdrawn very quickly. The money that was pumped in was pumped into all the wrong places, and we ended up in a situation where people went to university because there were no proper options for BTECs at level 4 or level 5, or Cambridge technicals or City and Guilds, or anything else. It is not just BTECs but the Pearson monolith we are talking about here.
Mr Perkins
I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. I accept that she has a long track record in this sector, and that is an important contribution to this debate. The investment in skills then was on a different level from the investment that has taken place since. I am very happy to spend the entire debate talking about the previous 20 years; it would be interesting but not entirely fruitful. I accept that she feels, as she said on Second Reading, that changes to higher national diplomas were damaging; she was negative about the drive towards university education. Like the Labour Government, I believe that we should recognise that it is a brutal world for those who do not have skill. A drive towards university education should not be at the expense of college education; they should be two hands working closely together.
The Chair
Order. You cannot intervene on an intervention. I will allow Mr Perkins to respond.
Mr Perkins
It was such a controversial intervention that people wanted to intervene on it. I do not entirely accept what the hon. Member for Great Grimsby says—that a university degree is not a contribution to the skills of the nation. She hits on a view that is at the heart of much of this Government’s approach, which is that education has value only in so far as it is used in the work that someone goes on to do, and that there is a very narrow distinction between skills or vocational education, which is useful, and university education, which is theoretical, abstract, and of little value. I do not recognise that distinction at all.
The Chair
May I gently remind people that, while I think it is appropriate to have a broader debate at the beginning, we are talking about amendments 4 and 5?
Mr Perkins
Sure. I take your point, Mrs Miller. However, the intervention from the hon. Member for Great Grimsby highlights an important broader issue: of course skills and vocational education will always need to lead people being able to find work, but constantly decrying university education, on the basis that it is somehow not delivering that, is mistaken. There has been a real drive by this Government to frame the further education and higher education sectors as enemies that must be pitted against each other. Our approach recognises them as two important, powerful strongholds in supporting this nation to be the kind of nation that it wants to be.
Mr Perkins
I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish; then, if my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South wishes to come in, I will take her intervention.
Andrew Gwynne
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I think he is absolutely right: we are heading into that age-old trap of not only dividing the academic from the vocational in further education, but implying that higher education is solely an academic route. There are many vocational higher education qualifications out there, and we must not ignore that. On Government amendment 5, the exact point that Andy Burnham—the Mayor of Greater Manchester—and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority have been making for years is that for the Greater Manchester city region to succeed, we must ensure that its skills agenda embraces not only the academic but the vocational, so that we have the skills for the jobs of tomorrow.
The Chair
The hon. Gentleman has neatly brought us back onto the subject of this debate, so I thank him for that.
Mr Perkins
I encourage my hon. Friend to expand on that point, because he is absolutely right. It is remarkable that the Government have been forced to introduce Government amendment 5, because it means that they brought the Bill forward without recognising any role for authorities that already have this funding devolved to them in the first place. It is a fairly dramatic change. The approach that Labour would take to local skills improvement plans is fundamentally different from that of the Government.
The Government are taking the approach that these are employer-led documents—that phrase again. They are documents of tremendous importance, so presumably the chambers of commerce will be holding the pen on them and will now, as a result of Government amendment 5, be forced to convince the Secretary of State that they have properly taken on board the views of those democratically elected to lead on skills policy in their areas. So many other important contributors are left on the side lines.
Labour’s approach would be to say that we need to recognise the importance of local skills improvement plans that will dictate the direction of skills policy. What we need is a local skills improvement plan that brings together the role of public and private sector employers; that brings in further education colleges; that brings in significant independent training providers within an area; and that is held together by those with democratic accountability, such as metro Mayors and local authorities. That holistic approach would deliver a skills policy that everyone would be able to get behind and recognise as representative.
The Government’s approach is very much about placing the chambers of commerce at the heart of this, but in fact they have had to bring forward an amendment to even put the metro Mayors and combined authorities back into that role. We support Government amendment 5, but it is remarkable that it was necessary at all.
I would like the Minister to expand on whether Government amendment 4 impacts clause 6 in terms of the duty placed on local skills improvement plans for compliance with section 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008. It is crucial that skills policy drives us towards a net zero future, so it is important to understand whether the intention is to undermine that commitment when it comes to Government amendment 4.
Again, we support Government amendment 5, although we are confused about why it is needed and why it was not central to the approach. As my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish mentioned, it is important that we recognise that mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority already have responsibilities in terms of policy and funding for further education and skills, and that they both have good professional relationships with employers, colleges and training providers in their areas. I have been along to meet them in Manchester and have seen their excellent work on careers guidance and their constructive approach to independent providers and the FE sector. That is a great example of how devolved decision makers are better in touch with the needs of their communities than a centralised approach.
It is a shame that the Bill, the brainchild of the former Secretary of State, is a return to the centralisation agenda that has too often bedevilled Whitehall thinking. It was clearly a driving force in the legislation. It is inconceivable that local skills improvement plans could have flown in the face of decisions made locally. It is therefore important to understand what protections there will be for existing funding arrangements with regard to those put in place by metro Mayors. Will they be transferred to employer representative bodies or will there be a dual system?
The Government propose that employer representative bodies consider the views of mayoral combined authorities or the Greater London Authority but, as was said by the hon. Member for Ipswich on Second Reading, what does that say about those communities that are not within metro Mayor areas? The majority of my colleagues on the Labour Benches are in metro Mayor areas—I am one of the relatively few who are not—but many colleagues on the Conservative Benches are in areas that have local enterprise partnerships, which were originally meant to bring together many of the different power brokers. It seems that democratic accountability is missing entirely in areas outside the metro Mayor areas.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
This is a crucial point, which I hope we will come to as our consideration of the Bill develops: how do we define regions and regional consultation? The hon. Member for Great Grimsby might have an idea completely different from mine about what constitutes the best region when looking at skills and skills development. I hope that the Minister will take that point away and look to define that later as we go through the Bill.
Mr Perkins
Absolutely. To return to the subject of the amendment concerning mayoral combined authorities, the phrase “due consideration” is noticeably vague. The kind of due consideration that the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire might have given to the views of the Mayor of Manchester would have left me—and, no doubt, the Mayor of Manchester—with sleepless nights. We hope that a more thoughtful approach is now in place and we welcome the change of tone, but we are not seeing a change in policy.
Emma Hardy
On that issue of “due consideration” and its vagueness, will the Minister agree to look at producing some guidance on what constitutes due consideration? Is that a consultation that has happened on one occasion, or on a number of occasions? How do we define “due consideration” to ensure that the democratic accountability to which my hon. Friend is referring is put at the heart of the Bill?
Mr Perkins
I agree with that absolutely. The next part of that—to extend what my hon. Friend is saying—is to ask whether there is a right of appeal for a combined authority or metro Mayor in the event that they do not consider that due consideration has been given to their views. If they think that the employer representative body has put together a local skills improvement plan that has not taken into account the representations made on one or more areas, will there be a right of appeal? Will the fact that the metro Mayor considers that due consideration was not given be able to pause the local skills improvement plan and bring people together?
What role does the Secretary of State consider that he will have? As I said, the previous Secretary of State was very much a centraliser—he wanted his hands on every single decision—and that clearly runs through the Bill. He had all these frustrations with the fact that individual organisations were not doing exactly what he wanted, so he wanted the power to tell them that they had to. Is that the sort of approach that this Secretary of State will take? Having appointed the chambers of commerce to make decisions before those who are democratically elected to do so, he appears to be positioning himself as the arbiter in a whole variety of local decisions. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Emma Hardy
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. Looking at the room, I see that people on both sides are genuinely interested in education matters. I hope that this will be a good Committee that really scrutinises the legislation before us in a shared ambition to make the Bill the best that it can be.
I will be brief. I have already made an intervention about guidance on what constitutes due consideration and about the arbitration processes for conflict over whether someone believes they have been duly considered. Will there be a timeframe for that due consideration? Local engagement and agreement for the skills plans is absolutely crucial, so having that clearly laid out is fundamental.
I hope the Minister will clarify something. I may be misreading the Bill, but am I right in thinking that further education colleges have been removed from consultation, or is that part of a later amendment? The Lords tabled an amendment to ensure that local school improvement plans are co-developed with colleges, local government, elected Mayors, employers and so on. Am I right in thinking that colleges are no longer listed as part of the consultation process, or will that be addressed in another amendment? I may have made a mistake, in which case the Minister will correct me.
We are basing everything on employers and the jobs available now, but has the Minister thought about future-proofing the local skills development plans to include industries that will be developed in future, especially in relation to climate, green changes and so on? We might create the best possible plan for jobs that exist now, but that might not be the plan that we want in five years’ time, so will such future-proofing be included?
Tom Hunt
I will make just a few very brief comments. I think that the local skills improvement plans are a huge step in the right direction. It is clearly crucial that local businesses should play a role in shaping the curriculum of further education colleges. We need to have far more of an ecosystem approach when it comes to the role of employers, schools, FE colleges and further education. Too often, it seems as if they are kind of on the sides.
Mr Perkins
What does the hon. Gentleman say to my earlier point, which was that what he is saying is exactly what has been said about every single Conservative skills reform in the last 11 years? They always claim that they are putting employers at the heart of the measures. Why does he think those previous approaches have failed?
Tom Hunt
To be honest, we are dealing with the Government we have today. I can say, as somebody with an interest in further education and skills, that this Bill is actually the most significant and potentially game-changing piece of Government legislation. My job is to look at the Bill before us today, and I think it is hugely in the right place. That is not to say that improvements cannot be made at this stage, and we will engage in doing that.
There is one quick point that I would like to make. When we talk about the local skills improvement plans and local employers playing a greater role in shaping the curriculum of further education colleges, I think it is important that we consider what might happen. I imagine that the vast majority of education providers will play ball and welcome that input from local business, but on occasions where there may be some resistance and that does not quite work, is there something that could be done to ensure that they come to the table to accept the advice and a steer from local business?
On my comments on Second Reading, which the hon. Member for Chesterfield has often mentioned, I recognise that there is a significant difference between mayoral combined authorities and regular upper-tier local authorities. Certain powers and funding have been devolved to mayoral combined authorities, and we do not have them in every area. I accept that, and I accept why the Government are treating mayoral combined authorities slightly differently from regular upper-tier authorities such as Suffolk County Council. I guess my view would be that the solution is to have more devolution. As somebody who recently, with other Suffolk colleagues, supported a bid for One Suffolk, I would be very happy if there were positive movements so that Suffolk was in a place to have the powers for its principal authority to play a role in local improvement plans.
Andrew Gwynne
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. My comments follow neatly on from those of the hon. Member for Ipswich, because the reality is that much of what the Government want to achieve in the Bill is starting to happen anyway in devolved combined authority areas where the skills agenda has been devolved. I welcome the emphasis on skills improvement plans and, now, the involvement of the mayoral combined authorities in them. It was perhaps remiss that that was not in the Bill originally, and I am pleased that the Minister has tabled an amendment to ensure that it is clearly in the Bill.
Devolution matters. It works, and it is working. It was a Labour Government who introduced the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009, which facilitates the devolution agenda. Greater Manchester, my own city region, was the first to have a combined authority in 2011. It had an interim Mayor in 2015—my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd)—and a Mayor in 2017: Andy Burnham. The skills agenda is at the heart of the Greater Manchester combined authority’s strategies. It has a local industrial strategy. It has the Greater Manchester work and skills strategy and priorities. In 2019, it had the adult education budget devolved to it. It has Bridge GM, which links schools and employers.
The thing that I am most proud of, and which fits neatly in the agenda of the Bill, is the Greater Manchester skills for growth strategy, which is designed to fill occupational skills gaps in the Greater Manchester city region, and provide young people and adults with the skills needed to fill the gaps.
However, we need to go beyond that, and I urge the Minister to encourage combined authorities to future-proof and devolve them the powers to do so. Technology is moving at a rapid speed. Our city region economies are changing dramatically in a short space of time, and we need to ensure that the workforce of tomorrow has the skills of tomorrow, not the skills of today. I welcome the fact that the mayoral combined authorities will be included in the Bill.
Emma Hardy
On the skills for tomorrow, there is a huge concern about amendment 4, which removes subsection (6) on future issues around climate change and environmental goals. Surely those issues will only grow in importance. Removing that from the Bill seems incomprehensible.
Andrew Gwynne
It absolutely does. My hon. Friend is completely right to highlight that, because they are not only the challenges but the opportunities of tomorrow. I firmly believe that the United Kingdom can be a world leader in developing the technologies and equipment to help tackle some of the environmental challenges that the whole globe will face in the years to come. That is certainly true of my city region. It is also true of Hull, where there are huge opportunities not just on renewable power but to develop the next generation of technology.
Emma Hardy
My hon. Friend has prompted me to point out that wind turbines are made in the great city of Hull, and we are going to be one of the green energy capitals of the UK. I wanted to get that in Hansard.
Andrew Gwynne
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention—probably almost as grateful as she is to have had the chance to make that press release—and she is absolutely right.
I firmly believe that the skills agenda is linked to the industrial strategy agenda, not just for individual city regions, towns and counties, but for the country. If we want Britain to succeed, we must think not just about the here and now, but about the future. That involves bringing together skills and industrial strategy. In a small way, that is what we are doing in Greater Manchester through the devolution agenda.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend is making an incredibly important point, which is at the heart of the difference between Labour and Conservative approaches. This Government’s approach is about moving towards a German-style skills system, but the Treasury and Business teams do not want a German-style economy. I very much welcome a step towards the German-style approach, but the Government are trying to impose a model on top of our economy, and that cannot be done without the drive towards an industrial strategy.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend must have eyes in the back of his head, because that was pretty much the next point that I wanted to make. It all hinges on the term “due consideration”. We are doing this in city regions such as Greater Manchester, and we are getting there. We have the skills, and we have good collaboration with local businesses to shape the agenda. We have a shared vision. I accept that that might not be the case in other devolved areas—there might be a degree of friction between the business community and the combined authority—but in Greater Manchester, it is genuinely a partnership. The skills programmes, strategies and priorities are genuinely developed in partnership.
The Minister talks about “due consideration” in relation to the amendment, but I want assurances from him that Ministers will take a genuinely collaborative approach and we will not end up with some monolithic, top-down and Whitehall-knows-best approach being imposed on city regions that are already starting to develop the very skills strategies that are envisaged in the Bill. I will be grateful if the Minister can address my concerns.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I will keep my comments brief, but I want to touch on some of the issues raised by colleagues.
First, LEPs, chambers of commerce and other instances of local involvement in skills plans have been mentioned. Some of those are excellent and some are awful. Will the Minister touch on what safeguards might exist for those plans, particularly in areas without combined authorities? Combined authorities have devolved local oversight or engagement in the plans, but for areas that do not, where will the safeguard be if chambers of commerce that are not delivering for business bring forward less effective plans?
Secondly, I should declare an interest as a local government leader in talks with Government about devolution. In all honesty, I would devolve adult skills to all upper-tier local authorities. However, recognising that areas with combined authorities will have local engagement in the discussion—the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish has mentioned future-proofing the Bill—does the Minister acknowledge that the Government are in talks about devolution with counties that will not be part of combined authorities, but that might have powers over adult skills? Is that something that has been considered in the wording of the Bill? Such areas might have that local input or devolved skills budgets and options available to them in future, although they might not be covered by the term combined authority.
Matt Western
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Miller. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle was saying, it is great to be in a room that contains so many educationalists and educators, including my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Great Grimsby, who will bring a lot to bear on the Bill.
I will preface my remarks by turning to earlier comments on vocational qualifications and the relative value of one sector versus another. We must remind ourselves to talk about the HE sector as opposed to universities and think about the great breadth brought to our educational sector by higher education providers, who are diverse in nature.
On Government amendment 4, given that COP was a month ago and how disappointing it was, we must ensure that all Bills include elements that remind us of the importance of climate change, which is the issue of our time and that of decades to come. The Government are seeking to remove subsection (6), inserted by the Peers for the Planet group, which importantly sees LSIPs granted to authorities by the Secretary of State only if they comply with the duty in the Climate Change Act 2008. We must ensure that, at every opportunity, in every piece of legislation, that duty is embedded in our thinking, and future generations must know of our determination on that.
I am sure that the Government are committed to environmentalism—they certainly talk about their commitment—and addressing the issue. I urge Government Members to think about this measure as it is particularly important in terms of education and what is being shared with the next generation. I remind the Committee that it was a concession in the Lords, so I am surprised that it should be opposed in the Commons.
I turn to Government amendment 5. It is important when designating LSIPs to consider the views and wishes of the mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority. The Association of Colleges made that clear when it said:
“The voice of employers is critical—but it is also important that LSIPs reflect wider priorities too”.
Through the pandemic, we should have learned just how important localism is. One of the great successes was the delivery of track and trace and the vaccine programme locally. The same should be said of how we design our needs for skills and education in our regions. The principle of subsidiarity—decisions being made at the local level—is really important.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend is making an incredibly important point. We have a couple of enthusiasts for devolution of power on the Government side of the Committee, but I fear they may be disappointed because the Government’s approach to devolution is very much less enthusiastic than that of the previous Conservative Governments in 2015 and 2017. The Bill, which seeks to bring a lot of power back to the centre, seems to prove that.
Matt Western
I agree with my hon. Friend, and I think many hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Mansfield, will be disappointed about that. It is really important that the Government send clear messages about devolution and what they want to see, but in many facets of Government business there seems to be a greater concentration of powers coming into Whitehall and Ministers’ offices than devolution to the likes of Mansfield, Manchester, Liverpool the north-east and so on.
As I said, one of the great learnings of the last 20 months is just how brilliantly our local services and authorities can deliver things. That is because they understand their geography, their communities and their populations. I am concerned about how due consideration, a much-vented issue in the last half hour, might work, particularly given the reliance on the personality of the individual who happens to be in the seat at the time. I will not go into any further detail on that because it has already been much explored.
Will the Minister provide a bit more information on what factors will be considered in the designation of an LSIP? The Local Government Association has stated:
“the reforms need to be implemented as part of an integrated, place-based approach. Without a meaningful role for local authorities, the reforms risk creating an even more fragmented skills system, with different providers subject to different skills plans”
I urge the Government and the Minister to listen and respond to the experience of the Local Government Association.
Emma Hardy
Let me offer the Minister a concrete example of the situation in Hull. We have the Hull and Humber chamber of commerce, which reaches over to the south bank, and we have a newly formed LEP that serves just Hull and the East Riding. We have a careers scheme for Hull and the Humber, and separate counties that have no overall mayoral authority, but an elected police commissioner for the whole of the Humber. To say that is muddled does not go far enough. I really feel that the amendment should make allowances for areas that are as muddled as Hull.
Matt Western
That is a good illustration of just how complicated these matters can be. I hope that there will be greater clarity on how the measures will work in future.
We have heard from colleagues how well things can work, including my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish, who told us about how Manchester is just getting on with it. Having been up there recently, I have seen the extraordinary work of that cluster of universities and colleges, and how they are co-operating and collaborating in their brilliant work to bring skills to their known geography—I want to place on the record how mighty impressive that was. I agree with the hon. Member for Mansfield on counties and how they work in their regions; that must be clarified as well.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
I ran a business in Greater Manchester’s Media City for many years. I saw the work of universities; in fact, I saw the universities arrive in MediaCity while I was working there. It was employers who actually drove that forward. I have listened to Opposition Members talking about local government and universities driving things forward, but businesses have been driving forward the skills agenda in Greater Manchester for many years. We have to put on the record the important role that business plays in that. The skills agenda is not being driven by local government alone; businesses are really at the heart of it.
Matt Western
I knew it was Warrington. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments—I worked in the industry for many years myself. Businesses have an important part to play as consultees, but my concern is about the balance struck between what business wants and wider needs—we have to get an absolute balance between that.
To give the hon. Gentleman a small example, Warwick University, which is close to my constituency, was founded back in the 1960s, but it was founded off the back of the automotive industry. That did not mean that it should be an automotive industry establishment, and it is not. It happens to be one of the best universities in the UK and globally, but it was part founded by industry. That is where collaboration can work, and the last Labour Government certainly looked very closely at that when developing regional plans to promote industries. I take on board his point that industries and businesses have an important role to play as consultees, but plans should not be explicitly or purely at their direction.
Alex Burghart
What an interesting debate to start off the Committee stage of the Bill. There are so many comments to come back to. As a general observation, it was very nice to hear the hon. Member for Chesterfield praise Conservative predecessors of mine for their comments about an employer-led system, which we have indeed been building up during our time in power. The Bill is simply the next stage in that process.
The fact that that process was required was first highlighted in a 2011 report by the Labour peer Lord Sainsbury. I do not want to get into the deep politics of it—we have the Bill to consider—but that report was written after Labour had been in power for 13 years. He felt that it was necessary to begin long-term reform of the skills system to make it more responsive to the needs of business and to make sure that students could get the qualifications they needed and the technical skills to go into the jobs that the economy demands. It is a great honour to present the Bill as a means of taking those ideas on to their next stage.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Chesterfield for saying that Labour will support the amendments and the local skills improvement plans. However, I need to clarify a point made by a number of Opposition Members: the Government are not removing clause 1(6). That seems to be a point of confusion. Clause 1(6) stands part of the Bill. Government amendment 5 would insert subsection (6A) to clause 1, on page 2, in line 32. It does not do anything to clause 1(6).
Emma Hardy
On a point of clarity—forgive me if I have this wrong— amendment 4 does seem to leave out subsection (6). My mistake—it says
“leave out ‘subsection (6)’ and insert ‘subsections (6) and (6A)’”.
Alex Burghart
With that in mind, and in answer to the point made by the hon. Member for Chesterfield on the impact of Government amendment 4 on clause 6, there is no friction at all between Government amendment 4 and clause 6. The amendment requires the Secretary of State to have regard to clause 1(6) and (6A) when deciding to approve and publish a plan. I hope that has cleared that up.
The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle raised a point about LSIPs and colleges, which will be dealt with in statutory guidance. The Secretary of State will lay very good statutory guidance on how employer representative bodies will work and how local skills improvement plans will be written.
We expect the whole process to be collaborative. The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish spoke very well about the existing collaboration in the system. It is something that we recognise in all of our combined mayoral authorities. We do not see there being any great friction or need for friction. We want to see authorities, businesses and providers working in harmony, as many of them already do. What we are doing in the Bill, and in these clauses, is simply creating a process that helps establish that good working.
I was up in Salford not long ago, in MediaCity, where I saw some of the Government’s fantastic digital boot camps. Young people—and some not so young people—are learning the skills of tomorrow at speed in 16-week courses, getting apprenticeships in MediaCity and meeting people who have previously done the apprenticeships, who now have jobs in MediaCity. We saw that Government initiative backed by local business is not in friction with the good work the local Mayor was doing—instead, it complements it. We also saw the local economy boosted as a result.
Some of the remarks made by hon. Members suggested that there is always going to be a terrible tension between what local political leadership and businesses are trying to do, and what local providers want to do. I do not think that will be the case. In fact, there is an enormous amount of goodwill in the system and people are desirous of working towards the same aims.
On the points raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Ipswich and for Mansfield, do I see before me two future leaders in their respective areas? Well, one leader already, but who knows if they will become greater leaders still? Obviously, at the moment combined authorities have a greater responsibility for adult skills than local authorities do, which is why we put them on the face of the Bill. In the course of statutory guidance and as situations evolve, perhaps it will be possible for us to set out how we expect that work to evolve.
I do not recognise the comments made by some Opposition Members about this Government not having an appetite for devolution. Success has many fathers. The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish talked about how Labour’s devolutionary reforms led to mayoral combined authorities, but I remember the Manchester devolution deal being done under the Conservatives.
Andrew Gwynne
I can second-guess where the Minister is going and I am grateful to him for giving way, but I was merely pointing out that the piece of legislation that permits combined authorities was one of the last pieces of legislation that was introduced by a Labour Government. It was clear that was where Labour was heading, but credit where it is due. David Cameron and George Osborne did allow significant devolution to my city region.
The Chair
Order. As interesting as devolution is, can we remind ourselves that we are talking about local skills improvement plans?
Alex Burghart
Thank you, Mrs Miller, and with your prompting I will refer to one more point.
Emma Hardy
I apologise if I am being tiresome, but just so I have understood this correctly, can the Minister confirm that the amendment leaves out subsections (6)(b), “adaptation to climate change” and (6)(c), “meeting other environmental goals”, but leaves subsection (6)(a)? Does the amendment remove paragraphs (b) and (c), lines 30 to 32, with those specific references to “climate change” and “other environmental goals”?
Alex Burghart
I believe I am right in saying that the amendment keeps clause 1(6)(a).
Alex Burghart
In the amendment, subsections (6)(b) and (6)(c) will not stand part of the Bill.
Emma Hardy
So that we are all clear, does that mean that “adaptation to climate change” and “meeting other environmental goals” are being removed?
The Chair
Minister, would you like to complete your remarks and maybe others can provide you with a little bit more information?
Alex Burghart
That is very kind, Mrs Miller. I will seek absolute clarity on this point, but my understanding is that the Secretary of State will still have to have regard to section 1 of the Climate Change 2008. That is an important concession that was made in the House of Lords, for obvious reasons.
To go back to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South, one of the major players—perhaps the major player—in what this Bill seeks to achieve is business. It is often business that drives, through its work with local providers, a responsive system, which means that the employers of today ensure that the employees of tomorrow have the skills that they need.
Andy Carter
In Warrington, we have used the town deal to put a focus on skills, with the employer at the heart of it. A digital skills academy has been created in Warrington, driven by employers but facilitated by the local authority, allowing the focus for colleges and for future growth in those areas. Businesses have really been at the heart of that work, which for me is so important.-
Alex Burghart
That point is well made, and I very much hope to visit Warrington in the near future and see that good work.
Mr Perkins
The Minister may have received guidance that might help him, but as I understood it, paragraphs (a), (b) and (c) of subsection (6) all remain in the Bill; he is simply adding proposed new subsection (6A), which we have just been debating. The amendment does not take out any of the paragraphs in subsection (6), unless I have misunderstood it.
Alex Burghart
To bring a bit of clarification to proceedings, the hon. Gentleman is quite right. Contrary to some of the messages that Opposition Members gave earlier, we are keeping all of clause 1(6)—that means paragraphs (a), (b) and (c).
Amendment 4 agreed to.
Amendment made: 5, in clause 1, page 2, line 32, at end insert—
‘(6A) Where a specified area covers any of the area of a relevant authority, the Secretary of State may approve and publish a local skills improvement plan for the specified area only if satisfied that in the development of the plan due consideration was given to the views of the relevant authority.
For this purpose “relevant authority” means—
(a) a mayoral combined authority within the meaning of Part 6 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 (see section 107A(8) of that Act), or
(b) the Greater London Authority.’—(Alex Burghart.)
The effect of this amendment is that the Secretary of State must be satisfied that due consideration has been given to the views of a mayoral combined authority or the Greater London Authority before approving a local skills improvement plan for an area that covers any of their area.
The Chair
We had some quite general debate on that group. I hope people have got things off their chest. Perhaps we could have a slightly more focused debate as we move forward.
Alex Burghart
I beg to move amendment 6, in clause 1, page 2, line 35, leave out from “body” to “for” in line 37.
The effect of this amendment is that a local skills improvement plan will be a plan developed by an employer representative body which is designated for a specified area. This amendment, together with Amendments 7, 8 and 9, reverse an amendment made at Lords Report.
Alex Burghart
The amendments strip back some of the detail in clause 1(7), which can be better dealt with in statutory guidance. As well as engaging a wide range of employers, a designated employer representative body should work closely with all relevant providers, local authorities and other key local stakeholders to develop its plan. Without such widespread engagement, the resulting plan is not likely to be very effective. Key stakeholders with valuable local intelligence include, but are not limited to, the Careers and Enterprise Company, local careers hubs, National Careers Service area-based contractors and Jobcentre Plus. Our expectations on local stakeholder engagement will be set out clearly within the statutory guidance. The guidance can be updated regularly to reflect evolving needs and priorities, as well as best practice. It also enables the required level of detail to be captured.
Clause 1 already places duties on relevant providers to co-operate with employer representative bodies to ensure that their valuable knowledge and experience directly inform the development of the plans, so that they are evidence-based, credible and actionable. Clause 4 makes it clear that relevant providers include independent training providers and universities. I therefore do not believe that the Lords amendment is needed, particularly given the MCA and GLA amendment that we have just discussed.
Mr Perkins
These are four significant amendments. Notwithstanding the assurances that we have just received from the Minister, they specifically take out what I think was a very strong amendment, supported by Members across the House of Lords, that added the importance of a collaborative approach to the Bill. For all the Minister said in that contribution, and the one before, about the importance of these partnership arrangements, it is not really a partnership arrangement. It is clear that all those consultees are subservient to the chamber of commerce which, ultimately, holds the pen and makes the decision. That report will then have to meet with the approval of the Secretary of State. The hon. Member for Mansfield raised in a previous debate the question of what happens, given the huge variety in the strength of different chambers of commerce, different local enterprise partnerships and so on, in the event that a local skills improvement plan goes to the Secretary of State and is considered not be adequate? Obviously, we can only assume that the Secretary of State would send it back.
Chambers of commerce are very varied organisations; I think everyone would recognise that there are some excellent ones—I count those in Derbyshire and the east midlands as an example of that. However, there are others that are much smaller and have very different areas of responsibility. Chambers of commerce are membership organisations that represent some of the businesses in their community; that is unlike chambers of commerce in Germany, which are compulsory for businesses to join, and therefore are representative, quasi-governmental organisations. In this country, chambers of commerce are one of many different business organisations that businesses might choose to join. Different chambers have different areas of priority and expertise and different industries that are particularly important to them. Even among their memberships they have, in my experience, a small number of members who are very active within them, and large numbers of members who take a much less active role.
What we have in the context of many of the consultees that the Minister referred to going into the guidance notes, are a number of organisations that are in some ways more consistent, and will definitely offer a breadth of approach. Therefore, the fundamental difference of the approach that Labour would take in the Bill, compared with the Government, is around whether it is a true partnership. The difference is whether it is a partnership that recognises the voices of public and private sector employers and of further education colleges, that recognises the power of those independent training providers that do such great work across the country, and that recognises statutory organisations such as jobcentres, all of which have a role in this, or whether, as the Bill says, they are all consultees, but the chamber of commerce ultimately writes this plan. We would like to see far greater parity in that power; we think it is a local skills improvement plan that would have more buy-in and more belief in the local community, and would be much more respected on that basis.
Emma Hardy
I am sure that my hon. Friend shares my concern, given amendment 6, that the specific reference to further education providers is removed from the Bill. Any local skills plan needs to be done in conjunction with further education providers; there is no point writing a Bill that does not have the capacity to deliver in that local area. It seems slightly odd that a specific reference to further education has been taken out of the Bill.
Mr Perkins
I agree with my hon. Friend. She is right that Government amendment 6 removes the words,
“in partnership with local authorities, including the Mayoral Combined Authorities and further education providers for the specified area”.
The Minister says that we should not worry, it will be in the guidance. However, the different approach by the Lords recognised that it was a genuine partnership. These organisations are now consultees that will make their representations to the chamber of commerce, and hope that the chamber of commerce smiles on the view they put forward. It is a totally different type of relationship. The relationship is either one of partnership or of subservience; the approach the Government choose to take is one of subservience.
Matt Western
My hon. Friend is making some very important points. On the face of it, it would seem that the Government seek to make local employers’ organisations ultimately responsible for the direction and control of our colleges, and potentially our universities as well.
Mr Perkins
In terms of areas that are not already devolved, that is absolutely right, and adult education budgets will be very relevant.
Hon. Members will be pleased to know that I will not dwell on the subsequent amendments, because we will have an opportunity to debate them, but I will touch on some of our concerns about the way in which the needs of learners might not necessarily be at the forefront of people’s minds in chambers of commerce. For example, to what extent will chambers of commerce be aware of the specific needs of people with education and healthcare plans or other disabilities? The amendments seek to reduce the extent to which it is partnership working and move to a hierarchy, with the chamber of commerce holding the pen and driving the bus, and others making suggestions about the route.
Emma Hardy
My hon. Friend is absolutely right as to whether it is a true partnership relationship or a relationship of subservience. I draw hon. Members’ attention to amendment 7. Not only does amendment 6 leave out specific reference to further education providers; amendment 7 leaves out specific reference to community learning providers, designated institutions and universities. Again, it is no longer a partnership, as was written in the Lords amendment. It becomes a situation in which central Government make the decisions and education providers are in a subservient relationship with them. My hon. Friend is absolutely right.
Mr Perkins
I thank my hon. Friend for saying that, and I agree. Government amendment 7 is consequential to Government amendment 6, and she is right about what that means. We have real concerns about how employer-representative bodies and LSIPs will fit within sectoral expertise in sectors such as construction and manufacturing, which transcend local areas but are incredibly important, particularly where our economy is hugely lacking in the development of the next generation.
It is really important to recognise that we have huge skills shortages in the public sector as well as the private sector. Health and social care is a classic example, but there are many others. The voice of the public sector must be heard, and we must ensure that it is able to support people who aim to get from unemployment into a trained-up place in the workplace, because they are also central to this sort of approach. I am interested to hear from the Minister what framework he envisages for LSIPs aligning with sectoral programmes and a national industrial strategy.
Government amendment 8 removes the words, “by people resident”, from the sentence about the skills required in a local area. The purpose of the Lords amendment was important: it was to ensure that LSIPs focused not just on the needs of employers but on the people resident in a community. What would happen in a situation whereby employers were satisfied with the extent to which they were able to access the skills that they needed, but a large number of people were employed and unable to get into the labour market? Ultimately, it is not the responsibility of chambers of commerce to address youth unemployment; it is the Government’s responsibility. If businesses consider that they are able to access the skills that they need, but there is still a large number of people who are unemployed, who takes responsibility for that? The Lords amendment ensured that the people who were resident in a local area were considered in the local skills improvement plan. The Government are taking those words out, which means that it goes back to being a plan put together by businesses to solve the needs of businesses, regardless of whether that addresses the problems of people struggling to access the labour market.
Emma Hardy
My other concern with the amendments, which I hope the Minister will address, is about areas with many small and medium-sized enterprises. Areas with large numbers of big employers can obviously exercise that strong voice, for example through chambers of commerce, but I am worried that in areas such as Hull, with predominantly SMEs, as I am sure Government Members will recognise, that voice will not come through as strongly.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend worries with due cause. Since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, small businesses have found it incredibly difficult to access apprenticeships. There has been a huge driving down in the number of people getting apprenticeships within small businesses. In areas such as Chesterfield, where smaller employers make up the majority of the economy, the apprenticeship opportunities are much lower than they were a few years before. Ensuring that the voice of small business is heard within this is incredibly important.
The Minister did not really talk about this amendment at all, but the Government might say that the skills plan also needs to have a focus on those relevant to a local employer who are not currently resident—we might call it the “on your bike” amendment, with the Government saying, “We want an approach that identifies skills needs of people who are not currently here.” If that was their intention, then it could have been worded to ensure that there was a strategy for attracting new workers. Simply taking those words out means that this is a plan for the employer community that does not have to consider those questions around the learners who are excluded from the labour market if those employers consider that they are relatively satisfied with what they are able to attract.
There is an important point here. At the moment, shortly after Brexit, there is a lot of focus is on skills shortages and staff shortages, and the sense, which I totally agree with, that we need to make more of the people we have. However, there may be other times when there is a real surplus of unemployed people, and we need a strategic approach that, in those times, supports those people into work, even if there are not a huge number of vacancies in the labour market. I think that those words are important.
Government amendment 9 removes the words “and other local bodies” from the clause concerning post-16 technical education, which was an amendment that the much-respected Lord Baker of Dorking added to the Bill. The Lords amendment that this Government amendment seeks to undo was drafted to avoid being too prescriptive, but it would have allowed LSIPs to work closely with other agencies, including Jobcentre Plus and careers advisory services, in providing careers information, advice and guidance.
All those organisations are important to ensuring that they are able to get into schools and support young people to get representation and ideas from both the business community and environments that they have not been familiar with. I would have thought that an amendment recognising that the careers responsibility is not just a responsibility of schools, but something that should be open to businesses, would have very much fitted with the spirit of the Bill. It was an opportunity for the Government to enable other bodies to play an important role in that post-16 technical education and careers guidance, and it is therefore disappointing that it was taken out.
We agree with their lordships on the introduction of these amendments, and we are disappointed that the Government are seeking to remove them. On that basis, we will look to support the amendments brought in by their lordships and disagree with these Government amendments.
Rachel Hopkins
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Miller. It is appropriate that I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a governor of the fantastic Luton Sixth Form College. I support the speech given by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield, the shadow Minister; I was also very disappointed.
The irony is not lost on me that a slightly less democratic place wanted to put more democracy into this Bill, which I was very pleased to see. The Government amendments take out democracy by removing the references to local authorities and mayoral combined authorities. I heard the Minister’s comments about expecting it to be collaborative and wanting good will between the different organisations. In order to ensure that all parts—the legs of the chair, so to speak—are in the Bill, the amendments made in the House of Lords should stay there.
I have a great passion for local authorities and the role they play in adult education. They have already been doing great work, understanding their own areas. In the general debate the point was raised about the role that locally elected leaders, local authorities and combined authorities play in place making, and the skills agenda is key to that. One of the points that has not been referred to specifically comes under amendment 7, which would take out the reference to the “long-term national skills” strategies. That is wholly important and not just secured through local businesses thinking about the skills they need roughly now. Retaining that reference to the long term and the statutory responsibilities of local authorities and combined authorities in the Bill would create a much firmer and stronger situation in our local areas. I speak as a former councillor on Luton Council. Great work is done at local grassroots levels.
Matt Western
It is generous of my hon. Friend to give way. She was in full flow and I did not want to interrupt her. In response to her point, it is fine to consult and get the views of businesses in developing a plan, but they do not necessarily know what is coming down the track: future opportunities, future business and future sectors that do not even exist yet. That is why it is important to keep as broad a base as possible. That was one of the points she was making well, but I wanted to amplify that.
Rachel Hopkins
I thank my hon. Friend for that fantastic intervention. It leads on to a couple of other points about those who are not in employment, and particularly local authorities with responsibility for young people who are NEET—not in education, employment or training. It is absolutely vital that those are addressed and that they have a formal seat at the table in that area. Equally, on my hon. Friend’s point about looking to the future, local authorities do a great amount of work to understand their populations and trends so they can project how many young people are coming through or whether school or training places will be needed. Employers do not always have easy access to that, but local authorities need to have an equal seat at that table in developing the plans, rather than just being tucked away in some statutory guidance. We know what happens with guidance; it is just guidance and it is often ignored.
Emma Hardy
On that point, I hope that the Minister will clarify that this will be statutory guidance, not just guidance that has been issued as a general idea that we can do it if we would like to. Statutory guidance is needed.
Rachel Hopkins
I thank my hon. Friend for making that important point about statutory guidance. In fact, if the guidance is going to be statutory, why not just make it statute and have it in the Bill? That is what I would like to see. It is important that local people have democratic oversight of what is happening in their areas. That is why I want to see local authorities, combined authorities and other organisations that can shape what is going on in their local areas.
Emma Hardy
On that point, the removal of
“schools, further education institutions, community learning providers, specialist designated institutions and universities”
means the people who actually deliver the skills strategies are being removed from a Bill about skills. It is a little odd.
Rachel Hopkins
I thank my hon. Friend for making yet another fantastic intervention. Yes, it is a little odd. Equally, amendment 9 removes other organisations, such as our Jobcentre Plus.
Mrs Miller, you will forgive me for intervening on an earlier intervention. What I was trying to get at with regard to universities is that they are also very much involved in skills development. I refer to the University of Bedfordshire, which is in my constituency. It has a fantastic new STEM building—science, technology, engineering and maths. Industry-standard equipment has been brought into the science labs, so the students studying for degrees such as biochemistry are using the equipment that is used out in industry. This is not just about theoretical and academic issues; it is also about key skills.
Emma Hardy
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out how incorrect the intervention was. One of the areas where we are desperately short of workers is social work. How do we train up social workers? They are trained up at a university. The idea that universities are only for academic knowledge and not places where people can be trained for jobs is ludicrous.
Rachel Hopkins
My hon. Friend also must have eyes in the back of her head, because one of the other points I want to talk about is health and social care. Again, I will talk about my fantastic home town of Luton. Someone can study for a BTEC in health and social care at Luton Sixth Form College, or study at the University of Bedfordshire and get practical skills training as a nurse, paramedic or midwife, before going on to be a nurse, paramedic or midwife at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital. All of those bodies will not be included in developing a skills plan if they are not set out in the Bill. I want to see them included, so that everyone feels that there is equality of partnership work, to ensure that what is needed is recognised.
I will not prolong my remarks any longer, but I just want to reiterate the points made from the Opposition Front Bench and say that taking out these important clauses that were inserted by the Lords weakens the Bill.
Matt Western
What is concerning about these amendments is the direction of travel. What is it that the Government are trying to achieve by removing these Lords amendments, because they seem to be incredibly positive and constructive about getting the right and relevant organisations across the piece to be involved in the development of a plan? The idea of a LSIP is a very good thing, but it must draw on the skills, knowledge and expertise of these bodies from a region, so that they can bring them to bear on the design of a LSIP, to ensure that the present and future needs of a region can be met.
My fear, having listened to the debate over the last few minutes, is that there is a horrible parallel with what is going on with the integrated care systems, whereby we are seeing more involvement by the private sector and a diminution of the provision from the public sector. When we look at individual placement and support, or IPS, we see that there is an absolute withdrawal of the public sector. The public sector will also have little to no say on what will happen with the delivery of skills in a region. That runs counter to what the Local Government Association believes.
The LGA says in its written evidence that it believes
“the reforms need to be implemented as part of an integrated, place-based approach.”
We have also heard evidence from the Association of Colleges, which said it was
“disappointed the Government have tabled an amendment to remove”
the reference to post-16 education providers. It is quite rightly disappointed.
Warwickshire College Group, based in my town, is a huge college that covers Warwickshire—I think it is still the sixth largest in the country, so it is a college of some substance. It wrote to me to say that it wants to ensure that colleges are co-constructing LSIPs with employers and that it very much needs to be involved, because it is within the power of colleges to further think strategically—that comes back to the point I was making earlier—and innovate for the skills needs of their communities.
We have also heard from the Workers Education Association. Its submission said:
“We are pleased that the Bill…should “draw on the views of”…further education institutions, community learning providers”,
and others, and that:
“We hope to see this retained and strengthened in the…Act.”
Then we get to organisations such as Central YMCA, which said that, as an independent training provider, it believes it is vital that LSIPs should draw on the views of organisations such as themselves, as well as those of schools and FE colleges.
The LGA believes that the Lords amendment should be maintained, to ensure that all employer representative bodies across England should
“work with local democratic organisations to better coordinate provision and align pathways of progression for learners.”
Andrew Gwynne
I do not want to prolong the debate on this group, but the Minister, in the discussion on the previous group, sought to assure the Committee that the approach was genuinely collaborative. Yet this group of amendments strikes out Lords amendments that would make the approach genuinely collaborative. I do not understand the thinking here. I cannot understand what the Minister thinks he is gaining or achieving by striking out the Lords amendments.
Let us look at the amendments in detail. Government amendment 6 would strike out, in clause 1(7)(a),
“in partnership with local authorities, including the Mayoral Combined Authorities and further education providers”.
The explanatory notes state that the reference to mayoral combined authorities is not required because that point has now been made clear through the earlier Government amendment that we have passed. I accept that point, but there is still a role for other local, non-mayoral combined authorities to have a view and an input into the skills agenda for their area, whether that is a unitary authority or a county council. These issues are part and parcel of what those local authorities do.
Emma Hardy
It feels like removing the Lords amendment will result in democratic accountability if the area has a Mayor; if it does not, there is no democratic accountability. An area such as Hull, which has no mayoral authority, has no democratic accountability or reference in the Bill. That feels unfair.
Andrew Gwynne
It not only feels unfair; it is unfair. I get that mayoral combined authorities have specific skills responsibilities devolved to them, so clearly the level of input from a mayoral combined authority is greater than that of a county council or a unitary authority that does not have those specific responsibilities devolved to them, but the council’s strategy for that area will involve education, skills and economic development. Those are important elements for county and unitary authorities.
Mr Perkins
I fear it is actually worse. The Government amendment agreed by the Committee a moment ago did give a role to mayoral combined authorities, but that role was that the Secretary of State had to satisfy himself that they had been consulted. The pen is still held by the chamber of commerce. The Lords amendment that the Government amendments in this group get rid of are about genuine partnership. The Bill, as brought from the Lords, states that it will include
“an employer representative body in partnership with local authorities, including the Mayoral Combined Authorities and further education providers for the specified area”.
That partnership is being entirely removed. Metro Mayors are being left as a statutory consultee, which the Secretary of State must satisfy himself are being consulted. The other partners will have no role whatsoever, except for in guidance, which will say, “Make sure you talk to them.” This change is about moving from a partnership approach to a consultee, subservient approach.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend the shadow Minister is absolutely right. When we look at what else is being deleted from clause 1, subsection (7)(b)(ii) talks about
“regional and local authorities, including the Mayoral Combined Authorities, within the specified area with specific reference to published plans and strategies which have been developed by these authorities”.
All those authorities have plans and strategies; I listed a number of them in relation to Greater Manchester. If the mayoral combined authorities are going to be involved in this, why take out a specific reference to the plans that have been developed by them? As I said previously, unitary authorities and county authorities have those strategies too, yet they have no say whatsoever.
Andrew Gwynne
I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington, because he was first, and then to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle.
Matt Western
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point, and I would like to draw him further on it. I accept and respect what the Government are doing with some of the allocations of moneys to towns through the towns fund and so on, but it seems odd that we have some visionary authorities, not just at county level but at town and district level, that are doing extremely good work—I include my own in that—and they are not included. They should be party to this. They know what they want to do, they know what they are capable of, they know the areas where they can develop and they need those skills to ensure it is realised. I emphasise that those sorts of authorities should be included as well.
Andrew Gwynne
I completely agree. Every layer of local government has an interest in the health and wellbeing—in the broadest sense—of the population. The best way to improve the health and wellbeing of the population is to ensure that people have good skills, good education and good job opportunities. That is the route to health and wellbeing, and that is true both at the district level and at upper levels.
Emma Hardy
I want to highlight to Government Members, although I am sure the hon. Member for Mansfield will know this as leader of a local council, that local councils have a statutory duty for all children with special educational needs or disabilities up to the age of 25. They have a statutory duty for looked-after children. They have a statutory duty regarding the number of young people not in employment, education or training—NEETs—as well. They have those statutory duties, yet the Government amendments remove their voice from the local skills plan. That does not seem right.
Andrew Gwynne
It absolutely does not seem right. I have spent a lot of time on local government, but the same part of subsection (7)(b) that will be struck out if Government amendment 7 is made goes further. While the line
“draws on the views of…employers operating within the specified area”
stays in, regional and local authorities, mayoral combined authorities and their strategies are taken out, but so are
“post-16 education providers active in the specified area, including schools, further education institutions, community learning providers, specialist designated institutions and universities”.
It is incomprehensible that those bodies would not be part and parcel of the deliberations on and the creation of the strategies.
Matt Western
If I may make one final point to address my hon. Friend’s own point, universities and higher education providers across the country are working well—some extremely well—in collaborating and co-sponsoring courses with their FE institutions. The idea that they would be excluded from the plans seems beyond ridiculous.
Andrew Gwynne
It is barmy—there is no other word for it. We are here debating a Skills and Post-16 Education Bill and we are excluding the very bodies that have a direct interest in skills and post-16 education. I just do not understand the Government’s thinking. They have promised collaboration, but you cannot have collaboration if the people and bodies delivering the skills agenda on the ground are explicitly excluded from the creation of those plans.
Tom Hunt
Of course, the bodies that are delivering technical and skills qualifications will continue to have a significant role. Surely the hon. Member must realise that the whole point of local skills improvement plans is to give a strong voice to local businesses? There are other avenues and ways in which providers can shape the offering.
Andrew Gwynne
I would like to know what the avenues are and why they are not in the Bill. If we are talking about developing a genuine partnership and collaboration, and if we are saying, “This is the skills agenda for our country. These are the needs of the next generation of workers in our country. This is where our country is heading with the jobs of tomorrow. This is the inward investment we want to bring in to our country. These are the things we want to make and do and build in our country,” we cannot do that just through business. Business is the way we create jobs, but it is educational institutions, universities and colleges that give the next generation the skills to deliver the strategy on the ground.
Matt Western
To give one simple example, and to be fair to the Government, the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre was developed through a university working with a local authority and a series of businesses. That is what we are talking about. It is about how we bring bodies together to develop plans, have a vision and then get the skills needed to deliver it. That is one brilliant example. We cannot have these plans simply designed by businesses.
Andrew Gwynne
No, we cannot. In other countries where there is a partnership between academia and industry, I have seen that the concepts of products are developed in universities, enterprise parks and science parks, and with the support of business they are brought to the market and developed across the world. I know that I have spoken a lot about Manchester, but one good example is the development of graphene by the University of Manchester. We are a world leader in that technology, and that was born out of genuine collaboration. Excluding universities and colleges from the plans for the economic development of our country is therefore barmy.
Ben Bradley
It is important to clarify this point, and I assume the Minister will do so as well. The hon. Member keeps using the word “exclude” as if others will be unable to take part in these conversations, and that is certainty not what amendment 7 says. Opposition Members have argued that the Government are taking too much central control, but when the Government try to give those at the local level flexibility to include the people they want to include, as opposed to mandating that certain groups be included, the hon. Member says that it is not specific enough. I wonder which one he is actually after.
Surely it would be better for local skills plans to be put together by partners who want to be involved, because not all the businesses or local bodies that he mentions will want or have the capacity to engage, and to have local flexibility to choose the most representative groups, rather than it being decreed that all such organisations must be involved in the discussions. It could become very unwieldly if we had to include every sixth form or FE provider in a whole region in those bodies. Surely flexibility is a good thing.
Andrew Gwynne
Clearly their lordships thought differently from the hon. Gentleman, and I think he is reading a different Bill. I will read it out to him. It says:
“draw on the views of employers operating within the specified area”.
The plans will be drawn from the views of employers.
Andrew Gwynne
Why does it need to specify employers, and only employers? It is a very one-sided view, and it strikes out regional and local authorities, post-16 education providers that are active in the area, schools, FE institutions, community learning providers, specialist designated institutions and universities.
To come on to my final point, why is
“such sources of information on long-term national skills needs as the Secretary of State may specify”
being removed? If the Government spotted on the horizon that there was likely to be a skills shortage, especially in our brave new world where we have taken back control and will upskill our own population to meet the coming challenges, I would expect the Secretary of State to ensure that our long-term national skills needs were included in every single one of those plans across England. Again, it is incomprehensible to think that the Secretary of State would not say to each and every one of those local areas, “We need to make sure that we have enough skills to do x, y or z, because we will face skills shortages in the future.”
To conclude, I cannot fathom the logic behind striking out these Lords amendments. Doing so runs against everything the Minister said a moment ago about collaboration. If he believed in true collaboration—a true partnership— he would not be doing this today.
Alex Burghart
It has been another lively and interesting debate on this group of amendments. The Government want to build an employer-led system, but the statutory guidance—yes, statutory guidance—will make it clear that the employer representative bodies that the Bill creates must consult a range of partners and collaborate with them.
On the removal of schools and other providers, the Bill is already clear that all relevant providers, including further education colleges, independent training providers, universities and sixth-form colleges need to be involved in the development of the LSIP—that is stated in subsection (4)—and if designated employer representative bodies do not have regard to relevant statutory guidance on engaging with relevant providers and do not comply with the terms and conditions of their designation, the Secretary of State may not approve or publish the local skills improvement plan and could remove their designation.
The national dimension is very important, and we expect local skills improvement plans to be informed by national skills priorities and to help address national, as well as local, skills needs. However, where there are national skills shortages in critical areas, we can expect the Government to carry on playing a role in helping alleviate them, as we are doing at the moment. We put £17 million into rapidly upskilling people to help meet the needs of the heavy goods vehicle sector, where we have significant shortages, and I have been pleased to see that that is going very well. That will not fall away.
Turning to the question of dropping the reference to long-term national skill needs, the Bill already makes reference to the fact that LSIPs will need to look at future skills needs—that is stated in subsections (2) and (7)(b)(iii). The Opposition made a very important point about the role of the public sector. Let us think about the phrase “employer representative bodies”: there is a very big role for business, but in many areas, the public sector is a major employer and will need to be involved in this process. We want ERBs to reach beyond their existing membership and cover both public and private employers.
Emma Hardy
The Minister has mentioned the employer-led bodies in the public sector. Could he pick up on my point about SMEs, which might not be part of an employer-led body but, in some regions, are the main employers?
Alex Burghart
We are expecting ERBs to draw up local skills improvement plans that take account of the economic area that they represent, which should absolutely include small and medium-sized employers, as well as self-employment opportunities.
While Opposition Members may feel that these things can be done only if every detail is written out in primary legislation, we know that that is not the case, because we have eight excellent trailblazer areas at the moment that are doing this job without a mite of primary legislation. With that in mind, I commend the amendment to the Committee.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Mr Perkins
On a point of order, Mrs Miller. Do we not decide on the other Government amendments? Are we doing those later?
The Chair
No, this is one of the wonderful complications of the Committee system. We do that later.
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 27, in clause 1, page 3, line 4, at end insert—
“(iv) groups representing the interests of people with disabilities,”
This amendment intends to ensure that Local Skills Improvement Plans draw on the views of groups representing the interests of people with disabilities.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 1, in clause 1, page 3, line 6, after “evidence” insert
“, including the views of relevant community groups including those representing the interests of disabled people,”.
This amendment intends to ensure that the evidence informing LSIP development includes information directly relevant to improving the employment prospects of disabled people.
Amendment 2, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) identifies actions to be taken to reduce the disability employment gap within the specified area.”
This amendment intends to ensure that the LSIP is used as a vehicle for improving the employment prospects of disabled people.
Amendment 28, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) identifies positive actions to reduce the disability employment gap within the specified area.”
This amendment intends to ensure that Local Skills Improvement Plans identify positive actions to reduce the disability employment gap within the specified area covered by the Plans.
Amendment 34, in clause 1, page 3, line 12, at end insert—
“(d) lists specific strategies to support learners who have or have previously had, a statement of Special Educational Need or an Education and Health Care Plan into employment, including but not limited to provision for supported internships.”
This amendment would require that local skills improvement plans list specific strategies to support learners who have or have previously had, a statement of Special Educational Need or an Education and Health Care Plan into employment, including but not limited to provision for supported internships.
Amendment 3, in clause 2, page 3, line 23, at end insert—
“(iii) the body is composed of employers who demonstrate reputable practice in relation to equality and diversity in employment, including in relation to disability, and”.
This amendment intends to ensure that members of the body with primary responsibility for creating the LSIP have sufficient understanding of and commitment to equality and diversity, including in relation to disability, to enable them to create an inclusive plan.
Mr Perkins
Amendment 27 was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle. Amendment 27 and amendment 1 would add the words
“groups representing the interests of people with disabilities”
and
“relevant community groups including those representing the interests of disabled people”
to clause 1, on local skills improvement plans. Given the discussion that we have just had, it is incredibly important that the consultees include those who represent people with learning disabilities and those who might be furthest from the labour market for a variety of reasons. Given the votes that have just taken place and are scheduled to take place, we are particularly concerned that there is a possibility that people furthest from the labour market, who will take the most work in order to contribute in meaningful employment, will be excluded. There is a disturbing lack of attention paid in the Bill to people with special needs or disabilities.
Amendment 1, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), would enshrine a role for representative bodies to devise specific plans of support for people with disabilities in local skills improvement plans. That is of tremendous importance. One of the things that is most important for the FE sector, and one of the greatest contributions it makes, is to support those people who are furthest from the labour market to get the skills that they need, through such things as supported internships and other innovative ideas that many of us have seen in action in our local colleges. Those programmes often take a considerable amount of work, but they make a life-changing difference to those people. A skills Bill that genuinely represents everyone must be mindful of the need for the local skills improvement plan to ensure that no one is left behind.
Amendment 2, which also appears in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham, is the same as amendment 28, and adds the need for an LSIP to identify positive—
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [ Lords ] (Third sitting)
Thursday 2nd December 2021
(2 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 2 December 2021 - (2 Dec 2021)
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 8 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 8 - Question accordingly negatived.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 43, in clause 2, page 3, line 27, leave out “as the Secretary of State considers appropriate” and insert—
“, including—
(a) the requirement for the local skills improvement plan to give due regard to relevant national and regional strategies, including in respect of the Decarbonisation Strategy,
(b) a requirement for employer representative bodies to publish a conflicts of interest policy for all those involved in approving plans or allocating funds which records actual or perceived conflicts of interests, and
(c) anything else the Secretary of State considers appropriate.”
This amendment sets out conditions for employer representative bodies. The amendment would require that employer representative bodies publish a conflicts of interest policy and give regard to national strategies (including the Decarbonisation Strategy).
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Efford. We will try not to give you any unpleasant surprises this time.
This is a relatively small but important amendment, which has three aspects to it. Given the exemplary cross-party work undertaken in another place on local skills improvement plans and climate change, we believe that the Bill can go further to ensure that, as a nation, we meet our commitment to the natural environment. It is therefore crucial to ensure that LSIPs give due regard to the decarbonisation strategy and that employer representative bodies produce plans with due diligence given to committing to ensuring that we have green skills for the future across local labour markets.
If we are to meet the UK’s emissions target of net zero even by 2050—we already know that to be a challenging and potentially insufficient commitment—it is essential that green jobs are created and that that is a key focus of the local skills improvement plans in every single area across the country. One reservation expressed in our previous debates is that the different chambers of commerce and employer representative bodies will have different priorities. The amendment, in the first paragraph, seeks to ensure that, whatever the priorities of the chamber of commerce, it addresses the decarbonisation strategy. If it does not have the expertise itself, it needs to avail itself of that to ensure that the plans move us towards net zero. Once again, this demonstrates the need to align skills policy with national strategies across Departments—in this case the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—so that LSIPs do not become silos.
The second paragraph of the amendment would require employer representative bodies to publish a conflicts of interest policy for all those involved in approving plans or allocating funds, to record actual or perceived conflicts of interest. This is an incredibly important proposal, because the Bill places responsibilities and duties on—predominantly, we expect—chambers of commerce in a statutory fashion. I think that is unlike anything we have expected them to do before—unless the Minister wants to draw my attention to something. Chambers of commerce are not statutory organisations, but they are now taking on a role that appears to have statutory status.
Many people at senior levels are involved in chambers of commerce. They are in there because they want to make their local economies better and to improve the opportunities for businesses in their local area. It is also perfectly possible, however, that they will have an agenda about the industry that they are in or represent. Therefore, if they are to take on a more statutory-looking role, it is important that we are aware of what their conflicts of interest might be. If a local skills improvement plan suddenly features policies to do with a certain industry, we need to know who put the plan together so that we can consider why they might have done so. It would therefore be basic best practice for a local skills improvement plan to include a declaration of any interests or potential conflicts of interest.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
It is appropriate that I declare an interest again: I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a governor of Luton Sixth Form College. Many local authorities have third-party declarations, where councillors have to declare any potential conflicts of interest regarding the funding decisions that they are making, even if a partner works for a charity that is getting a council grant. It should be the same with regard to employment representative bodies and their members, so that we have a clear and transparent understanding of where funds may be allocated, and where there are potential or perceived conflicts of interest.
Mr Perkins
Precisely—I could not have put it better myself. In fact, I do not think that I was putting it better myself. If a chamber of commerce has, for example, a tree surgeon as its chair, and the local skills improvement plan has policies on attracting skills in tree surgery and no other does, people might consider that an agenda has been driven. There are all kinds of other examples. There is nothing negative about tree surgery—we all know how important it is—but people would need to understand why it was in the policy and whether there were any other factors to consider. In recent weeks, there have been real concerns about the allocation of Government funding, who was getting it and on what basis, who was talking to who, who was donating to who, who was signing up to who, and who was the best pal or a publican of a friend of who. In that context, it is important to ensure that local skills improvement plans are not mired in the murk that we have seen from the Government recently.
Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)
As we know, eight trailblazer ERBs were set up in July this year, with £4 million. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to find out how beneficial they have been before we decide to roll them out and have chambers of commerce leading on them?
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is feature of the Government’s approach, particularly to skills, that they set up pilots and then reach a conclusion before it is completed, as we saw on T-levels. We are debating the creation of something when the pilot is still at a very early stage. It was commented on, on social media and elsewhere, that the Minister said on Tuesday that it does not have to be a chamber of commerce; it could be any kind of organisation. When I asked him how many other organisations there are, he said, “Well, none.” It is better if we are straight and honest about what we are talking about. The anticipation is that chambers of commerce will do it in the vast majority of cases. Other organisations may come forward, and we look forward to seeing that emerge, but clearly the legislation was written with chambers of commerce in mind, and they are taking on the trailblazer role. My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. Why not find out how these things are working before we rush ahead and do them?
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
To amplify that point, I am sure that Members on both sides agree that we need greater transparency. All we are asking for is openness in the process, so that people cannot seek to influence decisions. To take one simple example, not very far from me there was a local enterprise partnership, the chair of which happened to be a huge landowner who was seeking to steer future business decisions towards that parcel of land. That is why this is really important. Of course, it could come from any direction; I just happen to use that example. Whether it is the cronyism that my hon. Friend referenced earlier, or the chair of the Office for Students, these things have to be out in the open and as transparent as possible.
Mr Perkins
Absolutely. That is particularly important because organisations such as local enterprise partnerships, the Office for Students and others operate on a statutory level, with expectations around that. From a governance perspective, they are kind of arms of Government. The chambers of commerce are independent of Government. The Government are outsourcing responsibility for a function that they have created. It will be delivered as a function of Government, but they are expecting a private organisation to deliver it. It is therefore important that that private organisation operates in a way that a statutory organisation would.
Rachel Hopkins
My hon. Friend is making a very interesting point about transparency and the outsourcing of a Government function to a private entity. Does he agree that, given that a freedom of information request cannot be placed on a private entity, this is another reason why it is vital that these conflicts—or potential conflicts—are raised early doors and up front for transparency?
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend makes another incredibly important point. It is something that people should naturally accept. I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s response. That was another important intervention from my hon. Friend, and I appreciate the interventions both she and my other colleagues have made—if any Conservative MPs want to involve themselves in the debate, they would be very welcome to do so. It is important that everyone gets to know what is being said, who is saying it and on what basis it was said. That is the reason for the amendment. We do not need to continue describing it, but I am very interested to hear what others have to say on it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Efford, and I look forward to making even more rapid progress today, as we continue with clause 2 of our 39-clause Bill. I rise to speak to amendment 43, tabled by the hon. Members for Chesterfield and for Warwick and Leamington, regarding specifying certain conditions for the designation of employer representative bodies. It is obviously right that a designation may be subject to terms and condition, such as the terms and conditions that the hon. Member for Chesterfield has set out. However, the precise terms and conditions need to be flexible, and may change over time in the light of wider circumstances. They also need to be tailored to the specific employer representative body in question. That is why the specifics should be set out by the Secretary of State in a notice of the designation, which can be modified from time to time, rather than in the Bill.
Mr Perkins
I thank the Minister for that very brief response—the Opposition have heard it. It is important that there is clarity about where people are able to find these conditions. We are once again being asked, “Vote for it now, and we will let you know what it means tomorrow.” It sounds almost like the coalition agreement. I believe that a commitment at this stage to having those aspects in the Bill would have been useful. I do not believe the Minister touched upon decarbonisation at all in his response, which seemed quite an omission, but we are of the view that a decarbonisation strategy should play a central role in these LSIPs. For that reason, we will seek to test the mood of the Committee by pressing the amendment to a vote.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 3— Report on the performance of employer representative bodies—
“(1) Within six months of the passing of this Act, and every twelve months thereafter, the Secretary of State must publish a report on the performance of employer representative bodies and lay it before both Houses of Parliament.
(2) Each report must contain a statement setting out—
(a) the role of employer representative bodies,
(b) the accountability of employer representative bodies,
(c) the cost of employer representative bodies,
(d) the number of employer representative bodies in England and the areas covered,
(e) the number of employer representative bodies that have been removed and the reason why.
(3) Each report must contain an independent assessment of the impact of each employer representative body on—
(a) the development of local skills improvement plans, and
(b) local rates of participation in further education.”
This new clause requires the Secretary of State to publish and lay before both Houses of Parliament an annual report on employer representative bodies to allow for scrutiny of their role and performance.
Alex Burghart
Clause 2 is important for placing employers at the centre of the local skills system, shaping post-16 technical education and training so that it is more responsive to local labour market skills needs. It gives the Secretary of State the power to designate genuine employer representative bodies to lead the development of local skills improvement plans, working closely with employers, providers and local stakeholders. Employer representative bodies will be well placed to give a credible articulation of local skills need and drive greater employer involvement in local skills systems.
The Secretary of State will designate employer representative bodies based on criteria. They must be satisfied that a body is capable of performing the duties of developing and keeping under review a local skills improvement plan in an effective and impartial manner, and that it is reasonably representative of employers in the area. The body must also consent in writing to being designated. Designated bodies should draw on the views of a wide range of employers of all sizes, as well as other relevant employer representative and sector bodies, to inform the development of those plans. This should ensure it is as easy as possible for employers, especially small employers, to engage and have their voice heard. The success of the plans will depend on sustained and effective engagement between employers, convened and represented through the designated bodies, and providers.
Clause 2 requires the Secretary of State to provide written notice of the designation detailing the designated body, specified area, effective date, and any terms and conditions the employer representative body will be subject to. Introducing this power to designate is crucial to ensuring there is an effective employer-led body in place that is capable of leading the development of a robust local skills improvement plan for an area, working closely and in co-operation with relevant providers and stakeholders.
New clause 3, tabled by the hon. Members for Chesterfield and for Warwick and Leamington, is concerned with the performance management of employer representative bodies. It proposes a requirement for the Secretary of State to periodically
“publish a report on the performance of employer representative bodies”.
We agree that employer representative bodies need to be accountable for their leadership of local skills improvement plans, and the Bill already provides a framework for this. The Secretary of State must be satisfied that an eligible body is capable of developing a local skills improvement plan in an impartial manner before they are designated. The Secretary of State can then specify terms and conditions to which a designation is subject and modify them as necessary. In its role, the designated employer representative body will be accountable to the Secretary of State, and the Department for Education will monitor and review its performance.
If a designated employer representative body does not have regard to relevant statutory guidance—as we were discussing last time—or comply with any terms or conditions of its designation, or if it ceases to meet the criteria for which it was originally designated, the Secretary of State may well decide not to approve and publish the local skills improvement plan, and has the power to remove its designation. If that power is exercised, the Secretary of State must publish a notice, which must include the reasons for the removal. The Secretary of State is already accountable to Parliament, and Members can of course raise questions on this issue if they wish.
Mr Perkins
With regard to clause 2, we remain of the view that without amendment 37, which the Committee decided to vote against on Tuesday, the Government will be introducing a good idea badly. As such, local skills improvement plans will not enjoy the holistic representation or offer the breadth of experience they could have done, which is hugely regrettable. I do not propose to repeat all of the arguments we made last Tuesday, or even any of them, but it remains our view that not incorporating amendment 37 in the Bill will fundamentally undermine local skills improvement plans.
New clause 3, which we have proposed,
“requires the Secretary of State to publish and lay before both Houses of Parliament an annual report on employer representative bodies to allow for scrutiny of their role and performance.”
We think it is essential that there is proper scrutiny and oversight of employer representative bodies, that they enjoy the confidence of elected representatives at local and national level, and that local communities, local businesses and, crucially, learners—who are so absent from the Bill—can see how an employer representative body has performed and assess the quality of the plans they have produced. Given that employer representative bodies will control much of the adult education and skills budget and their direction through the formation of these local skills improvement plans, due diligence and accountability will be vital. All we ask for is an annual report to Parliament that will enable Members to analyse the performance of employer representative bodies and ensure they are doing the role they are intended to.
Alex Burghart
I want to clarify a point regarding something the hon. Gentleman just said. It is important for us all to realise and recognise that employer representative bodies will not be commissioners. They do not control budgets; they set out plans that local providers of education then have to respond to. He may not have meant that, but I just wish to clarify that point.
Mr Perkins
I am grateful to the Minister for clarifying that. I did understand that. When I used the phrase “control much of the adult education and skills budget”, I meant that the direction in which that budget ends up being spent will be informed—in fact, legally, will have to be informed—by those local skills improvement plans. While they might not be writing out the cheques, they will very much be responsible for the pathway that that funding takes. I thank the Minister for his clarification, but I do not think it alters the point that I was making.
Matt Western
Clearly, the new clause is quite simply about, as my hon. Friend is saying, ensuring that there is scrutiny of the actions and the role of these bodies and that they are actually serving in the way that they are intended. The change being introduced is quite significant; while we see some of it as being positive—although perhaps not very well formed, as we have articulated previously—that is why it is important that there should be scrutiny. The Government should take interest in that. This is just another example of there not being enough scrutiny in our governance.
Mr Perkins
Absolutely, and the Government have been accused of treating Parliament with contempt. What we ask for here is an important change that would lead to an annual report to Parliament and ensure that the Secretary of State would come to Parliament and answer to that once-a-year report.
The Minister spoke about the accountability of ERBs to the Secretary of State, but said nothing about the accountability of ERBs to Parliament, or of the Secretary of State to Parliament. It is not good enough to simply say “Well, there will be a responsibility to the Secretary of State, and if you want to ask him a question, you can.”
It is not asking too much to say “Once a year, provide a report. Members of Parliament expect a statement to be produced alongside that report, and any MPs with particular concerns have a tiny section of their parliamentary year to ask questions about employer representative bodies, and at least have those on the public record.” That was the purpose of our new clause 3. I think that it is a very sensible one, and that it would be useful if the Government ensured that they were open to that scrutiny.
Matt Western
It is a pleasure to serve under you in the chair again, Mr Efford. I will just add a simple point. I appreciate that it is always difficult in these situations for a Minister, but I would urge him—I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield would agree—to reflect on this very constructive new clause. While it may not be successful today, perhaps in days to come, the Government will reflect on that and look to introduce it at a later stage. I think that would be a very positive thing for the Government to do.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 2 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 3
Removal of designations
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 3 is an important accountability mechanism, which gives the Secretary of State the ability to remove an employer representative body’s designation in certain conditions. Hopefully, that will not be required, but we need to be clear on when such circumstances may arise, and ensure there is a process—
Mr Perkins
On a point of order, Mr Efford. I do not think we have dealt with new clause 3. Did we?
The Chair
The new clauses are dealt with at the end of the proceeding. So we will deal with all of the new clauses and any votes then. You will move new clause 3 formally at that stage and we will vote on it.
Alex Burghart
As I was saying, we need to be clear when such circumstances may arise and ensure that there is a process for taking appropriate action, which will be through a published notice.
The ability to remove a designation is needed for a range of important reasons, for example in the event that an employer representative body does not comply with the term or condition of their designation, or does not have regard to relevant guidance on carrying out their role. This clause helps to ensure that the employer representative body designated for an area remains representative, and capable of delivering and keeping under review a local skills improvement plan in an effective and impartial manner.
Mr Perkins
This clause is obviously necessary, given the votes that have taken place already. It outlines the circumstances in which the Secretary of State can remove the designation of an employer representative body.
It would be useful to get clarification from the Minister about the reasons why the Secretary of State would look to replace an employer representative body, such as the performance of that body; any representations made by anyone within the body, be it further education colleges or other institutions; representations by other employer representative bodies that perhaps did not consider that the body was being consistent or was properly declaring interest; or any other criteria that might require an employer representative body to be replaced.
The other real concern is that the Secretary of State has awarded himself huge powers. He will be the person who will decide who to appoint; he will be the person who approves the local plan; therefore, he becomes the person who decides whether it is right policy for Bishop Auckland, or for Bishop Stortford, or for anywhere in the country—the Secretary of State is the man who decides whether or not a plan is the right one. If he then decides, “Oh, well, I don’t really like this plan”, or, “I don’t like the way the employer representative body is carrying out its business”, he can choose to get rid of the employer representative body as well.
The Secretary of State is taking a lot of powers under the guise of devolution to set policy in individual local areas. Although we understand the purpose of the clause and do not intend to vote against it, it would be useful to hear from the Minister a little more about the criteria that will be used. It is also important for these employer representative bodies to have clarity and that it is not just a case of, “Look, if you annoy the Secretary of State, he might get rid of you”, and that instead we have a proper process and proper criteria.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
We have to legislate for the worst case scenarios as well as for the best case scenarios. Given that there is little democratic oversight, particularly outside areas with metro Mayors, in this whole process, does my hon. Friend think that we perhaps need parliamentary scrutiny of any decision that the Secretary of State makes in respect of who the representative bodies are and are not at any one particular time?
Mr Perkins
That is an important point. Obviously part of my hon. Friend’s constituency comes within the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. He and his colleagues in the Greater Manchester area have a very strong sense of the priorities for their local area. They might have worked very closely with an employer representative body and come up with a plan that they liked. However, the Secretary of State might not like that plan and might decide, “Well, I’m overruling that”’; the Secretary of State is sat there in Stratford-on-Avon, but he thinks he knows better than my hon. Friend what Greater Manchester needs. Some kind of process that just explains on what basis the Secretary of State will make these decisions would be very valuable.
This reminds me of what was happening around the time of the second coronavirus lockdown, when we know that the Government and the Secretary of State were very angry with Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, for not complying with their strict demands and edicts. If it was an employer representative body that was angering the Secretary of State, goodness knows whether or not he would cite this clause and say, “Well, we’ll have to get rid of you, because you haven’t done what we said”.
When the Secretary of State awards himself such powers—and we understand that there is a need to put in place a clause to replace ERBs, on occasion—some kind of parliamentary scrutiny is needed of those concerns and the desire to remove the designation.
It would be useful to hear more from the Minister about how that process will take place. Who will be able to make representations around the replacement of an ERB? What weight will be given to the representations of alternative employer representative bodies, FE colleges and independent training providers? The worry is that the plans may mean that independent providers that play an important role in individual sectors are overlooked and are not seen within the employer representative bodies or the local skills improvements plans. Who will be able to make representations on all that, and what level of scrutiny will there be? Those are important questions, and we look forward to the Minister assuring us on those matters.
Alex Burghart
I have listened carefully to the hon. Member for Chesterfield, and I refer him to clause 3. The Secretary of State will set out terms and conditions for each employer representative body, and those terms and conditions will be public. Statutory guidance to govern how employer representative bodies behave will also be public. In the event that a Secretary of State wishes to remove the designation of an ERB, he or she will have to do so in writing. Under the terms of clause 3(3)(a), he or she will have to
“include reasons for the removal of the designation”.
Obviously, the Secretary of State is accountable to Parliament. I imagine that there would be further urgent questions on the matter, and that Select Committees might want to look into it. I believe that our mechanisms for parliamentary accountability are sound and good—particularly when they are overseen by noble Chairs such as yourself, Mr Efford. With that, I resume my seat.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 3 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 4
Interpretation
Amendments made: 11, in clause 4, page 5, line 35, after “institution” insert “in England”.
Amendments 11, 12, 13 and 14 ensure that a relevant provider, to whom the duties in clause 1(4) apply, must be in England. This amendment ensures that, for an institution within the further education sector to be a relevant provider, it must be in England.
12, in clause 4, page 5, line 38, leave out “a” and insert “an English”.
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 11. This amendment ensures that a higher education provider will be a relevant provider only if it is an English higher education provider.
13, in clause 4, page 5, line 40, after “provider” insert
“whose activities, so far as they relate to the provision of post-16 technical education or training, are carried on, or partly carried on, in England”.
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 11. This amendment ensures that an independent training provider is a relevant provider only if the provider’s activities that relate to providing post-16 technical education or training are carried on, or partly carried on, in England.
14, in clause 4, page 5, line 41, at end insert “in England”.
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 11. This amendment ensures that the only schools that can be relevant providers by virtue of regulations under clause 4 are schools in England.
15, in clause 4, page 6, line 9, leave out “in respect of which amounts are”
and insert
“funded, wholly or partly, by amounts”.
This amendment, together with Amendments 16 and 17, ensure that education or training is treated as English-funded where amounts are paid directly to providers of the education or training in accordance with regulations made by the Secretary of State (as, for example, where payments are made by the Student Loans Company).
16, in clause 4, page 6, line 10, leave out “by the Secretary of State”.
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 15.
17, in clause 4, page 6, line 11, after “made” insert
“by the Secretary of State”.—(Alex Burghart.)
See the explanatory statement for Amendment 15.
Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 4 is important in providing clarity as to the providers who will be subject to the duties relating to local skills improvement plans and the employer representative bodies eligible to be designated to lead them. It also gives the Secretary of State the ability, through regulations, to include additional providers.
The clause enables the Secretary of State to specify further types of providers that deliver English-funded post-16 technical education and training in England to be encompassed in the future. However, those regulations would be subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution in either House of Parliament. I hope members of the Committee agree that this is an important aspect of the LSIP provisions.
Mr Perkins
We are moving at such breakneck speed, Mr Efford, it is hard to keep track.
The clause is an interpretation clause, clarifying what is meant by the various terms of eligible body, employer, training provider and so on. We have no reason to vote against it. Amendments 11 to 17 have just been made. It would be useful if the Minister could inform the Committee what the consequence of the proposals on local skills improvement plans will be for the Barnett consequentials. How may they be considered by the Scottish Government, Welsh Assembly and Northern Irish Assembly?
Alex Burghart
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his support for the clause. My understanding is that there are no Barnett consequentials as a result of this measure. If that turns out to be incorrect, I will let him know at the first available opportunity.
Mr Perkins
Given the amount of money that is being spent on local skills improvement plans and the initial budgets towards the trailblazer, I am slightly surprised to learn that there is no equivalent expectation for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I will take the answer that the Minister has given me as the one that will stand for now, and forever into the future, unless I hear otherwise.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 4, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 5
Institutions in England within the further education sector: local needs
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
There is strong agreement on the importance of the provision of high-quality technical education and training that is responsive to local needs. For many colleges, the delivery of technical education is a key part of a wider curriculum that responds to different local needs.
The wider curriculum can include, for example, academic provision for students hoping to move on to university, English or maths provision for adults, or high-needs provision for learners with an education, health and care plan. Colleges also need to deliver other functions that support education delivery, such as careers education and advice, support for students with special educational needs and pastoral support.
We will only achieve our goal of provision that is responsive to local needs where there is effective strategic curriculum planning within every college. Such curriculum planning needs to reflect both the priorities set out in the local skills improvement plan, and the needs of different groups of learners.
The clause therefore places a duty on governing bodies of institutions within the further education sector to periodically review their provision against local needs and to consider changes that might improve the way those needs are met. The duty applies to further education and sixth-form colleges, and to institutions designated under section 28 of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. That reflects the importance of those institutions in many local communities and the breadth of their curriculum offer.
In carrying out the review, the governing body must have regard to any guidance issued by the Secretary of State. A draft of the statutory guidance has been published by the Department. The guidance sets out the principles that should be followed when carrying out reviews and how reviews should be conducted, including working with different stakeholders and other governing bodies.
While the new duty builds on the existing good practice within the sector, there are also cases where improvement is required. That might include, for example, cases where intense local rivalries have led institutions to prioritise the needs of one group of learners over another, even if that is at the expense of learners in the local area as a whole. By putting in place a legal duty requiring reviews to be published, we are strengthening transparency and accountability around decisions on provision that are vital for local communities. When carrying out reviews, colleges will need to be mindful of their other relevant statutory obligations, including those in relation to learners with special educational needs and disabilities.
The clause strengthens the legal framework in which colleges, working both individually and in collaboration with each other, regularly review their provision to identify how it can be improved. That will help to deliver more responsive further education provision and will benefit local communities in all parts of England.
Mr Perkins
Clause 5 sets out the duty for institutions such as colleges to review provision in relation to local needs. The review must be published on the institution’s website and must be conducted in line with the Secretary of State’s guidance. The Opposition do not propose to divide the Committee on the clause. I am grateful to hear from the Minister specific mention of special needs. He will be aware that we are very concerned that that area should be reflected in local skills improvement plans, so I appreciate his reference to it. It is important to ensure that the review takes into account local circumstances and has the broadest possible base. We support the clause.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 5 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 6
Functions of the Institute: oversight etc
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 32, in clause 6, page 7, line 23, at end insert—
“(2A) The Institute shall perform a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy, paying particular regard to ensuring that sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below are available.”.
This amendment would require the Institute to perform a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy, and would require the Institute to pay particular regard to ensuring that sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below are available.
The debate on this amendment is the only opportunity that the Committee will get to talk about apprenticeships in the skills Bill, and that is pretty remarkable. The amendment would require the institute to perform a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy and to pay particular regard to ensuring that sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below are available. Apprenticeships are the gold standard in vocational opportunity. Every single one of us is aware of apprenticeship providers and employers that have excellent apprenticeship programmes in our constituencies, and we have met people whose lives have been changed by their apprenticeships. However, we also know that for many of our constituents—particularly our younger constituents—apprenticeships remain elusive. There are far fewer apprenticeship opportunities than there should be.
A Labour Government will be committed to increasing the number of apprenticeship opportunities and addressing the calamitous collapse in new apprenticeship starts at levels 2 and 3. We will promote apprenticeships as the No. 1 vocational opportunity for young people who are not attending university, and we will seek funding for them ahead of schemes such as kickstart, which is more costly and less well defined, demands less commitment from employers and makes less impact on learners. It is a vivid demonstration of the Government’s complete failure to address key issues that while they preside over their failure on apprenticeships, they introduce a skills Bill that almost entirely fails to touch on the reform needed to salvage these crucial career opportunities.
Andrew Gwynne
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this important point, because it is, quite frankly, flabbergasting that in a skills Bill there is very little mention—in fact, almost none—of apprenticeships. For so many, apprenticeships could be the route to developing the skills for the jobs of the future. When I talk to local employers, they now appear to be using the apprenticeship levy funding to upskill their own workforces, rather than using the money to skill up the next generation.
Mr Perkins
Absolutely, and that speaks to the heart of the amendment. The apprenticeship levy has, remarkably, led to a steep decline in those aged under 25 taking on entry-level apprenticeships. In fact, it must be the first policy—well, that is probably not true, but certainly it is one policy—that set out with a particular objective, only to achieve the polar opposite. We have an apprenticeship policy that has drastically reduced the number of apprenticeship opportunities, and it is worth reflecting for a moment on the scale of that failure.
Kim Johnson
My hon. Friend makes some important points about apprenticeships and the fact that the number of them has reduced. Does he agree that some of that is down to the lack of information and career guidance available in schools for many of our young people?
Mr Perkins
I absolutely agree. There are a huge number of causes, but my hon. Friend is right that one is the abandonment of careers guidance that happened in 2010, when this Government came to power and scrapped Connexions—got rid of many of those—and the statutory responsibility for careers guidance.
To give a scintilla of credit to the Government, they have at least realised to an extent that the decision made back in 2010 was catastrophic and made an attempt to rebuild some kind of careers service. We have many criticisms of their approach, but at least there is a recognition that simply getting rid of face-to-face careers guidance and going towards a purely online service was disastrous. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside is absolutely right about the number of people not doing apprenticeships. We will have an opportunity later in proceedings to discuss careers guidance in more detail—it is a priority for the Labour party.
Without in any way undermining what my hon. Friend said, it is also important to make the point that there is a real shortage of opportunities out there; it is not purely that people do not want apprenticeships. I went to a training academy for construction on the south coast and I was told, interestingly, that there were about 100 applicants for every one of its apprenticeship opportunities. In an area with relatively low levels of unemployment, kids are still fighting to get hold of those opportunities. They recognise the value of apprenticeships. The importance of promoting apprenticeships is a strong point to make, but there is also a huge amount more to be done on supply.
To return to what I was saying a moment ago, it is important to understand the scale of the collapse in the number of apprenticeships. The number of apprenticeships going to 19 to 24-year-olds declined from 142,200 in 2016-17 right down to 95,500 in 2019-20, so there was a fall of almost 33% over that period. The levy was supposed to boost employer investment in training—my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish was in this place when the apprenticeship levy was announced, and he will remember that we were all told it would boost the amount that employers would invest in training—but that has declined, with £2.3 billion less spent in 2019 than in 2017.
The current funding arrangement particularly fails small businesses, which are a real priority for the Labour party. Especially in communities such as Chesterfield, small businesses are the prevalent providers of employment, and the fact that they have been shut out of the apprenticeship regime so dramatically with the introduction of the levy has had a massive impact. In 2016, 11% of businesses with less than 50 employees had apprentices in their organisation. I think 11% was probably not enough, but it was something. By 2019, there had been a 20% reduction in the number of small businesses with apprenticeships.
It is no wonder that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development described the apprenticeship levy as having “failed on every measure”. It says that the levy will continue to
“undermine investment in skills and economic recovery without significant reform”.
Where is the opportunity to provide significant reform to apprenticeships and the apprenticeship levy, if not through a skills Bill? Yet the Government have chosen to leave apprenticeships out of it. Where is the reform? What are the Government doing about this failure, and do they even acknowledge that it exists? The starting point for addressing a problem is to accept that there is one. We have been forced to shoehorn an amendment into this skills Bill in order to even talk about apprenticeships.
Let us take construction as an example. The Construction Industry Training Board estimates that we need 217,000 new entrants to construction by 2025 to prevent growth from being slowed. The Government have for 11 years presided over a low-growth, high-taxation economy. Without an increase in the construction workforce, that growth will continue to be stilted.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman seems to have forgotten that up to 2019, this country had the highest level of employment in history. He is being very selective with the information he is providing.
Mr Perkins
The hon. Member talks about high levels of employment, but I have people in my constituency who are doing three jobs at once and still cannot pay their bills. The truth is that under this Government, we have a low-wage, low-growth economy. People are paying the highest level of taxes since the 1950s. He might not think it makes much sense, but to people in my constituency it absolutely does.
The Chair
Order. The interventions are straying a little bit away from the amendment. I would be grateful if we could return to the subject of the amendment, exciting though that exchange was.
Tahir Ali (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab)
Compare high unemployment with the youth unemployment in core cities. The opportunities and pathways available to those young people are almost non-existent. Where local authorities, such as Birmingham, have worked tremendously hard to bring down youth unemployment, it has been reversed as a direct result of the actions taken by Government. In Birmingham, for example—
The Chair
Order. Interventions should be a lot shorter than that. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but we must keep to the point. I will allow him one sentence to finish his intervention, then we will go back to Toby Perkins.
Mr Perkins
Absolutely, and I thank my hon. Friend for that point. It is precisely the motivation behind the amendment, which we will get the opportunity to vote on. I think his point is incredibly important. Many young people in cities such as Birmingham look at the future and find that jobs are very thin on the ground. Even thinner on the ground are careers, rather than jobs. I am talking about opportunities to develop skills and get involved in a long-term career, as opposed to a casual job where they go to work, come home and are still living in poverty. That is why skills are so important, and why this investment is so important.
Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw) (Con)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for being so generous with his time. To go back to a point that has been made in previous interventions, does he recognise that although getting younger people into employment will always be an issue, the fact that this country’s rates are so low compared with those of many of our neighbours on the continent, such as Spain and Italy, represents a roaring success story?
The Chair
Order. I will not allow you to answer that, Mr Perkins, because it takes us wide of the issue, which is the review of the levy and ensuring that there are sufficient apprenticeships. Can we get back to the amendment?
Mr Perkins
I appreciate your iron grip on the debate, Mr Efford. I will confine my contribution to the amendment, as I was doing before I was so rudely interrupted. There is a link between youth unemployment and apprenticeships, and it is precisely that link that the amendment, which I tabled with my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington, seeks to address. The current funding arrangements are failing small organisations. It is important that the Government acknowledge that and take steps to recognise that problems exist. We are not seeing anything that suggests that they realise that there is a problem with the apprenticeship levy.
Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman not see some irony in his speech? The reason why the Bill introduces LSIPs, and so on, is that we want employers to take control and understand more about apprenticeships, because there are lots of jobs and apprenticeships available, unlike when Labour was last in Government and we had 25% youth unemployment.
Mr Perkins
I do not see a lot of irony in my speech, but I saw quite a bit in the hon. Lady’s intervention. The truth is that we have had 11 years of a Government that told us that every single reform that they took was about putting employers in charge, and yet, at the same time, apprenticeships have fallen. I will not repeat the figures.
Mr Perkins
Let me destroy the intervention that we have just had before I take another. If we accept that there is real value in apprenticeships, surely—given the fall in the number of apprenticeships, and the 11 years of reforms intended to put employers in the driving seat—anyone would think that continuing to do something that keeps failing is the definition of insanity. That is why we have tabled amendments to address that.
Lia Nici
I extend an open welcome to the hon. Gentleman to join a meeting of the apprenticeship diversity champions network, where we have more than 100 employers—more are joining—who are doing fantastic things with apprenticeships. I assure him that he will be able to hear lots of positive stories from them.
Mr Perkins
I would be delighted to attend that, and I look forward to receiving the invitation. I have already seen many examples of great apprenticeship programmes. I do not for a second decry those that exist, and I always enjoy seeing employers, in my constituency and elsewhere, who offer good apprenticeship programmes. It is because I recognise their value that I am so angry that apprenticeship starts have fallen from 494,000 in 2016 to 322,000.
One of the things that really concern me about the Government is that they operate by anecdote. They see something great, and it convinces them that everything is all right with the world. Actually, although there are superb apprenticeship programmes around and a lot of employers are committed to them, overall the numbers are going down. The number of them at levels 2 and 3 is going down. The number of small businesses offering apprenticeships is going down. The availability of apprenticeships in crucial sectors such as construction is going down, and so is the availability of people to get on to them, particularly in smaller towns that do not have major employers. That is what we are trying to address with amendment 32.
Matt Western
My hon. Friend is making, as ever, some very important and powerful points. The wording of the amendment is very simple and, I would have thought, pretty honest and straightforward. It is about better governance and better operation of any attempt to improve skills delivery in education and across our economy. The amendment simply says:
“The Institute shall perform a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy”.
I have spoken to many businesses in my constituency and elsewhere, and they are really concerned. They see the apprenticeship levy as having simply become a tax on business, with £250 million returned to the Treasury in 2020-21 and £330 million in 2019-20. Does my hon. Friend share my concerns?
Mr Perkins
I absolutely do, which is probably why I teamed up with my hon. Friend to table the amendment. He is absolutely right. We do not oppose the apprenticeship levy, but it is really important that we explore the point he has made. The apprenticeship levy is a significant tax and it falls on 2% of all businesses, as the former Chancellor George Osborne told us when he announced it. At the same time, he completely withdrew the Government’s own funding for apprenticeships and replaced it with this funding.
George Osborne did something unique: he created a tax that businesses get to decide how to spend. When we send a cheque or BACS payment for road tax, as all drivers do, we do not do so with an accompanying list of the potholes that we want to be repaired. When we pay our overall road tax, we get to drive and the Government and councils decide which potholes will be fixed and which road improvement programmes will be carried out. What happened here, however, is that the Government isolated a tiny fraction of all employers and said, “You’re paying this tax. This is the only contribution to apprenticeships that is going to be made and you get to decide what it is spent on.” All the other 98% of businesses, which are not levy payers, therefore have no funding for apprenticeships.
It is hardly surprising that we have seen a dramatic collapse in the number of small businesses that are able to offer apprenticeships, because they have been excluded from the system. They heard a very powerful message back in 2015: apprenticeships are something that big businesses do, and they are not for small businesses any more. All kinds of measures were put in place, in terms of the bureaucracy around apprenticeships, and that really reduced the opportunities available. Many small businesses that had up until then been successfully involved in apprenticeships got the message and got out of that environment.
Matt Western
That is the point. I am sure it was not by design that the money got lost in the Treasury, but it is a real tragedy that the money intended for delivering apprenticeships to small businesses has been lost. Therefore, the really important parts of our economy—the small businesses that might be working in our supply chains, our service sectors or whatever—are not getting the money they need in order to train the next generation.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Regardless of whether it was by design or not, it was absolutely foreseeable that that was what would happen, and many such criticisms were made at the time. The reality is that the Government set up the apprenticeship regime on the basis of successful programmes at organisations such as BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce. They thought, “That is what we want for everyone,” so they created an apprenticeship regime that was designed around major businesses, without recognising that those major businesses are simply not available in many of our constituencies. If young people in my constituency wanted to do an apprenticeship, they were doing it at their local hairdressers, construction firms or other small businesses. A successful regime would support small businesses in accessing apprenticeships in the same way as large businesses. The Government need to recognise that the scheme’s bureaucracy is simply pushing businesses away and preventing them from taking part unless they have large training, HR and personnel departments.
I have a level 3 apprentice in my office. MPs’ offices are effectively small businesses, with very small numbers of people working in them, and that apprenticeship involves significant bureaucratic requirements. A very helpful independent training provider is supporting me on that apprenticeship programme and has worked through the paperwork with me, but high-quality apprenticeships should not have to be linked to bureaucracy and funding arrangements that drive small businesses away.
There is one legitimate question that has not yet been asked by the Government, but I will save them from having to do so by asking it myself. They talk about reform, but what should that reform look like? We want an apprenticeship regime that supports access for small businesses, ensures quality, and recognises that the majority of the apprenticeship levy should be spent on level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships. There is absolutely a role for degree apprenticeships—for people who aspire to get level 6 qualifications—but that should be about a journey, not organisations doing what they are currently doing in many cases, which is saying, “We’ve got this levy. What are we going to spend it on? Well, we’ll let the finance director do his MBA—he’s always fancied that.” That is what apprenticeship funding is currently being used for in so many cases. I am never going to advocate against continuous professional development—of course it is important—but it is also really important to recognise that that is what is happening, and that it needs to be addressed.
The amount of money going back to the Treasury is actually worse than the figures given by my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington. During the back end of this year, we got an answer to a parliamentary question showing that last year a total of £2 billion of apprenticeship levy funding had been sent back to the Treasury unspent. A huge amount of this funding is not being spent, which to me is the very definition of a failing system.
Matt Western
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; he is being very generous with his time. Regarding that £2 billion figure he has just cited and his earlier point about the construction industry, surely the amendment’s proposed review could give direction for the delivery of courses. For example, the construction sector needs to undertake recladding exercises up and down the country, and ensure that they are delivered on time.
Mr Perkins
Absolutely: construction is a great example. As I have said, there are 217,000 too few construction workers. Anyone who has tried to get serious construction work done at their house—an extension or similar—will know how tough it is to find a builder who has time to do it. Our country is losing huge amounts of growth and we are also facing a housing and homelessness crisis, because we simply do not have enough workers in the construction industry. It is incredibly important that these issues are addressed.
We would have liked to propose more specific reforms to the apprenticeship levy. More specific amendments would have sought to rectify years of neglect by this Government, particularly of SMEs and sectors that are crying out for a pipeline of apprenticeships. However, we were told that such reforms were outside the scope of the Bill. Nevertheless, we are proposing that the IATE introduces a review of the current operation of the levy, particularly in relation to ensuring that sufficient opportunities are available at level 3 and below. That is essential to ensuring that opportunities exist for young people who are seeking to step on to the first rung on the ladder, as well as adults who are seeking to retrain, particularly in sectors such as care and others that I have referred to. It is vital that levy funds are used to train up the next generation.
Within the scope of what already exists, the Government are attempting to do things that I think are positive, supporting businesses that pay the levy to allow their supply chain to use those funds, thereby benefiting more small businesses. However, this is still about trying to correct a wrong that was there in the first place: a better apprenticeship reform would be about making sure that more of that funding actually goes to small businesses and is used in every single community in the land. It would be about more people doing level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships, more opportunities for 16 to 19-year-olds, and the careers regime that my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington referred to, which would give young people opportunities early in their school career to follow the apprenticeship path. It would allow young people to go into a level 2 apprenticeship at the age of 16 and to work their way through to a degree at 25 or 26, after having been paid all the way there. That is the kind of future that a Labour Government would get us to.
Andrew Gwynne
It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I rise to support the Opposition amendment—a modest amendment that simply asks for a review of the apprenticeship levy, paying particular regard to ensuring that sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below are available. This is really important. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield has set out in great detail why we believe the apprenticeship levy is not working in the way in which the Government promised. The intention of the apprenticeship levy is a good one, but the practice of it in our constituencies is not working. We can see that in all the data and all the facts that my hon. Friend has laid out. The professional bodies responsible for training also support that view.
If the Minister has not already read the House of Lords Youth Unemployment Committee report, I encourage him to do so because it is very clear about the failings of the levy and the negative impact it has had on apprenticeship opportunities for younger people. It acknowledges that there has been an increase in higher-level apprenticeships, which is good, but drilling down into the data we see what the Opposition have already outlined—employers ensuring that their existing workforce are trained up to higher levels. That is good, and continuous improvement in the workplace is something we should support, but I do not believe the apprenticeship levy should pay for something that has always been paid for by employers. It goes against the ethos of the apprenticeship levy. Why do I speak so passionately about apprenticeships? I want to take the Committee back to 1990 when we had a Tory Government. We were in the 11th year of Baroness Thatcher’s premiership.
Andrew Gwynne
I know how to warm up a Committee. It was also the year that 16-year-old Andrew Gwynne left Egerton Park High School in Denton with a clutch of good GCSEs, but I did not know what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I did not want to go to college, so I took the rather unusual decision, given how it was painted at the time, of applying to go on youth training, the successor to the old YTS—the youth training scheme. I was very fortunate in the opportunity that youth training gave me. As I say, I had a clutch of good GCSEs and could have gone on to study A-levels, but I did not want to do that. I wanted to go down the vocational route.
I had to have a job interview at ICL—International Computers Ltd, now part of Fujitsu—in West Gorton in Manchester. I got my new suit from Burton and got on the 210 bus, nervous as anything. I had my job interview and got the two-year placement. When I think of the real responsibilities that they gave that 16 to 18-year-old, I look back in horror because I am not sure that I would have given 16 to 18-year-old Andrew Gwynne those opportunities—[Interruption.] I can see you staring at me from the Chair, Mr Efford—I do not think you would have given 16 to 18-year-old Andrew Gwynne those responsibilities either.
Alex Burghart
I could listen to that all day. What a heart-warming story of great education and training achievement under a Conservative Government. Although I do not agree with all the detail given by Opposition Members, I echo their sentiment. We all care deeply about apprenticeships, and the good news is that we will get more of them, because the Chancellor committed to spending a great deal more money on apprenticeships, taking their budget to £2.7 billion a year by the end of the spending review period.
I am pleased that the amendment was tabled because it gives us an opportunity to go over some of this ground and talk about the great work that we have been doing on apprenticeships. Alas, we lack the time to go into all the detail raised by the Opposition, but I remind them that although there have been changes in the numbers of people doing apprenticeships, that has happened for a reason. It has happened because when the coalition came to power, there was a need to review the quality of apprenticeships in our country. The Richard review—a famous and widely respected review—found that apprenticeships were not giving employers the skills that they needed, and that one fifth of apprentices reported receiving no training and one third of apprentices did not know that they were on an apprenticeship. That is why we decided to go for quality, and that quality is now paying off.
I was lucky enough to be at the national apprenticeships awards last night—I was sorry not to see Opposition Members there—and it was a fantastic evening. We saw many people—some young; some not so young—who were doing apprenticeships at all levels, and fantastic employers, from big companies and small schools to the Royal Navy, which is a fantastic provider of apprenticeships at all levels. It was a real celebration of the new landscape of high-quality apprenticeships to provide young people, and not so young people, with the skills that employers need.
I recognise the points made by the Opposition about level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships, of which I also want to see more. However, in 2020 and 2021, those levels made up 69% of apprenticeship starts. The majority of employer-designed standards are still at levels 2 and 3—345 out of 630.
It has been this Government, during the pandemic, who have paid employers and providers £1,000 when they take on apprenticeships for young people aged 16 to 18. More than 80% of 16 to 18-year-olds were participating in education or an apprenticeship at the end of 2020, the highest number on record.
More than one third of apprenticeship employers are still SMEs. We will see that number increase as the excellent levy transfer scheme continues to go great guns. Already millions of pounds are being transferred by large employers to smaller employers in their supply chains and beyond. Some of the case studies I have seen so far are wonderful. I do not know whether they are in the public domain, so I cannot talk about them, but we are seeing providers pass their money on in really creative and interesting ways.
We must almost remember that 95% of the costs of training and assessment for smaller employers are still covered. The figure is 100% for the smallest employers who are taking on young people.
Mr Perkins
Someone listening to the hon. Gentleman who did not know about the subject might well think that he was talking about a record of success. The figures that I have referred to, and which the CIPD described as having “failed on every measure”, are the reality of apprenticeships. It is one thing for the Government to say there is a problem here and they are seeking to address it, but the Minister seems to be talking as though everything is going well as the result of this policy. Is there any sense that this Government believe that the levy needs reform or that there is anything they are going to do to increase the number of opportunities for young people?
Alex Burghart
We are increasing the number of opportunities. We got an excellent settlement in the spending review. We are going to have more apprentices at every single level. This is a Government who believe in apprenticeships, who back them and who put their money where their mouth is. Listening to Opposition Members, one could be forgiven for thinking that apprenticeships in this country were worthless. That is not a picture I recognise. It is not a picture that providers I meet recognise. It is not a picture that the apprentices I meet recognise.
Matt Western
No Opposition Member has said that apprenticeships are worthless—quite the opposite. We really value them. I think the frustration is that businesses are saying that the system is not working, whether that is large businesses paying in and not getting any return, or the smaller businesses not getting any gain. The money seems to be being lost to the Treasury, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield said.
Alex Burghart
If the hon. Gentleman had been at the awards ceremony last night, he would have struggled to find any provider saying that they were not getting any gain from the scheme, which is what he has implied—in fact, not implied; it is what he said explicitly. Equally, the small and medium-sized employers who were there were getting a great deal of gain from it. The people who are on the apprenticeship schemes are getting a great deal of gain. Where we absolutely agree is that there is a need for more apprenticeships. This Government are going to provide more apprenticeships. We have already provided more apprenticeships at a higher quality than we have ever had before. We are going to see that continue.
Matt Western
Just to be clear, I do not think I implied that at all. What I am saying is that, speaking to businesses, including some major businesses in and around my constituency that I talk to regularly, as I do with Warwickshire College, one of the largest colleges in the country, they have been saying that, while the programme is good and the apprenticeship levy had good intent, it is not working. That is why we tabled the amendment. We want to be constructive and help the Government make it work better.
Sadly, I was not invited to the awards last night. I will check my email, but I do not believe I was. I very much look forward to coming next year.
Alex Burghart
I very much hope that the hon. Gentleman is invited next year. I look forward to seeing him.
Alex Burghart
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green suggests I take the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington as my guest. I was myself a guest. I am sure those organising will have heard his appeal for a ticket.
We want more apprenticeships. We have a great many fantastic employers in this country, providing wonderful opportunities for people at all levels at the moment. We are going to see that increase under the commitment that the Government have made. It is for the Government to consider when might be the right time for a review of apprenticeship reforms, through consultation with stakeholders. For now, we want to focus on improvements to apprenticeships to make them attractive to employers in more sectors. We want to focus on making apprenticeships relevant in new and changing occupations, and on improving quality.
Mr Perkins
That was a very disappointing contribution. To describe the Labour party’s view—that apprenticeships are the gold standard—as that we think apprenticeships are worthless, is beneath the Minister. I hope he will reflect on that. We absolutely do not think they are worthless; we think they should remain the No. 1 opportunity. We think far more young people who are not going to university should be going on to apprenticeships; we think that far more people who are going on to apprenticeships should use those as a vehicle towards university. We see them as one of the most important ways of tackling social mobility—they are a huge priority for us. It is precisely because they are a priority that we are so frustrated with this Government’s failure. I do not recognise the way the Minister represented the Opposition’s opinions on this.
I will return to the point that independent organisations, such as the CIPD, have described the apprenticeship levy as having failed on every measure. Everyone will have heard that we have a Government with no intention to reform the levy. If young people want more opportunities, if they want a Government that will invest more in 2025 than they did in 2015, which this Government will not be doing—even by 2025 they will not reach the amount that was contributed toward apprenticeships in 2015—and if young people want a Government that will change that, they will have to vote Labour. That is the message that is coming out of this debate today. There is one party that believes the apprenticeship levy could be a route to reforming and creating opportunities for young people, and one party that thinks that the apprenticeship levy is working just fine the way it is. That is what this next vote is all about.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [ Lords ] (Fourth sitting)
Thursday 2nd December 2021
(2 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 2 December 2021 - (2 Dec 2021)
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 9 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 9 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
It is good to be back, as we cross the halfway point in Committee proceedings for the Bill. Clause 6 provides an important oversight duty for the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. It will ensure the overall coherence of the system of technical education and training, and will help to ensure that we have the right balance of provision to meet the skills needs of the economy. That includes apprenticeships, technical qualifications and other types of technical education, and training across all 15 technical routes.
Those routes underpin the institute’s occupational maps. They are the groupings for occupations in relation to which apprenticeships and technical education might be approved by the institute. Routes include hospitality and catering, construction, creative and design. The clause places a duty on the institute to keep under review the technical education and training within its remit and, through that review, to consider the impact of its activity on the range and sufficiency of that technical education and training. That means that different types of technical education, such as apprenticeships and qualifications at different levels, will not be looked at in isolation.
The institute will consider whether there is anything further within its powers that should be done, or that should be done differently, to safeguard the coherence and sufficiency of the technical education and training in its remit. The institute may provide the Secretary of State for Education with reports on the range and availability of apprenticeships, qualifications and other technical education and training in the system, raising any matters that arise during its review.
In addition, the clause brings into the institute’s remit other technical education and training that supports entry to occupations that are published by the institute in its occupational maps. That will allow the institute to play a role where education and training links to employer-led standards but does not lead to a qualification—for example, traineeships and skills bootcamps. That role might include, for example, advising or publishing guidance to support alignment with employer-led standards.
Aligning that type of provision to standards, where it is appropriate to do so, will create a joined-up system. It will benefit learners by supporting progression into skilled jobs, as well as further technical training. The institute is best placed to have oversight of the system as a whole because it has oversight of the occupational maps that bring together the occupations for which technical education is appropriate. It guarantees that the employer voice is at the heart of our skills system.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
We do not oppose clause 6. We tabled amendments on apprenticeships, but we are not opposed to the role of the institute in itself. It was an interesting debate, with some really valuable contributions from some of my colleagues. We also had another Conservative who enjoyed himself at a party, and another lesson about the importance of who we invite to our parties. It was very much in keeping with the debates of this week, but we do not oppose the clause.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 6 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 7
Additional powers to approve technical education qualifications
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 47, in clause 7, page 10, line 37, at end insert—
“(2A) Notwithstanding the provision in subsection (2), the Secretary of State will appoint by regulations a body other than the Institute to withdraw approval of a technical education qualification at Level 3.”
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to appoint an alternative body to the Institute to approve the withdrawal of technical education qualifications at Level 3.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 48, in clause 7, page 11, line 19, at end insert—
“(10) The Secretary of State must publish criteria to define what is meant by ‘high quality qualifications’, which can be used as a framework for future deliberations about any defunding of qualifications.
(11) Any future defunding of qualifications must be reviewed by an appointed independent panel of experts, against the criteria set out in subsection (10).
(12) The Secretary of State must publish the proposed list of Level 3 vocational and technical qualifications which are proposed to be defunded, based on the criteria as set out in subsection (10), within 3 months of this Act receiving royal assent.”
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish the criteria for what they consider to be high quality qualifications worth funding and to set up an independent panel to determine this.
Mr Perkins
The Government have decided to continue with Ofqual as a regulator of academic qualifications in England, and new powers are granted in the Bill to the institute to approve technical qualifications in the future. It is vital that both public bodies have the necessary statutory underpinning to carry out their roles effectively, and to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. We consider that the clause is insufficient, as it does not clearly define the roles of Ofqual and the institute in law to ensure a single regulatory framework, where all qualifications are regulated and treated in exactly the same way.
The Bill proposes a two-tier system of regulatory approval for qualifications, with Ofqual approving and regulating academic qualifications and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education approving technical qualifications. We are worried that that may reinforce the apparent low public confidence in technical qualifications. Ensuring that technical qualifications have parity of esteem with academic ones has been a challenge for successive Governments, and it is precisely one of the things that T-levels set out to address. We are therefore concerned that Ofqual is established as the independent regulator for what are seen as the academic qualifications, with a different organisation for the technical qualifications. We believe that that creates an artificial divide between the two routes.
The roles to be played by Ofqual and the institute in regulating technical qualifications need to be clarified, because the Bill indicates that it will bring about a dual regulatory system. Ofqual is established as the independent regulator under the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. That legislation introduced an independent regulator following a period of scandals and instability in the regulation of the qualifications and examination system.
There are worries that the Bill will introduce material conflicts of interest, because the institute will be the owner and provider of T-levels, as well as the regulator, with powers to decide which other technical qualifications might compete with T-levels and should be approved or withdrawn. For funding purposes, the organisation that owns T-levels will decide what happens to the other qualifications that exist. Our amendment seeks to address that and to give greater clarity on the different organisations and bodies.
I turn to amendment 48. It is essential for the Government to unveil what they deem to be useful qualifications before the Bill is passed. As with so much in the Bill, the Minister leaves a great deal to the imagination or to future clarification. Conservative Members have been remarkably trusting of what the Government have told them so far and have not told us a huge amount about what they think, with the honourable exception of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby. When it comes to the votes, however, we have seen that those Members are persuaded that the Minister will deal with everything later.
Amendment 48 would require a panel of experts to determine what a high-quality qualification is, ensuring that if qualifications are abolished, it will be left to those experts—working to criteria set by the Secretary of State—to understand whether that has been done because the qualifications lack the necessary qualities. There is a real concern in many people’s minds that the Government are undermining BTECs and other level 3 qualifications by setting out to defend T-levels, on which they are getting small numbers of people, and trying to get rid of all the alternatives.
If the reason for getting rid of BTECs is, as the Government say, that the qualification is not of the necessary quality, let us see the evidence for that. Let us have a team of experts look at all the factors—people’s ongoing progression routes, whether they get jobs after the qualifications, whether they can access universities and whether they are able to perform when they get to university—and let us see the criteria for establishing whether qualifications are of high quality. So far, the approach seems to have been pretty much of the back-of-a-fag-packet kind.
The Minister’s and the Secretary of State’s predecessors initially stood at the Dispatch Box and said, “We’re scrapping BTECs because they are of low quality.” Then they said, “We’re not going to get rid of them all, just some of them. We will get rid of the poor-quality ones.” We say, reasonably, “All right, but people studying those qualifications today want to know whether what they are studying is of high quality or not.”
Tahir Ali (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that a quality BTEC qualification would lead to skills and jobs? We should be focusing on BTECs, which have a good history, rather than getting rid of them and replacing them with something that is nowhere near as established.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend makes an important point. I know from what he said on Second Reading that this is a matter of significant personal interest to him because of his own and his son’s history with BTECs, which he outlined. I am in exactly the same position. My son did a level 2 and a level 3 BTEC, having not done particularly well in GCSEs. He subsequently went on to university, completed his bachelor’s degree and is now in the process of completing his master’s. The BTEC provided a pathway and a bridge from—not to put too strong a point on it—failure in mainstream schooling to academic success. We know that BTECs have a history of turning around the lives of people up and down the country. This needs to be handled extremely carefully before decisions are taken that undermine those qualifications.
Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)
I appreciate the hon. Gentleman allowing me to intervene. Do he and his colleagues not understand that BTEC is just a brand name of the Pearson group? Those high quality qualifications, those outcomes and those assessment criteria will go into things such as T-levels. They will just have a name change. Importantly, they will be led by employers and they will include essential work placements. We talk to members of the public about BTEC, but the only reason we do so is because BTEC is a brand name that has been out there for a very long time. Vocational and technical education will continue to be important.
Mr Perkins
What an interesting intervention. If the hon. Lady is saying that T-levels are simply a rebranding of BTECs—
Lia Nici
With respect, I did not say that. I said that BTECs are an overarching brand name. We have Cambridge Nationals, City & Guilds and so on, but what is important is the content of those qualifications. I am sure that what is of high quality in BTECs will be included in new qualifications such as T-levels.
Mr Perkins
I accept the clarification, and the hon. Lady makes an important point. If she is saying that not all level 3 qualifications are BTECs, I understand that, and I will come on to that when I speak to other amendments. There are many other important qualifications that are not BTECs, but BTECs make up the largest number of them, which is why many of us identify them in those terms. Both BTECs and T-levels are overarching brand names, if we want to put it in such terms. I have no objection to the brand names. If it is felt that T-levels will eventually be viewed with more regard by the public than BTECs—having the word “level” in them makes them sound more like a A-levels—I am fine with that, but the Government initially trashed the BTEC qualifications without telling us which ones they thought were good or bad.
Mr Perkins
If I may, I will respond to my hon. Friend, who makes an incredibly important point. Even more worrying is the fact that the Government initially went out there and said, “This qualification is broken and we are going to replace it,” but when the sector more generally—86% of respondents to their consultation—said, “This is a huge mistake”, the Government said, “Okay, we will only get rid of some of it, not all of it.” When we ask which bit they will get rid of, they say, “The low-quality bit,” but when we ask which bit that is, they say, “We do not know; we are going to do a review.” That is no way to do policy. It needs to be done the other way around. Identify which of the qualifications are not working, do all the research, find out where people are not getting on to the courses and then start talking about why we are getting rid of the qualifications.
Mr Perkins
That is an important point, and the amendment seeks to push the Government on it. They need to identify what those high-quality qualifications are, and quickly.
This is a point of real importance. The Government have started to undermine BTEC qualifications. It makes me genuinely angry, because people are studying for those qualifications now, and they are being told, “That thing you are doing may be pretty worthless and it might not take you anywhere. We don’t know yet, because we haven’t done the review, but we generally think that BTECs are not that great.” At the same time, employers out there are saying, “Well, I have trusted this qualification over many years and I think it is okay.” The Government are performing a review over three to four years. Students will be going on to the qualifications not knowing whether they will be undermined.
The Government really need to show us the evidence; do the research, if they have not yet done it; and come back with a list of the qualifications and what is going to be taken forward. That is what the amendment is designed to achieve.
Lia Nici
On the point about quality and outcomes, we want employers to lead this initiative, along with partners from training and education, because, as the hon. Gentleman has stated in his eloquent and long speeches, we want to ensure that people are trained in skills that are relevant to jobs. We know that we have a huge skills mismatch. We want our employers to be able to lead on that and say, “These are the training areas we want, now and in the future.”
Mr Perkins
I do not disagree with that sentiment, but when the vast majority of employers responding to the Government’s consultation say, “Don’t get rid of BTECs”, how does the hon. Lady arrive at the position that we are getting rid of them because that is what employers want? That is not what employers are saying. I agree that we must make sure have qualifications that are relevant, but parroting that does not alter the fact that employers say they support BTECs.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
I ought to declare that one of my children has a BTEC level 3 extended diploma and went on to university, and the other has a level 3 apprenticeship. I suggest that it is the hon. Gentleman who is undermining BTECs, because he is the only one who has made that point in our debates. The Minister said on Second Reading that we are reviewing BTECs only where they cross over with T-levels, because we do not want duplication of work.
Mr Perkins
It is a strange representation of my position to say that because a Minister stands at the Dispatch Box and describe something as poor quality, I am undermining that thing by referring to what the Minister said. I am trying to defend what in many cases is a valid and trusted qualification. As the hon. Lady knows, my children have had a similar experience to hers. It is for precisely that reason that I seek to defend the qualifications.
More important than defending the qualification per se—there probably are some good ones and some bad ones—is to say that the Government should not undermine it until they know what they are talking about. That is the most important point here. They should do the research and then come back and tell us what the policy is, not the other way around.
The Government have set us on a path towards T-levels by undermining the alternatives—I guess because their T-levels have not so far had huge take-up—and they have done so without actually knowing what they are talking about. The hon. Member for Loughborough says that all they are looking to do is prevent duplication. That is absolutely not the case. In so far as there is duplication and reason to believe that a T-level is a better path than an existing qualification—a BTEC, a Council for Awards in Care, Health and Education qualification, or anything else—I have no problem with that, but clearly the Government have set out to rubbish the existing level 3 qualification in order to promote their T-levels. They cannot now row back and say, “Oh, we’re only interested in duplication.”
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
We really do not need to get drawn into the merits of T-levels against BTECs—that is a false choice. For many young people in particular in this country, BTECs are their route through the education system. I have BTEC levels 3, 4 and 5. Does my hon. Friend recognise the 2018 research by the Social Market Foundation, which showed that 26% of university applications are from young people with a BTEC? It is a significant route into higher education.
Mr Perkins
I recognise that point, but this is an area of real worry for me. The Government have said explicitly that they want to reduce the number of people doing university degrees that they consider to have low value. Again, they have not told us which ones. A disproportionately high number of learners from deprived communities are doing BTECs rather than A-levels. I strongly suspect that seeking to reduce the number of people doing certain university degrees will disproportionately affect the cohort who do BTECs. Although my hon. Friend is right that a lot of students, such as my son, the child of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green, and the child of the hon. Member for Loughborough, have gone to university via BTECs, I fear that the number will reduce under the Government’s expressed strategy to reduce the number of students doing university degrees that they do not think have value.
Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)
My hon. Friend has identified that young people from disadvantaged communities are likely to suffer. There will also be a disproportionate impact on both black students and students with special educational needs who use that route into education and higher education.
Mr Perkins
I am glad that my hon. Friend made that incredibly important point. She is right that BTECs, and the further education sector in general, have a far higher proportion of black and ethnic minority students than mainstream schools. They are incredibly important routes, and it is important that they are spoken up for, and that that difference is raised. Different students study in different ways. The Government have a real bias against anything that is not largely exam focused. They believe that only an exam focus gives someone a real qualification, and BTECs have been much more based on a student showing what they have learned over a two-year course, rather than just in a couple of weeks at the end of June.
Such qualifications have been a route for many people to improve their social mobility. That is why the campaign to defend them is so strong. We will talk about BTECs in more detail under future amendments, but amendment 48 seeks to provide that the Government
“must publish criteria to define what is meant by ‘high quality qualifications’, which can be used as a framework for future deliberations about any defunding of qualifications.”
It states:
“Any future defunding of qualifications must be reviewed by an appointed independent panel of experts, against the criteria”
that the Secretary of State has set out. It continues:
“The Secretary of State must publish the proposed list of Level 3 vocational and technical qualifications which are proposed to be defunded, based on the criteria set out…within 3 months of this Act receiving royal assent.”
That amendment would make an important difference. First, the Secretary of State would tell us by what criteria he will continue to fund, or to defund, qualifications. Secondly, to ensure that the decisions are based on academic considerations rather than political ones, it would ensure that the independent panel of experts applies the criteria that he has put in place. Thirdly, it would ensure that the process for level 3 qualifications does not drag on endlessly.
The Government have started the process of undermining the qualifications by describing them as of low quality. That should not go on forever—within three months, we could have a list to say, “This is high quality, this is what you should study in future and this is what, under the criteria set out by the Secretary of State, we will no longer fund.” I find it hard to understand why people would vote against such an amendment. It is widely supported and I am interested in what response we will get from the Minister and others to the amendments.
Andrew Gwynne
I support the amendments because, as I alluded to earlier, I feel passionately about the role that BTECs can play. The way in which the Government have handled the whole withdrawal of BTEC qualifications is a lesson in how such things should not happen.
I therefore support including in the Bill that the Secretary of State should appoint, through regulations, a body other than the institute to withdraw the approval of technical education qualifications. It is important that, before moves such as those we have seen on BTECs, we have a proper and thorough assessment of the qualifications, in particular when they are well known and respected by not just the general population, but academia and employers. That is the whole point of BTECs: everyone knows what a BTEC is and people know what the different levels relate to. BTECs are accepted as a standard qualification in academia and in employment.
Lia Nici
I am concerned that the Opposition are concentrating on BTECs. BTEC is a brand—it is a commercial brand. In ordinary parlance, we might use it as a throwaway term for level 2 or level 3 qualifications, but I am concerned that the Opposition are supporting one brand when we have a multitude of brands. I wonder whether they have been pushed by the brand owner’s lobbying—why are we talking constantly about BTEC and not about other level 2 and 3 providers as well?
Andrew Gwynne
I find that quite offensive—to suggest that Opposition Members have been lobbied by Pearson to support a qualification. It was not always Pearson’s. The hon. Lady talked about a brand, but it was Edexcel before Pearson, and before that it was the Business and Technology Education Council, which is where the term BTEC comes from. The reason that I am standing here to defend BTECs is that I have BTEC levels 3, 4 and 5.
Andrew Gwynne
I am not giving way to the hon. Lady, because I am still answering her. I have BTEC qualifications at levels 3, 4 and 5. I am proud to have gone through the BTEC route, and I want to ensure that the next generation of young people and, indeed, adults have the opportunity to go through the BTEC route, which is well respected and recognised by academia. I think only one university in the whole of the United Kingdom does not accept students with BTEC qualifications. I tell the hon. Lady that any lobbying I have had has come from the local colleges in my constituency, because they are incredibly concerned that withdrawing the qualification completely takes away a route to university for many people.
Andrew Gwynne
The hon. Lady can shake her head, but I invite her to Ashton Sixth Form College and Stockport College, and she can get into the real world.
Tahir Ali
I take great exception to the word “brand” being used for the BTEC. The BTEC is not a brand; it is a qualification achieved by those who do not want to pursue an academic route. If BTEC is a brand, GCSEs are a brand, A-levels are a brand, BSc is a brand, masters degrees are a brand. It is nonsense, and it is abhorrent to even refer to BTEC as a brand. The only brands Government Members are interested in are the ones that cost a lot of money.
Andrew Gwynne
From a sedentary position, the hon. Lady says that it is a brand. It is not a brand; it is a qualification. I took BTEC qualifications when they were managed by the Business and Technology Education Council. The gown that I proudly wore at Stockport College’s graduation ceremony in Manchester Cathedral was my BTEC higher national diploma gown—exactly the same gown that BTEC HND graduates wear today, even though it is a Pearson qualification.
Andrew Gwynne
We have heard enough from the hon. Lady. If she has nothing positive to add, I will not give way to her.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I would like to think that the hon. Lady does have something positive to contribute. I say that as an act of decency, really. Like many Members in this room, I am sure, I found inappropriate the accusation that myself and other Opposition Members could have received money for making claims in favour of—[Interruption.] Or that we were being lobbied to speak positively—
Lia Nici
On a point of order, Mr Efford. That is not what I said at all. However, there are other level 2 and 3 providers. We constantly hear about BTECs. There are high-quality providers of other qualifications. We want to move towards T-levels. That is what this is all about.
The Chair
That is not a point of order. However, if the hon. Lady wants to make a contribution on that point, she can catch my eye. Have you completed your intervention, Mr Western?
Matt Western
I simply urge the hon. Lady to retract what she said in her point about Opposition Members being lobbied by Pearson.
Andrew Gwynne
I agree with my hon. Friend. That is what I said in answer to the hon. Lady when she made the assertion. I will happily give way to her if she will withdraw those remarks.
Lia Nici
Thank you very much for allowing me to intervene. I reiterate that Pearson is the owner of the BTEC brand, and because BTEC was being used again and again, I suspected that lots of lobbying was going on. I did not say that any money was changing hands or that anything corrupt was going on. I did not say that.
Andrew Gwynne
I will accept the half-hearted withdrawal from the hon. Lady if she says that she now accepts that we have not been lobbied by Pearson in the way that she implied. She makes the very real point that there are other qualifications at this level. I have a City & Guilds qualification and a Royal Society of Arts qualification at those levels. She is absolutely right that other really good qualifications are available to people to study at levels 2 and 3, and beyond. However, the main and most respected set of qualifications at this level is currently BTECs. I get that the Government want to introduce T-levels, and I support the concept of T-levels, but the hon. Lady and other Government Members must understand that there are some young people for whom T-levels will not be suitable but for whom BTECs are. Having the opportunity to study at BTEC level will allow them to progress to higher education or employment. To take those choices away is a retrograde step.
We are not here to debate the rights and wrongs of what the Government want to do. We are here to debate a sensible amendment that would ensure that, if the Government want to change the framework of qualifications in the way that they say in respect of T-levels and BTECs, there is a thorough assessment of the need to do that.
Andrew Gwynne
I will come to the hon. Lady in a minute. There may be a duplication of some qualifications where one of them is no longer required. In that case, it may well be the right decision to withdraw funding from the BTEC qualification and put it into the T-level qualification. There may well be, however, two qualifications with a similar outcome—BTECs and T-levels, for example—but with different routes that are suitable for different sets of young people, meaning that although they get to the same end point, their starting point is very different. We should not be denying that choice.
Frankly, there will be some qualifications where a BTEC is the only game in town and it excels in providing those qualifications. Those should be retained. We are talking about ensuring that there is a proper assessment when Ministers seek to make academic changes. I will give way to the hon. Lady and then to my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield.
Jane Hunt
That is very kind; I thank the hon. Member. He seems to be agreeing with the Minister this afternoon. To quote from Hansard,
“Our qualifications review is vital to ensuring that what is on the market is the best it can be. I am clear that T-levels and A-levels should be front and centre of the level 3 landscape, but I am convinced that we need other qualifications alongside them, many of which exist now and play a valuable role in supporting good outcomes for students. It is quite likely that many BTECs and similar applied general-style qualifications will continue to play an important role in 16-to-19 education for the foreseeable future.”—[Official Report, 15 November 2021; Vol. 703, c. 385.]
I wonder what the hon. Member has to say on that.
Andrew Gwynne
I fully agree with the intentions, and I have just said as much. From speaking to colleges that serve my constituency, the reality is that, although they want to, they will not be able to continue with a whole string of BTEC qualifications. That is the point. Moving away from the rhetoric to the reality, college principals are saying that this will be a retrograde step. Amendment 48, which my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield spoke to, is about ensuring that there is a proper mechanism to assess these changes. When we are putting through big changes to a well-established sector, we need to make sure that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
We must ensure that we do not undermine opportunities for young people. We must not undo the well-respected and long-standing route of a BTEC qualification. If there is such a decision, we need a proper, detailed assessment. It might not be BTECs next; it might be that somebody decides that City & Guilds is no longer required or that the RSA no longer needs to provide qualifications, and so on. The assessment would need to go through the process that my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield set out in an independent and considered way. Ministers and, ultimately, Parliament would then make a sensible decision about how the higher education framework should look.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend was talking a minute ago about different qualifications and cases where a BTEC is the only show in town. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby was saying that we should recognise that there are other level 3 qualifications. Does my hon. Friend agree that an example at level 3 is the CACHE qualification, which is undertaken by people who want to work in the early years sector? The CACHE qualification has a big work experience element, and there are many reasons why early years students might be more likely to choose it over a T-level. The Government seem to have decided that T-levels are the answer and that they should decide what else can fit around them, rather than the other way around, which would be to identify where the holes are and to introduce T-levels to replace them.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why it is sensible to have a mechanism to assess these things properly, impartially and in the round and present that information to Ministers and Members of Parliament.
I have not yet heard any argument about what useful qualifications are. Is my BTEC national certificate in business and finance a useful qualification? Is my BTEC higher national diploma in business and finance a useful qualification? I do not know. The Minister has not set out what a useful qualification is. Whether these things could be done through T-levels or whether the BTEC option is a useful qualification—none of that has been set out. I want it set out independently, which is why I think it is really important that we get a mechanism in place that is independent and offers sound advice to Ministers and MPs.
As I have mentioned before, more than a quarter of higher education applicants—26%—come through the BTEC route. That is not insubstantial. I want to make sure that more young people and more adults come through an appropriate vocational route into higher education. If that is T-levels, great—let us get more people through T-levels into appropriate higher-level qualifications—but for many it will still be BTEC. It needs to be BTEC.
As my colleges are saying, we cannot undermine the ability to provide BTEC courses. At the moment, it is all T-level, T-level, T-level. BTEC is becoming an afterthought—and not necessarily a funded afterthought at that. That is my real concern, and it is why I am pleased to support my hon. Friend’s very sensible and modest but very practical amendments.
Matt Western
I do not want to rehearse points that have already been made, but I highlight the fact that BTECs are written into the Bill, which refers on page 10 to
“BTECs, AGQ or a Diploma”.
When we refer to BTECs, we are referring to them very honestly. There is no preference for any provider or qualification; they just happen to be a significant part of the skills agenda and, as I say, are written into the Bill.
Alex Burghart
May I make a small point of clarification? The hon. Gentleman says that BTECs are written into the legislation. They are, but only because of a successful amendment tabled by Lord Watson in the upper House. They are not in the Government’s original drafting of the Bill.
Matt Western
I take the Minister’s point, but that decision was reached and agreed across the parties in the House of Lords. The Lords accepted that BTECs are a qualification, along with AGQs and diplomas. As a point of reference, that is a pretty honest point made by noble Lords, and we agree. I just clarify that we are not favouring one provider or qualification over another; we are simply using the parlance of the FE sector.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield mentioned, the issue is about criteria. I am really concerned, having spoken to colleges and universities in the higher education sector about the associations between FE colleges and universities. There are so many young people who may struggle through school and the normal academic process, but who have the chance to do a BTEC and rediscover learning and what is right for them. Qualifications such as AGQs and BTECs have provided a real opportunity for those young people. That is why we believe it is important that, rather than pursuing T-levels almost exclusively, as the Government have done, we should make a much more open choice available to young people. We are concerned about the move towards assessing the quality of level 3 courses and about what will be taken into account—hence our amendment.
Alex Burghart
Let us get to the amendments themselves. Amendment 47 would require the Secretary of State to appoint an alternative body, rather than the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, to determine whether approval should be withdrawn from technical qualifications at level 3. The Government think this amendment is unnecessary. Institute approval is a mark of quality and provides currency with business and industry. It shows that employers demand employees who have attained the qualification, and that it delivers knowledge, skills and behaviours needed for particular occupations. Approval would be withdrawn when a qualification no longer meets the criteria against which it was approved and no longer delivers the outcomes that employers need.
It is entirely appropriate that approval and withdrawal of approval decisions based on the same set of criteria should be made by the same body. That body should undoubtedly be the institute. It is best placed to manage our system of technical qualifications and will actively involve employers when making approval and withdrawal decisions, including through its route panels of employers, who hold national sector expertise and knowledge of occupational standards. To be clear, the institute does not have the power to make funding decisions about qualifications. Those powers rest with the Secretary of State. However, we want to fund technical qualifications that hold currency with employers; institute approval will provide a robust basis for this.
Amendment 48 has three elements to it. The first is that the Secretary of State must publish criteria defining what is meant by “high quality” when it comes to deliberations around the defunding of level 3 vocational and technical qualifications. The second is that an independent panel of experts be appointed to review the defunding of any qualifications in accordance with these criteria. The final one is that a proposed list of qualifications in line to have their funding removed is published within three months of this Bill achieving Royal Assent.
On the first point, the Secretary of State was clear on Second Reading that the removal of funding for level 3 qualifications that overlap with T-levels will be based on the extent to which they overlap with T-levels. High-level criteria for the removal of funding for technical qualifications that overlap with T-levels were published in the summer alongside the response to the consultation. Further detail about those criteria will be published in the near future, alongside a provisional list of qualifications in scope for funding removal in 2024. These will include grounds for awarding organisations to appeal against the provisional decisions made the Department for Education.
On the second point, both Ofqual and the institute will play an important role in approving new and reformed qualifications independently from the Department, and the institute’s approval will be a necessary pre-requisite for funding decisions taken by the Department. There is no need for any further independent body being built into the system. On the third aspect of the amendment, we want to have transparent processes for the removal of funding for qualifications and the approval of new ones. I have already made it clear that we will shortly publish the first list of technical qualifications that are in scope for the removal of funding because they overlap with T-levels. The funding of new and reformed qualifications will be based on strong quality standards, to be published next year, and decisions based on approvals involving two expert and independent organisations.
Mr Perkins
That was an interesting contribution from the Minister. On the first aspect of amendment 48, which calls for the Secretary of State to publish criteria to define what is meant by “high-quality qualifications”, he seemed to be saying that, effectively, that has already been published—although there will be more to be published in future. This is so obviously a moving situation; the Government are desperately trying to recover from the position that the previous Secretary of State has put them in. I think amendment 48 is a constructive way of supporting them to get out of the situation they are in.
It appears from what the Minister says that he does not need to vote for the amendment because that will happen anyway. If it will happen anyway, what is the problem with voting for the amendment? Having specific criteria to define what is meant by high-quality qualifications —removing the case-by-case approach and any political agenda, and once again enabling decisions to be made according to academic and, one might almost say, evidence-based criteria, which is what the Secretary of State told us he would be all about—would be entirely sensible, so I do not understand why the Minister will not vote for the amendment.
On the second part of our amendment, the Minister suggested that we do not need an independent body because we have IATE. The whole point about amendment 47 is that an organisation having ownership of a qualification and also being the referee on other qualifications is a pretty complicated and worrying situation. It is a bit like saying that Toyota, which makes electric cars, can also say whether everyone else’s electric cars meet the criteria.
Alex Burghart
It is worth bearing in mind that there really is not a conflict of interest here. The institute is not a market participant. Toyota manufactures and sells cars. The institute will not sell T-levels.
Mr Perkins
The Minister says that there is no conflict of interest. People in the sector believe that there is. Clearly it is a matter of opinion, but the perception of a conflict of interest exists. That is why we tabled the amendment, and I suspect it is why we were asked to do so.
The Minister suggests that he will vote against proposed subsection (12) of amendment 48, but at the same time he says, “Don’t worry. We’re going to publish it shortly. We don’t want to be committed to three months, but it will be shortly.” I do not know what the definition of shortly is if three months is too short. I understand that we are only in a position to press one of the amendments to a vote. We have not been given any encouragement by Government Members that they will support amendment 47, so even though we remain of the view that it would have been sensible, on advice I will withdraw it, but we will seek to divide the Committee on amendment 48. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave withdrawn.
Alex Burghart
I beg to move amendment 18, in clause 7, page 10, leave out lines 38 to 40.
This amendment leaves out subsection (3) of section A2D6 (approved technical education qualifications: approval and withdrawal) to be inserted into the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. The subsection was inserted at Lords Report.
Alex Burghart
Amendment 18 removes an amendment from the Opposition Benches of the Lords that sought to delay the withdrawal of public funding from level 3 qualifications until 2026. The Lords amendment is not needed. We listened to the issues raised in the other place and, as such, the Secretary of State announced an extra year before public funding is withdrawn from qualifications that overlap with T-levels, and before reformed qualifications that will sit alongside T-levels and A-levels are introduced. Our reform programme is rightly ambitious, but we know that it would be wrong to push too hard and risk compromising quality. I believe that that additional year strikes the right balance between giving providers, students and other stakeholders enough time to prepare while moving forward with our important reforms.
The changes are part of reforms to our technical education system that will be over a decade in the making from their inception, building on the recommendations in the Sainsbury review, published in 2016, which itself built on the findings of the Wolf review of 2011. Both reviews found that the current approach is not serving learners or employers well. It fails to incentivise the active involvement of business and industry in technical qualifications, whereas our reforms will place employers at the heart of the system. We need to ensure that we get this right, but it is also important that we act quickly to close the gaps between what people study and the skills that employers need.
T-levels are a critical step change in the quality of the technical offer. They have been co-designed with over 250 leading employers and are based on the best international examples of technical education. We have already put in place significant investment and support to help providers and employers prepare for T-levels. By 2023, all T-levels will be available to thousands of young people across the country, and over 400 providers have signed up to deliver them so far.
We have learned from past reforms that, for T-levels to embed successfully, we should not continue to fund all competing qualifications alongside them. That is what we did when we moved from apprenticeship frameworks to apprenticeship standards: the frameworks were removed. Apprenticeship standards are the same employer-led standards on which T-levels and higher technical qualifications are based, and soon there will be a broader range of qualifications as part of our ambition for a coherent system in which employers play a leading role throughout the technical qualifications landscape. The Government’s amendment will allow those vital reforms to be implemented so that more young people and employers can benefit from a high-quality technical offer, with one extra year to help providers and other stakeholders to prepare. That extra year does not require legislation.
Amendment 19, which also stands in my name, seeks to reverse another amendment from the Lords. That amendment said that no student would be deprived of the right to take two BTECs, an applied general qualification, or a diploma or an extended diploma. All learners should be able to attain the skills they need to succeed in higher education or progress into skilled employment. A-levels and T-levels will be the best academic and technical options for most 16 to 19-year-olds, and we want as many young people as possible to benefit from them. However, that does not mean that we are removing all applied general qualifications. We see a valuable role for such qualifications in the reformed landscape where there is a need for them and where they meet our new quality and other criteria. I assure Members that we recognise that there is a need for other qualifications —ones that provide knowledge and skills that are not covered by T-levels, or are less well served by A-levels.
In our response to the level 3 consultation in the summer, we set out the qualifications that we intend to fund alongside A-levels and T-levels. They include large academic qualifications, such as BTECs or similar, as a full programme of study in areas that do not overlap with T-levels and are less well-served by A-levels: performing arts or sports science, for example. Students will continue to be able to study mixed programmes, with applied general-style qualifications alongside A-levels, where there is a need and where they meet our new other criteria. That includes areas such as engineering, applied science and IT, in which T-levels are also available.
Successive reviews have found that the current approach has led to a complex and confusing market that is variable in quality, which does not serve students or employers well. Streamlining the qualifications landscape will help to simplify the market and provide students with both quality and clarity of choice. I therefore commend these amendments to the Committee.
Mr Perkins
This is a really important moment in the passage of this Bill, because Government amendments 18 and 19 seek to remove two of the most important amendments that were secured in the House of Lords. The Minister described the first of those as an Opposition amendment, but we should remember that it only passed because of the votes of Conservative peers, as well as Labour, Liberal Democrat and other peers. Indeed, the Conservatives who voted for that amendment included such renowned and respected peers as Lord Willetts, former Minister of State for Universities and Science, who was largely seen as one of the pioneers of policy in this area during his time in government; Lord Clarke, former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer; and Lord Howard, former Conservative party leader. These are not people who often vote against the Government—well, Lord Clarke did quite a bit. [Laughter.] On the whole, they are not people who regularly vote against the Government. They do so only with the greatest of regret and the greatest of persuasion, so when people such as Lord Howard, Lord Willetts and Lord Clarke say that this is a moment for the Government to pause before they get this wrong, then joking aside, they should be listened to seriously.
Mr Perkins
Lord Baker made his support for this approach known. I think he was absent from the vote, but he very much supported the move towards protecting this. In fact, he described the Government’s approach as
“an act of educational vandalism”.
The Government have made an important concession. It is not in the Bill, but the Secretary of State has agreed to an additional one-year moratorium on the defunding of level 3 qualifications. That is important, and I have two points to make on that. First, it means that level 3 qualifications will not be defunded in this Parliament. If anyone out there wishes to ensure that level 3 qualifications—they offer real student choice, are respected by the sector and understood by employers—are defended and maintained in the future, they will have the opportunity: they will be able tao vote Labour in a general election. The fact that level 3 qualifications will not be defunded in this Parliament is an important concession. The opportunity to save the Government from that folly will be there in a general election, and we will push that argument very strongly.
Secondly, the clause that the Government are attempting to get rid of stated that there would be a four-year moratorium. We have heard that they are not having the four-year one, but they will have a one-year moratorium. Why not replace the words “four years” with “one year” in their amendment? At least then it would exist in the Bill. It seems churlish for the Government to say, “We will give you an assurance that we will do that, but we are still not going to have it in the Bill, even though we are offering you this commitment.” It is deeply disappointing that the Government have removed an amendment that enjoyed cross-party support in the other place. There are real concerns that the number of students currently doing alternative level 3 qualifications will not be well served going forward.
The hon. Member for Great Grimsby was frustrated that Opposition Members kept referring to BTECs rather than recognising the variety of different level 3 qualifications, but it is important to say that BTECs are the largest number of those level 3 qualifications. Last year 230,000 students did a level 3 BTEC. The Government have an aspiration that in four years’ time there will be 100,000 students doing T-levels. It remains to be seen whether they will be successful in that. If they are, there will still be 130,000 students in four years’ time who will not have access to that qualification if those BTECs disappear, and that is why it is so important that we ensure those ladders of opportunity are not removed.
As our next amendment will show, when I will go into more detail, we need a lot more scrutiny of the success of T-levels before BTECs are defunded. We are still in the pilot phase. I will talk more about T-levels when we debate the next amendment, but before Members vote on this one, they need to understand that we are still only in the second year of the very first intake for those qualifications. Only three of the qualifications were actually started 15 months or so ago. Some of them are in the first weeks of being studied, and already the Government are making decisions about what will happen to the alternatives before the pilot has even taken place. It is like getting rid of a ship because you are in the process of starting to invent an aeroplane. It is an unreasonable way to operate.
There are real concerns around the narrow pathways devised for T-levels. BTECs are often a route to university for those who have chosen not to go down the A-level track.
On Government amendment 18, we believe that the House of Lords was correct to introduce the four-year moratorium, and the Government should respect that. If they do not, and they want us to believe that we can trust them that there will be a one-year moratorium, instead of a four-year one, why not put that in the Bill?
Government amendment 19 restricts additional opportunities for studying level 3 qualifications for people who have already got one. When the Prime Minister announced the lifetime skills guarantee at Exeter College, he talked about the need for people to retrain. It was at the height of the covid pandemic, and he said that some people are in areas that might not have a future, and that we need to allow them to retrain. The whole principle of the lifetime skills guarantee was around people retraining—perhaps they are in travel, tourism or hospitality, and we will move them to health and social care or engineering. However, when it comes to the guarantee, they cannot do that, because people are only guaranteed to do one level 3—if someone gets their level 3 at 19 and then wants to retrain at 40, they will have to pay for it. That will definitely be a barrier for people.
The Lords, very sensibly, introduced an amendment saying that
“no student would be deprived of the right to take two”
level 3 qualifications. We sometimes hear from Government Members about these perennial students who, if allowed to do these funded qualifications, would do qualification after qualification—although I do not believe such people really exist in any serious number. Whether someone in their 50s might do a degree as a matter of interest is a different matter, but no one does a level 3 vocational qualification just for the banter—they do it because it is a route to a job.
Even if that was true, and we accepted that there must be a limit on it somewhere, the peers did introduce a limit. They simply said that for a lifetime skills guarantee to be worthy of the name “guarantee”, we have to let people do a second qualification if they need to retrain at some point. The Government are getting rid of that. We have just heard from the Minister; I would be very interested to understand why he thinks that someone who did a level 3 qualification 10 or 15 years ago and now wants to do a different level 3 should not be able to do that. He is proposing Government amendment 19, which scraps the right for people to do a second qualification, without, as far as I can recall, referring to it in any sort of detail whatever. People will be pretty disappointed with that.
More than 9 million jobs are currently excluded from the lifetime skills guarantee, which we will go into in more detail later. When whole sectors such as tourism and hospitality have been left out, it is a misnomer and a misrepresentation to call it a guarantee. It is an aspiration and nothing more.
I strongly oppose Government amendment 18, which removes the very sensible moratorium to protect level 3 qualifications, until the Government have worked out what the hell they are doing. I also oppose Government amendment 19, which removes the assurance that a student who has done a BTEC or any kind of level 3 qualification will be able to access a second one if, in the future, they need to.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
I support the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield on the Front Bench. Yet again, I find myself agreeing with the Lords in their amendments, which, as a republican, is sometimes quite tricky. However, as my hon. Friend said, these eminently sensible amendments were put forward with cross-party agreement.
I find it fairly odd that Government Members want to restrict competition. For a party that seems to have market competition at the heart of many of its policies, I find it strange that they are trying to narrow it and not allow students to have choice.
Mr Perkins
I slightly challenge my hon. Friend’s idea that this is a party that is in favour of market competition. We know it is in favour of a short list of one, devised by who knows the relevant Minister. They claim to be interested in market forces, even if their policies often do not follow that idea.
Rachel Hopkins
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is a pity that the cameras are not in this Committee room or he would have seen my wry smile in response to his comments. The reason behind wanting to ensure that applied general qualifications—BTECs—are still available for a longer period of time, in greater breadth, is all about student choice. Ultimately, this is a Bill about skills and post-16 education, which should have students at its heart. That is why I want to make the case to retain those Lords amendments and the case against the Government’s proposed amendments to take them out of this Bill.
On retaining the moratorium for four years before any change to the breadth of BTECs, I want to query a point that the Minister made, which I hope he can clarify. He referred to the Wolf report and the Sainsbury report. The briefing I have received from the Sixth Form Colleges Association, which I have worked with as the governor of a sixth form college, rightly flags up that the Wolf report says that BTECs are
“valuable in the labour market, and a familiar and acknowledged route into higher education”.
The Sainsbury report did not consider BTECs or A-levels as
“reform of this option falls outside the Panel’s remit”.
So, the Department’s case for scrapping BTECs rests on one report that rated them highly—
“valuable in the labour market”—
and another report that did not look at them at all. I would be grateful for some clarity on that point in the Minister’s subsequent comments.
On the second part, around being able to study for a second level 3 qualification, the case was made very well by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield. As only a recent entrant to this place, I have spent my whole career in the workplace with people who want to better their careers. Looking at the pace of change of within the workplace over the last 10 or 20 years, many staff I worked with may have had some sort of qualifications—BTECs or whatever—but they needed to up their digital skills to become managers and to start leading teams. This amendment would mean that they would not have been able to do that if they wanted to take their career further. I think that shows a complete lack of understanding of what the world of work can be like for many people.
If people do not have money or savings, they will not be able to do that, which goes against everything that I want to see for people and social mobility, so that poor working class people in my town can get on and they are not held back by the short-sighted, narrowing of opportunities that these amendments from the Lords sought to prevent. The Government are seeking to narrow opportunities in the Bill.
One point made by my hon. Friend was that some areas are not included in these proposals. In Luton South, we have the town centre, which has lots of retail, hospitality, pubs and hotels, particularly linked to Luton airport, but the area would not be included. That is so narrow and makes me think, “Well, what is this all about?” Is it all about a two-way street, where someone who is poor will go and do technical qualifications, and someone who is able and has connections can go and do A-levels? The gap will not be filled by many of the applied general qualifications, which reflect the workplace.
It is not just about the qualification at the end; it is also about how the assessment takes place throughout the course of the qualification and the different assessment methods. I want to see that recognition. The point was raised earlier that it is not just about some exams at the end of two years, regardless of whether people are following a technical or an A-level route.
I would be interested to hear from the Minister about some the requirements around the T-levels with regards to employer placements, and the spread and availability of them. We appreciate that we are in the pilot phase of some of those T-levels, but that is why it is so important to ensure sufficient review of how T-levels have rolled out and how the success of the students taking them has manifested itself.
Will there be sufficient placements for students? That is one question and, to link back to much of the debate we had on Tuesday about the formation of the skills plans, another is how will students travel to those placements? When education maintenance allowances were taken away from many students, they could not afford a bus fare. To be aspirational for many of our students, they might have to travel out of area—I speak as someone who represents a town, but other colleagues have talked about smaller towns, villages and other areas—but how will they travel and get about?
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is touching on something that is important, but often overlooked about BTECs. Yes, they can be done as full-time qualifications, but many people do them on day release. People are already in employment, and they are released on a day to get a level 3, level 4 or level 5 qualification to make progress. Do we not absolutely have to keep that in the system?
Rachel Hopkins
Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point. That is so vital, in particular for people with more flexible arrangements in the workplace. The pandemic has shown that people can work more flexibly through need, as much as through preference. For many, that day release is important. Many further education colleges work with local employers in their areas to ensure that the qualifications and the day releases meet the need. We must ensure that that can continue. We must not—as the phrase goes—throw the baby out with the bathwater. I hope that the Minister will address my points in his closing remarks.
Andrew Gwynne
I rise to support the Opposition’s quest to retain their lordships’ amendments to the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield said, the amendments are common sense. As someone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the very figures he mentioned, who now sit in the other place, were leading lights of the Governments of the late Baroness Thatcher and John Major. They have huge knowledge in these areas—whether I agree with them or not politically.
No one can deny that Lord Baker was an Education Secretary of some standing. He knows what he is talking about. No one can say that Lord Clarke is not a man of great knowledge and understanding in these areas. Other former Ministers of those Administrations and a former leader of the Conservative party know what they are talking about when it comes to these issues.
Matt Western
So many senior experienced educationalists from previous Administrations over the decades—notably on the Conservative side, but also the likes of Lord Blunkett—came together. They understand the sector, and the fact that they have concluded and agreed on why such qualifications need to be retained is most telling.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was going to come on to the Labour support in the House of Lords for the amendments. It is absolutely right that, when it comes to replanning a whole part of the further education sector, we should get that cross-party unanimity as far as possible. We want these changes to succeed, to last and to live through the current Government and future Administrations, as BTECs have done.
Mr Perkins
To reinforce my hon. Friend’s point, he talks about Lord Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, who voted for the amendment. For once, actually, I am thinking what he is thinking.
Andrew Gwynne
I can see what my hon. Friend did there. For once, I agree not only with my hon. Friend—I always agree with him—but with the noble Lord Howard. Of course, he did not need to be asked the question 46 times to give the answer that we wanted.
I went through the BTEC route. For the Committee’s benefit, I will not go into all that again, but I believe that it is still a viable route for so many people—young people in particular but also adults—who want to better themselves and pursue a new career. To take away some of these options in the way in which the Government seek is regressive. My hon. Friend the shadow Minister is right that if the Government will not accept a four-year moratorium—even though they should—they should place the one-year moratorium in the Bill so that that is clear. I support their lordships fully on this issue.
I get what Ministers are saying about the risk of compromising quality, but nobody has ever made the case to me that the BTECs at my local colleges—Stockport College, Tameside College and Ashton Sixth Form College —are compromising quality. They give young people and adults some of the best opportunities to better themselves and reskill themselves.
Rachel Hopkins
The point about the quality of these qualifications has already been made. So many young people get to really good universities on a BTEC qualification, and surely those universities would not accept qualifications that were not up to scratch.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I believe that just one university in the whole of the United Kingdom does not accept BTEC qualifications, and it is not Oxford or Cambridge—they do. If these qualifications are good enough for Oxbridge, they obviously set the standard that academia wants to see.
It is more than that. BTEC is about more than reaching the same standards in theory as A-levels or years 1 and 2 of an undergraduate degree. There is also the experience and opportunities that BTECs bring to the people studying them, which academic qualifications—and possibly even T-levels—cannot.
I want the Minister think about the fact that some colleges are requiring GCSEs in English and maths to be considered for a T-level qualification That is fine, but what about those who do not have those qualifications but do have a whole string of other GCSEs at the equivalent of grade C and above, in old money? Do we really want to hold back our young people and keep them doing resits until they can get on to a T-level qualification, or do we want them to progress through T-levels and possibly study for English or maths resits at the same time? That really concerns me. I see colleges in Greater Manchester suggesting those entry requirements for T-levels, even though that is not necessarily the Government’s intention. We must look at that.
With BTEC, students who did not have GCSEs had the opportunity of going through a BTEC first before progressing to BTEC national and BTEC higher national. It is really important that we do not take opportunities away from young people. We should be increasing opportunities.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
I just want to be clear that, on Second Reading, the Secretary of State indicated that the requirements for maths and English were being removed. I just want to make sure that the hon. Gentleman has not misunderstood that or is trying to suggest otherwise.
Andrew Gwynne
No, and I said clearly that that is not the intention of Ministers, but it is already happening de facto on the ground. Although colleges do not need to consider whether someone has English or maths qualifications, some are saying that they want people to have them. We have to ensure that that does not happen. At this early stage, the Minister can use his influence to ensure that colleges stick not only to the spirit of what was said on Second Reading but to the letter of what we want, which is no young person missing out on the opportunity to follow the BTEC further education route, as is currently the case.
Lastly, I will talk about depriving people of the right to take two BTECs, AGQs, diplomas or extended diplomas. In the good old days, when someone left school and went to work in what was likely to be their job for the entirety of their working life before they retired, these things did not matter. Today, the workplace and employment market are incredibly fluid. We cannot guarantee a job for life in 2021, and we certainly cannot guarantee that there will be a job for life in a decade’s time, or even two decades’ time. People going through college now cannot be guaranteed that they will remain in one job for the whole of their career. The reality is that they will have lots of jobs. The world of work will change, the challenges for people in the workplace in the future will change, and the way we work will change, so the way we learn about advances in technology and new job opportunities has to change as well. It may well be that somebody is currently employed in an area that will not exist in 10 years’ time. Are we seriously going to deny them an opportunity to reskill in a whole new area of work that is currently unforeseen but might develop? Are we really going to be so rigid as to say that somebody cannot go back to college to do a qualification at the same level as the one they got 20 years ago but is no longer relevant to modern-day work?
I support the Lords amendment. It is absolutely sensible for the future, because we do not know what the future holds. Are we really going to hold back a proportion of the workforce who might have to retrain or start literally from scratch and do another level 3 qualification in a whole different area because the level 3 qualification they did 20 or 30 years ago is no longer relevant to the modern world of work? That is absolutely crazy.
Lia Nici
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I have been bobbing up and down a lot. I feel that I need to bring a little bit of balance to proceedings. I am concerned that people listening to the debate will be full of fear and dread about what may be happening. My concern is that the mantra has been that BTECs are going, it will be terrible, it will hold everybody back and working-class young and older people will not be able to do anything. That really is not a proper representation of what is happening.
We have had A-levels in our education system for many decades. They are not a brand. They are a qualification. T-levels will mean that vocational qualifications will be better understood. Not only will they be high quality, but they will have been shaped in part by our LSIPs and employers.
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
Is it the case, like it is for me, that when my hon. Friend talks to employers in her constituency they often say, “We’ve got the jobs, but haven’t got the skills locally”? The Bill will play a big part in changing that.
Lia Nici
My hon. Friend is right. A huge number of jobs are available. What we need to do now, and the Bill will enable us to do it, is pivot on an axis to ensure that employers are fully involved. We have some very good education providers in post-compulsory technical that work with employers, but a lot more work needs doing. When I go to see employers in my constituency, they all say that they have jobs available but cannot get people with the right skills. We have to do something about that, not only for our employers and our economy but for our constituents.
My constituency of Great Grimsby is the most wonderful place to live, but our skill levels are not where they need to be, for people in and out of work. If we are to level up for everybody across the country, particularly in my home town of Great Grimsby, T-levels will be a fantastic way for us to move forward. Apprenticeships are also extremely valuable, as people can earn while they learn. I am extremely concerned that we seemingly have a moral panic to try to get headlines to worry young people. I say to young people, and older people who are looking to train to level 3 qualifications, that it is not the disaster that it is being portrayed as for the sake of headlines.
There is a reason we do not want a long moratorium on such things as BTECs, which the Opposition are mentioning over and over again. I have worked in further education for 22 years. I have taught secondary school students and lectured at higher education level, and I happen to have a diploma at level 3, level 4 and level 5—a higher national diploma—one of which happens to be a BTEC. We want to ensure that education providers know exactly what is happening with a deadline. They are now ready to pivot on that. I have been talking to my biggest provider, Grimsby Institute of Further and Higher Education, and its experience of T-levels so far is utterly outstanding.
Lia Nici
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. Great Grimsby has a history of fishing. Actually, it was the Icelandic cod wars and joining the EU that ended our fishing industry. We still have a very important fish processing industry that employs around 5,000 to 6,000 people in the town directly. I am working with the fishmongers’ association, Seafish, and my local colleges and industry to look at new apprenticeships and T-levels, so he is right: I am working on that. It is extremely important, because we have lots of people in our communities who are working at extremely high levels and have no qualifications. We need to consider not only people who are new into the workplace but those who are working and are specialists in their field. I see them every week when I am out and about. They talk passionately and are very knowledgeable—to level 5, 6, 7 and beyond—and they worked their way through. We need to ensure that qualifications can do that as well.
Andy Carter
My hon. Friend mentioned the importance of engaging with colleges and employers. Does she agree that it is also critical that we engage with young people and hear their experiences of T-levels? Priestley College in my constituency was one of the first in the UK to undertake T-levels, and one of the best visits I have had in my almost two years of being the Member for Warrington South involved sitting with T-level students and hearing their experiences of going out into the workplace and learning in a very different way from what they expected. We have been able to gather a tremendous amount of insight, and we can build on that. My hon. Friend made the point earlier that Opposition Members’ suggestion that vocational qualifications are moving in a direction that is perhaps not advantageous for young people is simply unfounded.
Lia Nici
I thank my hon. Friend for making that extremely important point. I speak to T-level students who are absolutely and utterly convinced that this is the way to go forward. I spoke earlier about my career in education and did a quick tot up of how many young people I have put through diplomas at level 3. I think about 45,000 students have been through my classrooms, studios and workshops, and they now work all over the world in a whole range of different roles within their specialism. It is really important to say that we do not want to put people in an absolute state of panic, because there are really good qualifications and jobs out there.
I will make a couple of points before I finish. The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish said that the Conservative party does not like competition, but I think there is a misunderstanding here. T-levels are not a brand; they are qualifications. All those different organisations, such as Cambridge, Pearson and the City and Guilds, will all be able to feed in and offer T-levels.
I want to pick up the point about the Wolf report, which said that BTECs are high quality. The Wolf report came out in 2011, so I would be cautious about looking at something that was published 10 years ago.
Andrew Gwynne
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way. I want to quiz her on the assertion that BTECs are a brand. I studied for a BTEC national certificate in business and finance, and I qualified in 1992. Is that a qualification or a brand?
Lia Nici
Actually, the hon. Gentleman has a diploma, which happens to be accredited by the examining board of BTEC. That is what I am trying to explain. Although this has been a very interesting debate, I felt that I had to stand up and say something because there was some misrepresentation and some panic being put into this, which I really do not think is a positive thing for young people and their parents and carers, or for more mature students who are looking to do level 3.
The Chair
Order. Could we come back to the amendment? We have dealt with whether T-levels and BTECs are brands—we have been around that circuit already. I do not think we need to repeat that part of the debate.
Lia Nici
Thank you, Mr Efford. People will still be able to study on day release and part time. I know that everybody is passionate about this issue, but we need to be balanced. We all want our young people and older people to be able to study for qualifications that are high quality and that will help them to go on to further education or to get good-quality jobs, and I believe that the Bill will do that.
Mr Perkins
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Lady, whose contribution I did not entirely agree with. However, it has been so rare in our debates to have contributions from Conservative Back Benchers, so I do not want to discourage them when they take place.
There are a few things that I want to say. First, the hon. Member for Great Grimsby says that she is interested in providing qualifications that employers will value, but 86% of those who were consulted on the Government’s review agree with the amendment that the Lords put in and disagree with the Government’s intention to take it out. If her purpose is to do what employers want, she should be voting for the Lords amendment rather than against it. She says it was her belief that the BTEC was simply a brand, but it is clearly a qualification. To “other” BTECs as if they are somehow lesser than A-levels and T-levels is a considerable mistake. The amendments are very much undermined.
Matt Western
I want to draw attention to the points that have been raised by the Social Market Foundation and Universities UK on how important qualifications such as BTECs have been. There is a fear that T-levels will not allow for the same degree of social mobility as has been possible in the past, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, students with SEND and BME pupils.
Mr Perkins
I agree with my hon. Friend. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby said she speaks to employers in her constituency who say that they are not able to attract employees with the skills they need. We have all heard that refrain. That is precisely why introducing a reform that could see 130,000 students without the qualification they are currently getting is a hugely retrograde step.
The hon. Member for Great Grimsby says that she is concerned that people watching this debate will be misinformed. I have to say to her that the only people watching the debate know the sector very well indeed—there is not widespread competition for the number of viewers that “Coronation Street” gets. Those watching this debate already understand the sector. They are precisely the people who have responded to that consultation in great numbers—86% of whom have said that we should support this Lords amendment rather than get rid of it. I think that her worries about people in the sector being misinformed are very much out of line. Actually, it is the sector that is coming to us and saying, “Slow down. T-levels may well have real value, but we don’t yet know. Before you chuck the baby out with the bathwater, take it steady. Let’s support the Lords amendment and vote against the Government one.”
Alex Burghart
This is another interesting debate. It is another opportunity for the Opposition to fawn over former Conservative Secretaries of State and to think back to the wonderful childhoods they had under Baroness Thatcher—[Interruption.] There are some great opportunities for 16-year-olds in Greater Manchester, it would appear.
I appreciate that there are cross-party points to be made. I do not need to remind the Committee that a lot of this work originates from the pen and mouth of Lord Sainsbury, who in 2016 put together the review that would ultimately lead to the design of T-levels, which he has been intimately involved in. I imagine that most members of the Committee have received communication from his lordship in the run-up to this debate, in which he has made it very clear that the reason we needed T-levels was because there was a need at level 3 for large qualifications, designed by employers, that met the needs of employers and offer serious work placements, and that this would enhance the level 3 offer immeasurably.
Lord Sainsbury is a very strong Labour advocate for this policy. On his advice, we have designed a new suite of qualifications at level 3, designed with 250 employers, with nine weeks of work experience put in. It was wonderful to hear a speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby, because I have had the same experience. I have had the pleasure of doing this job for 11 weeks or so now, and I have travelled across the country meeting T-level providers. The level of enthusiasm among staff, pupils and employers who are providing the work placements is enormous. It is an electric moment in education.
I fully respect the serious point that the hon. Member for Luton South made about capacity for work placements, an issue that the Department is taking very seriously. My officials have absolutely busted a gut during the pandemic to make sure that young people on T-levels at this uniquely challenging time do not miss out on their work placement. I am pleased to say that the vast majority of young people who started their course in September 2020 have found a work placement, though a few have not, and we are working very hard to make sure that they do. It is a promising sign that even during a pandemic, we managed to do that, but we know that we will have to work hard on this issue, and we do not take the challenge lightly.
Rachel Hopkins
I hope that the Minister will appreciate my concern. There are 10,000 students in the T-level pilots. He says that the Government are almost there on work placements, but nearly 250,000 people are studying for level 3 BTECs, so there would need to be a significant transition. I hope that he accepts those concerns about placements.
Alex Burghart
The hon. Lady makes a serious point of which we are mindful, but obviously there are lots of areas where there are no T-levels at the moment, and there are great opportunities for work experience; we are already engaging with employers and colleges.
Access has come up repeatedly. There is absolutely no good reason why a young person at 16 to 19 who is ready to study at level 3 should not do a T-level. The idea that large numbers of young people aged 16 to 19 will be shut out of studying at level 3 because of T-levels is simply wrong. There was a potentially serious obstacle in the English and maths exit requirement, which is why we removed that. I say in all seriousness to the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish that if there are colleges out there still using an English and maths entry requirement, I would like to know which ones they are—I will happily speak to their principals. I do not expect him to put that on record in Hansard, but I would be grateful if he supplied me with that information.
Andrew Gwynne
I am grateful to the Minister for that, because as I said, we really need to bottom this out. We absolutely need to make sure that we apply not just the spirit of what the Minister said on Second Reading, but the letter of it. I will certainly supply him with that information.
Alex Burghart
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that undertaking, because this is about creating more and better opportunities. On the point about destinations, a number of MPs here have said that BTECs have led to higher education. That is excellent. There is no reason at all why T-levels should not do the same thing. Many universities have already come forward to say that they will recognise them, and we are very confident that the number will increase.
The hon. Member for Chesterfield raised a point about capacity. I am afraid that he may have got his figures slightly confused. In steady state, there is absolutely no cap on the number of people who can do T-levels. I think one estimate was that each cohort could be 100,000 people. There is plenty of space for anyone who is at the right level to do a T-level.
The Government are moving at pace, but over quite a long period. This process started in 2011, and was boosted by the work of Lord Sainsbury in 2016. We introduced our first T-levels in September 2020, and we will not begin defunding until 2024. We are taking proportionate steps to introduce a new generation of level 3 qualifications that will present great new opportunities to students, providers, employers and the economy.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 6—T-levels: Duty to review—
“(1) Two years after the date on which the first T-levels are completed, the Secretary of State must perform a review of the education and employment outcomes of students enrolled on T-level courses.
(2) No qualifications may be defunded until the Secretary of State’s duty under subsection (1) has been undertaken.”
Alex Burghart
I rise to speak in support of clause 7. Much of the debate so far has centred on the level 3 qualifications that will be funded for young people in the reformed landscape. This is an important matter, and one that we have consulted on extensively as part of the post-16 qualifications review. We are making changes based on feedback. We are allowing that extra year before implementing our reform timetable, and we are removing the English and maths exit requirement from T-levels, bringing them more in line with other level 3 study programmes, such as A-levels.
However, I would like to bring us back to the specific purpose of this legislation, which is focused on the approval and regulation of technical qualifications. For the majority of technical and vocational qualifications, little scrutiny is applied to the content before they enter the publicly funded market under existing arrangements. That is in contrast to the more rigorous arrangements in place for general qualifications such as A-levels, and we do not think that it is right. We want students and employers to be confident that every technical qualification is high quality and holds genuine labour market currency.
Clause 7 introduces powers to enable the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to approve a broader range of technical qualifications than it is currently able to, with a particular focus on alignment with employer standards. Standards are developed by groups of employers and are managed and published by the institute. They set out the knowledge, skills and behaviours that are essential for a person to be competent in an occupation. Apprenticeships, T-levels and higher technical qualifications are based on those standards. T-levels have been co-designed with more than 250 leading employers and raise the quality bar of the technical offer at level 3. We want to ensure that all technical qualifications are high quality and meet the skills needs of business and industry. Extending the institute’s role will make it certain that the majority of technical qualifications available in England are based on standards and deliver the skills outcomes that employers have told us they need.
This clause places a duty on the institute to regularly review the qualifications that it approves, upholding quality over time and ensuring continued labour market currency. It will give the institute the power to manage the number of qualifications in targeted areas—by issuing a moratorium on the approval of new qualifications—if the institute judges that there is a risk of inappropriate proliferation. Furthermore, it will enable the institute to charge fees for the approval of qualifications, subject to regulations published by the Secretary of State.
As the Sainsbury review found, the current approach is not working, with over 12,000 qualifications at level 3 or below. It has led to a complex and bloated landscape of qualifications, which is confusing for learners and does not serve them or employers well. Our reforms to technical qualifications will set a new quality bar, where the content of qualifications lines up with the skills needs of the workplace.
New clause 6 would place a duty on the Secretary of State to undertake a review of the education and employment outcomes of T-level students two years after the first cohort has completed the programme. It would also prevent the removal of funding from qualifications until the review has been carried out. T-levels are a much-needed step change in the quality of the technical offer for 16 to 19-year-olds, based on the same employer-led standards as apprenticeships. Their design draws on the best international examples of technical education.
A number of mechanisms are already in place to keep T-levels under review, including the institute’s arrangements for reviewing T-level technical qualifications in live delivery. We are working closely with students, providers, employers and universities to ensure that stakeholders are clear on the range of progression opportunities that T-levels present. From 2024, we will publish statistics on the attainment of the T-level technical qualification and the employment outcomes of T-level graduates. That is set out in the technical guidance of the 16 to 18 accountability measures.
In addition, the Bill already provides for the review of approved technical qualifications. New section A2D8 under clause 7 places a duty on the institute to regularly review the qualifications it has approved. That includes T-levels, higher technical qualifications and the other qualifications it will approve as part of our reforms. I therefore do not support the inclusion of new clause 6 in the Bill.
Mr Perkins
Labour welcomes T-levels in principle but has concerns about their implementation. The current cohort of pupils in the first year is pretty small, and there is insufficient evidence to assess the success, or otherwise, of the qualifications at this stage. We have real concerns about the work experience element of T-levels. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton South spoke about whether there are enough employers able to offer work experience, whether that work experience will be relevant and meaningful, and how it will be assessed. What safeguards will be in place to ensure that the work placements are relevant? Will there be a way of pupils failing their work experience other than by not attending?
We are also concerned that the amount of work experience required will restrict the number of institutions that are able to offer a broad suite of these qualifications. We think the failure to achieve the amount of work experience placements might mean that not enough of the qualifications are available at different institutions. A lot of students are finding that if they want to do the T-level that would take them towards the career they want, they might have to travel a very long way, because there will not be the same availability nearby.
The Government are attempting to trash the reputation of alternative and established level 3 qualifications in the minds of employers, students and their parents, while the T-levels are still standing on shifting sands. They were announced initially as a vocational route to take 18 to 19-year-olds towards the world of work. When a study in September 2020 showed that Russell Group universities were not willing to take T-levels as entry qualifications on to science and engineering degrees, the Government were entirely sanguine, describing them as ladders to work, not to university. Yet the Secretary of State’s current favourite anecdote is of a student he met at Barnsley College called Greg, we are told, who now believes that he has the pick of universities because he is studying T-levels, so the outcome destination for T-level students in the Government’s mind seems to have shifted overnight from the workplace to university, without any evidence as to why that is.
Just like the Minister, I recently visited a college to meet students and lecturers on T-level qualifications—I went to Derby College last week. I also met students who were doing other level 3 qualifications. I asked the 14 students doing the science qualification at Derby, “How many of you are pleased that you did this qualification?” Fourteen hands went up. They were very pleased with the qualification. They had been doing it for only a couple of months, but they were really encouraged. I went on later to meet students doing a BTEC level 3 qualification in digital technology, working towards gaming. I asked them the same question, and once again every hand went up.
Matt Western
I want to clarify a point—really just for my own clarification. What number of GCSEs are people supposed to have, and at what grade, before they are eligible to take a T-level, and how does that differ from a BTEC, an AGQ or other forms of diploma?
Mr Perkins
As I understand it, from what the Secretary of State has said, going forward there will not be the need to have a maths or English GCSE before a student does a T-level. In the future, it will be similar to how it is currently, but last year’s cohort—the first cohort—did have to have GCSEs in maths and English before they were allowed to do the qualification.
Alex Burghart
To clarify the point that the hon. Gentlemen are discussing with each other, there was never an entry requirement for T-levels—there was an exit requirement. Someone could start their T-level without any GCSEs at all, but up until Second Reading it was not possible for them to get their T-level certificate unless they had by that stage passed their English and maths. They could have spent their education at 16 to 19 getting their English and maths; they would have it at the end. That is no longer the case. In the same way as a person does not need to have GCSEs in order to do A-levels, they no longer need to have GCSEs to do T-levels. We obviously encourage all students to improve their English and maths at 16 to 19 years old.
Mr Perkins
We all encourage them, absolutely. I am interested in what the Minister says. I had the impression that a GCSE in maths and English was being used as an entry-level requirement, but I hear the Minister’s point, and if institutions were to take a different approach, I dare say I would find out about them. I appreciate the Minister’s comments.
Matt Western
So the point would be, as the Minister just described, that someone could have been very good at the T-level subject that they had chosen to do, but unless they got through—okay, the Government have changed their position just recently; whether they hold to that decision long term, we do not know—they would not get that qualification, even if they retook English and maths countless times. They may have spent years trying to get it, and they would still be a failure.
Mr Perkins
As I understand it—from what the Minister said, and from my understanding—it was previously an exit-level requirement. We were arguing against that for some time and we are glad that we have managed to persuade the Government of that argument. The important point here is that the Government are learning, visibly and in plain sight, but they have already made the decision on what the conclusions are going to be, while they are still working out what they are doing with the qualification that is working.
It is essential that Ministers get this right, to ensure that T-levels enjoy the confidence of employers, FE professionals and young people and their families. The amendment would offer oversight and ensure that the quality and standards of T-levels are assessed thoroughly, and that conclusions are drawn about any improvements or observations made in that review. It is absolutely fundamental that the Government should review after they have established what the T-level students have done, as things settle down. Qualifications originally planned to be T-levels are still being cancelled. We may well find in a year’s time that further qualifications have not had enough take-up and they also start being cancelled. Let us see what is happening before any decisions are taken to defund alternative qualifications.
Alex Burghart
I do not wish us to keep treading over the same ground. I am very pleased to hear of the many happy students at Derby College, and that they are enjoying their courses. The key question before us is whether we want a system at level 3 that prioritises qualifications designed by employers and that offer a substantial element of work experience. I think we do. It is good for students, good for employers and good for the economy at large. We are designing a system of technical education, whereby a lot of students will go into level 3 technical and do T-levels. They will progress to apprenticeships and to work; some will progress to university. We will also have students at 16 to 19 who do level 2 and go into apprenticeships or traineeships, or work. There will be routes for everyone at 16 to 19 in our reformed system, but everyone will ultimately be doing a qualification that was designed with employers in the room, and many people will be doing a qualification with a serious workplace element.
We are advised to be cautious and careful, and I understand that; these are big reforms. Ten years have passed since we started this process, and it is five years since the Sainsbury review. By the time the first qualifications are defunded, four years will have passed.
Alex Burghart
Sorry, I have finished.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 7, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 8
Functions of the Institute: availability of qualifications outside England
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
The clause is an important first step in allowing qualifications such as T-levels to be made available outside England by the relevant bodies. To date, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has not collaborated with bodies outside England for that purpose. The clause makes the power explicit.
We know that many qualifications taken in England are also taken by students elsewhere, both in the other nations of the UK and beyond. Those arrangements will remain unchanged for many qualifications. However, there are some qualifications for which the institute owns the intellectual property, such as those forming part of T-levels. If other nations decide that they want to offer T-levels, the clause would allow the institute to engage with relevant bodies, such as regulators or education authorities, as appropriate. That engagement would enable all parties to work together to consider the arrangements that might be needed for programmes of education such as T-levels to be taken by students outside England.
Hon. Members
Hear, hear.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 8 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 9
Technical education qualifications: co-operation between the Institute and Ofqual
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
The clause recognises and supports effective joint working between Ofqual and the institute. Under existing legislation, the two bodies share statutory responsibility for oversight of technical education qualifications. Their respective functions and professional expertise are vital in safeguarding the credibility and integrity of technical qualifications. In particular, the institute ensures that qualifications are relevant to employers and deliver the skills they need, while Ofqual’s regulatory role is vital to maintain educational standards and the consistency of technical qualifications.
Despite the close relationship between the two roles, the two strands of existing legislation governing them are currently separate. The clause fills the gap by reinforcing the co-operation that is necessary between the two bodies to ensure that they can each perform their respective functions effectively. The two bodies already work together. They have developed an administrative framework for co-operation. The clause, together with clause 10, will align the legislation with key elements of the framework that they have agreed. Clause 9 writes mutual co-operation clearly into their respective statutory remits, as well as their working relationship. The clause also empowers each of the two bodies to provide advice and assistance to the other and ensures that each will have regard to such advice. These provisions will reinforce the long-term stability of their relationship. In particular, they will reduce the potential for the two organisations’ priorities, systems and processes to drift apart over time.
By working together effectively, the two bodies will minimise the scope for confusing, duplicated and overlapping processes. That will support the setting of clear, demanding quality standards for the qualifications. It will minimise the potential for confusion and unnecessary bureaucracy that could burden awarding bodies if Ofqual and the institute do not co-ordinate their requirements, systems and processes.
Mr Perkins
Throughout the Bill we have been calling for greater clarity and understanding of the roles of various operators within the sector, so we are pleased to see that that is the case with clause 9.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 9 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 10
Application of accreditation requirement in relation to technical education qualifications
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 49, in clause 10, page 14, line 17, leave out paragraph (a).
This amendment would ensure Ofqual remains able to make a determination under subsection (1) in relation to accreditation requirements relating to approved technical education qualifications.
Amendment 49 is brief and would ensure that Ofqual remains able to make a determination under section 138(1) of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 in relation to accreditation requirements relating to approved technical education qualifications. The Bill hugely centralises power in the Secretary of State’s hands, and it is important that an independent organisation can ensure that our technical education framework remains based on evidence and academic excellence, rather than on political priorities. For that reason, we would look to leave out paragraph (a) and ensure that Ofqual remains able to make such determinations.
Alex Burghart
The amendment aims to retain Ofqual’s power to accredit technical education qualifications that are also subject to the institute’s approval processes. These two functions are very similar, so the amendment would undermine the intention to clarify the statutory approval process for technical qualifications.
By creating a single approval gateway managed by the institute, the Bill removes duplication in the processes for these qualifications and so ensures that the system is as efficient as possible. If we were to accept the amendment, awarding organisations might be subjected to two overlapping and very similar approval processes. The mutual co-operation requirements of clause 9 ensure that although Ofqual cannot decide to accredit technical qualifications, it will continue to play a key role in their approval. Ofqual will continue to exercise its regulatory functions in live delivery.
I should draw the Committee’s attention to the comment by Jo Saxton, the Chief Inspector of Ofqual:
“The Skills Bill heralds the acceleration of a unified system of technical qualifications based on employer-led standards, in which Ofqual has a pivotal role, providing students and apprentices with high quality qualifications…The Bill cements our close working relationship with the Institute, drawing on the strengths and expertise of both organisations, with our statutory regulation of technical qualifications continuing to underpin this system”.
I think we can take it from that comment that Ofqual is very happy with the Bill as it is drafted.
It is more appropriate that the institute leads on the approval process, because its work is essential in ensuring that both the content and the outcomes of technical qualifications are aligned to the skills that employers have told us they need.
Mr Perkins
I heard what the Minister said. This was a probing amendment to try to understand a little more about how Ofqual’s role would operate in the future. However, having heard what the Minister has had to say, I beg to task leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 10 is needed in addition to clause 9 in order to clarify the roles of the institute and Ofqual in the approval of technical education qualifications. Under the existing legislation and the provisions of the Bill, the institute has specific responsibility to ensure that technical qualifications meet the skills needs of employers and different employment sectors. In parallel, Ofqual has the discretion to decide that individual types and classes of qualification should be subject to an accreditation requirement before they can be taught in schools and colleges. The purpose of the two processes is similar—to ensure that qualifications meet a high-quality bar before they enter the market. Therefore, the current legislation means that individual technical qualifications could be subject to two similar and unhelpfully overlapping approval processes. That would be unnecessary double regulation.
Clause 10 will remove the potential for overlap and duplication by creating a single approval gateway for all technical qualifications. Taken together with the mutual co-operation provisions in clause 9, it enables the two bodies to work together to provide a clear single approval pathway for technical education qualifications. It will remove the potential for duplication and additional bureaucracy both for the two bodies themselves and for the awarding organisations whose qualifications are subject to approval.
Mr Perkins
Given the concerns that we have raised with regard to the creation of the division between Ofqual and the institute, and the fear that that may lead to a two-tier approach and a sense that the investigations into academic qualifications that are seen with A-levels and other qualifications under Ofqual are different from those under the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and the technical qualifications, this is an issue that the Government need to be very careful about in future. They should ensure that there is real confidence that the technical qualifications are robust and subject to the same processes, and the same checks and balances, as other qualifications.
That is the key point that we make to the Government. We do not intend to oppose clause 10 stand part, but we seek reassurances that there will not be too much of a sense that the different pathways are of different merit.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 10 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 11
Information sharing in relation to technical education qualifications
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
The clause supports a critical aspect of the joint working needed to ensure that the whole technical education system works together to deliver the skills that employers need. It does so by ensuring that Ofqual can exchange information with the other bodies that have important roles in this framework. Under existing legislation, the institute can exchange information with other bodies to support its own functions and those of the other body involved. At present, similar powers do not apply to Ofqual. Ofqual’s explicit information-sharing power allows it to share information only with other qualifications regulators in the UK to enable or facilitate the performance of the qualifications functions of that regulator. There is no explicit function allowing it to share information to support the functions of other types of bodies.
Mr Perkins
Could the Minister clarify a little more the kinds of information that he anticipates will be relevant under this clause?
Alex Burghart
It is part of that long day you were talking about, Mr Efford. The purpose of the clause is to ensure that whatever information the institute and Ofqual want to share with each other, they can. It is open-ended, and is there to serve their purposes.
Alex Burghart
I will make some progress. The clause tackles that limitation by providing Ofqual with information-sharing powers in relation to technical education qualifications that correspond with those that already apply to the institute. Specifically, the clause enables each organisation to share information either to support its own functions, or to help other bodies in their own roles. For example, it would allow Ofqual to share information that it already gathers from awarding body organisations with other bodies, such as the institute, to avoid other bodies needing to duplicate data-gathering exercises. That approach of “collect once, use multiple times” would help reduce administrative load. Hopefully, that answers the question that the hon. Member for Chesterfield asked.
The clause plays an important role in supporting coherent, efficient joint working between Ofqual and other relevant bodies, and will help to secure high quality across the technical education system as a whole.
Mr Perkins
There are always concerns when it comes to this Government and information sharing. There have been many examples in which there has been real concern about the approach that the Government have taken to this sort of thing, which is why I was asking about the scope of these powers. We entirely understand sharing information about specific qualifications, but if it gets more granular than that—if it gets more into the area of personal data—there will be real concern. At future stages of the Bill’s passage it would be good to get a more detailed understanding of precisely what information the Government are seeking powers to share. Notwithstanding that, on the basis that these information-sharing powers mirror the current arrangements with regard to the institute, we do not intend to oppose clause stand part.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 11 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 12
Technical education qualifications: minor and consequential amendments
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
The clause sets out minor and consequential amendments to the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 and other legislation as a consequence of the other provisions contained in chapter 2 of the Bill. That includes amendments that result from extending the powers of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education such that it will be able to approve a wider range of technical qualifications. These amendments are necessary to ensure that the statute operates effectively.
Mr Perkins
They certainly are.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 12 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 13
Renumbering of provisions relating to technical education qualifications
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
The clause sets out changes to the numbering of existing sections to the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, allowing for new and existing provisions to be sequenced and numbered in a logical manner. This is a technical but necessary consequential change to the legislation, resulting from other provisions in this chapter of the Bill.
The Chair
We are all grateful for that clarification.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 13 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Michael Tomlinson.)
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [ Lords ] (Fifth sitting)
Tuesday 7th December 2021
(2 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 7 December 2021 - (7 Dec 2021)
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 3 / Noes: 7 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 7 / Noes: 3 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 9 / Noes: 4 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 10 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Chair
We now come to clause 14 and Government new clause 1.
Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mrs Miller. Am I correct that new clause 1 has not been put to the Committee? I expected us to deal with it alongside clause 14. In the absence of the Minister, will you clarify what has happened?
The Chair
I can clarify that Government new clause 1 will be voted on later. It was grouped for debate with clause 14 stand part, but there was no debate.
Clause 16
Lifelong learning: amendment of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
Clause 16 amends the definition of “higher education course” in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 to make express provision for the regulation of modules and to make it clear what a module of a higher education course is, as distinct from a full course.
The current post-18 student finance system does not specifically provide for modules. The lifelong loan entitlement will transform student finance by supporting more flexible and modular provision. This legislative change is needed to provide the explicit underpinning for the delivery of modular provision. This clause makes specific provision for modules by amending part 1 of HERA 2017, which relates to the regulatory regime under the Office for Students.
The amendments relieve higher education providers of certain additional burdens that would otherwise arise from the addition of the concept of modules under HERA.
Mr Perkins
I am grateful to the Minister for moving the clause; he was not here to move clauses 14 or 15 stand part. He has offered no apology to the Committee. As we did not have the opportunity to hear from him before those clauses were voted on, will he explain what happened this morning?
Alex Burghart
I am happy to respond to the hon. Gentleman, and I apologise to the Committee: I was unexpectedly held up on my way here. I apologise to everyone for the inconvenience and for any discourtesy, particularly to you, Mrs Miller. The amendments relieve higher education providers of certain additional burdens that would otherwise arise from the addition of the concept of modules under HERA. These relate to certain requirements to provide or publish information under section 9 of that Act.
We want to reduce the bureaucratic burden on providers where possible, and these changes will ensure that the introduction of funding for modules through the LLE will not add to this.
We will consult on the detail and scope of the lifelong loan entitlement in due course. We will take this and other wider engagement into account before we reach a final position on fee limits and will bring forward further primary legislation on this matter.
Overall, the changes in the Bill will help to pave the way for more flexible study and for greater parity between further and higher education.
Mr Perkins
On a point of order, Mrs Miller. I appreciate the Minister’s apology—these things happen—but I was under the impression that in the event of a Minister being unable to move a motion someone else stands in. As a result of no one being here, clauses to the Government’s Bill have passed without debate. For those who made representations, that feels like quite a discourtesy.
I accept the Minister’s apology for his being unavoidably detained, but people listening to our deliberations might well wonder what the Government’s intentions are as the Bill has been unable to be amended.
May we have your advice on how this unavoidable situation can be put right so that people can at least understand the Government’s thinking?
The Chair
It is for the Government to decide how they deliberate on their business in the House. I certainly agree with Mr Perkins that it is unusual not to have a Minister here to move clauses, but the Minister has given us an explanation. New clause 1 has not been moved; it will be moved and voted on later. I think you have made your point, Mr Perkins.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
In fact, there is no need to extend this debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 16 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 17
Universal credit conditionality
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
The Chair
With this, it will be convenient to discuss new clause 8— Benefit eligibility: lifelong learning.
The secretary of state must ensure that no learner’s eligibility to a benefit will be affected by their enrolment on an approved course for a qualification which is deemed to support them to secure sustainable employment.
Alex Burghart
Clause 17 seeks to change the law so that some students could keep their universal credit entitlement while studying.
It may help if I explain to the Committee that financial support for students comes from the current system of learner loans and grants designed for their needs. Section 4(1)(d) of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 sets out that one of the basic conditions of entitlement to universal credit is that the person must not be receiving education, which is defined in regulations made under subsection (6).
Where students have additional needs that are not met through this support system, exceptions are already provided under regulation 14 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013, enabling those people to claim universal credit. This includes, for example, those responsible for a child—either as a single person or as a couple—or those aged 21 or under studying non-advanced education, such as A-levels, who do not have parental support.
It is an important principle that universal credit does not duplicate the support provided by the student support system. The core objective of universal credit is to support claimants to enter work, earn more or prepare for work in the future. There is an expectation that people who are able to look for work or prepare for work do so as a condition of receiving their benefit.
Let me reassure the Committee about the important work already that is under way. Officials at the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions are working closely together to help to address and mitigate the barriers to unemployed adults taking advantage of our skills offers. For example, DWP Train and Progress is a new initiative aimed at increasing access to training opportunities for claimants. As part of this, in April 2021, a temporary six-month extension in the flexibility offered by UC conditionality was announced. As a result of this change, adults who claim universal credit and are part of the intensive work search programme can now undertake work-related full-time training for up to 12 weeks —or up to 16 weeks as part of a skills bootcamp in England—without losing their entitlement to UC. That builds on the eight weeks during which claimants were already able to train full time without losing their UC entitlement. This flexibility has now been extended to run through to the end of April 2022. Such measures are helping to ensure that UC claimants are supported to access training and skills that will improve their ability to gain good, stable and well-paid jobs. Claimants who enrol on a longer course that is not advanced education can also retain their entitlement to UC, provided they can still meet their UC conditionality requirements.
More broadly, we are continuing to support working families on UC. As we set out at the spending review, we have reduced the taper rate to 55% and increased work allowances to £500 per year, allowing UC claimants to keep more of what they earn. This is an effective tax cut worth £2.2 billion, meaning that almost 2 million of the lowest paid in-work claimants are better off overall by around £1,000 a year on average. We do not think it is necessary for the UC regulations to be amended in this way, and the clause should therefore be removed from the Bill.
New clause 8 seeks to ensure that eligibility to benefit is retained for claimants undertaking certain courses deemed to support them to secure sustainable employment. In addition to what I have stated on universal credit and Train and Progress, claimants on new-style jobseeker’s allowance are able to undertake a full-time course of non-advanced study or training—not above level 3—for up to eight weeks if work coaches identify a skills gap and are satisfied that it will improve the claimant’s prospects of moving into work more quickly.
The time spent on the course can be deducted from the hours of work search that the claimant is expected to undertake. Claimants on new-style employment and support allowance can already receive benefits while in education, whether full or part-time study, as long as they satisfy the eligibility conditions.
The DWP is monitoring the impact of Train and Progress, with the review date due in April, and will make decisions on continuing based on the evidence available. This will include the potential to extend the legacy benefit groups that have not transitioned to UC.
New claims for legacy benefits are no longer possible, so this is a diminishing case load. Existing claimants can still study part time as long as they meet their conditionality requirements and are willing to give up their study for employment, which they have agreed to look for.
The core objective of universal credit and other working-age benefits is to support claimants to enter work where appropriate, earn more or prepare for work in the future. There is an expectation that people who are able to look for work or prepare for work do so as a condition of receiving their benefit. We therefore do not think it is necessary or appropriate to change eligibility criteria to benefits for those who enrol on a course, so the clause should not stand part of the Bill.
Mr Perkins
It is vital that the cross-party support in the House of Lords on ensuring that those in receipt of universal credit are not penalised for undergoing level 3 training is upheld in the Bill.
What the Minister just said, however, somewhat undermines other things that we have heard from him and other members of the Government about the importance of skills training and education. Much of the Government’s approach to skills, which we support, has been about the importance of qualifications and apprenticeships being proper qualifications that are given depth and that develop people’s learning. For that purpose, apprenticeships are a minimum of one year; level 3 qualifications are longer, and even level 2 apprenticeships are a minimum of one year.
It appears that the Government’s approach to universal credit is that those who are seeking to get themselves into the jobs market should be allowed to do very basic training of the sort I have seen on many excellent work programmes, but that if they want to develop the qualifications they would gain on a one-year course they will be unable to do so while claiming universal credit.
It is essential that those who are furthest from the labour market have every opportunity to find work.
Alex Burghart
What one-year courses is the hon. Gentleman thinking of where claimants may continue on universal credit while studying?
Mr Perkins
Apprenticeships are a one-year course. Many people might be on an apprenticeship and on universal credit. I have had the opportunity to see many courses that people are not on for longer than what the Minister said and face perhaps significant barriers to accessing the world of work. We have real concerns, which were shared by those in the other place, that rather than helping people to move from universal credit into work this programme will prevent them from doing so.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak for the first time in this important Committee under you, Mrs Miller.
One of the key points that we have seen is the move to online learning for many people, which would be time away from seeking work. Many of the modules last for a quarter, six months or a year. Does my hon. Friend agree that, under the clause, many people will feel uncertain about whether they can undergo training?
Mr Perkins
I absolutely do agree. Under the original drafting of the clause it was clear that to access universal credit people had to be on an approved course that took them towards the world of work. It fits in with the principles of universal credit, as we are led to understand them. Under the clause,
“the Secretary of State must review universal credit conditionality with a view to ensuring that adult learners who are—
(a) unemployed, and
(b) in receipt of universal credit, remain entitled to universal credit if they enrol on an approved course for a qualification which is deemed to support them to secure sustainable employment.”
The word “sustainable” is very important. The Government’s approach seems to be that it is better to get anyone off unemployment and into work in any capacity, even if it is only a few days of casual employment, than to allow them to take sustainable steps to develop skills and get a job on which they can rely in the long term. My hon. Friend, many Labour Members and possibly Conservative Members will have come across constituents who are bedevilled by unstable employment—a day here or a few days there—without anything on which they can rely in the long term to sustain their families financially. Sustainable employment that they can trust is vital.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
I shared many of the hon. Gentleman’s concerns so I went to the Department for Education to seek clarity. As I understand it, many of the things that he is suggesting are already possible. Under both the current system and the new proposals, if a job coach accepts that a qualification would help someone into work, that coach can already approve that qualification and allow someone to do that training instead of job seeking under the work-based requirements for universal credit. Someone can also do a part-time qualification outside of working hours and still receive universal credit. Does he accept that that is true and perhaps contradicts some of his comments?
The Chair
Before Mr Perkins responds, may I remind Members that an intervention is just that; if you want to make a speech, make a speech.
Mr Perkins
A very well made point, Mrs Miller.
I accept that what the hon. Gentleman describes may be true on some occasions. However, the way in which the Bill is drafted and the very fact that the Government seek to oppose it, means that many job coaches, and many learners, will think that the Government would prefer to get them off the dole and into any job, at any moment, rather than invest in their skills. I have met many people in a variety of projects who are employed by the private sector, social enterprise or Jobcentre Plus to support people into work whose absolute focus seems to be to get one person from one list on to another. I fear that the long-term contribution to that person and ensuring that their training and qualifications are sustainable—the purpose of the Lords amendment—is lost as a result.
The hon. Member for Mansfield appears to be saying that the principles of the Lords amendment are already in operation given how job coaches operate. If that is the case, what is the harm of including the amendment in the Bill? If those rights and opportunities already exist for people, I cannot see the point in the Government’s opposition to the amendment.
The noble peers saw the value in the amendment, which enjoyed cross-party support. It is disappointing that, by their attitude, the Government are continuing to create the impression that people on universal credit who have the audacity to invest in their skills rather than simply take the very first opportunity to get off the dole and into work, however unsustainable or unreliable, should be discouraged from that.
On Second Reading, I was struck by the contribution from the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous). He said:
“the Government have placed much emphasis both on the importance of making work pay and on the current high level of job vacancies. Unfortunately, many people are currently some distance from the workplace and are not able to take advantage of these opportunities. However, many of them would be able to do so if universal credit conditions were reformed so that they could more readily access education and training. With that in mind, I urge the Government to consider carefully the amendment tabled by the Lord Bishop of Durham.”—[Official Report, 15 November 2021; Vol. 703, c. 416.]
As I said at the time, the hon. Gentleman was absolutely right to say that.
Given the twin challenges of Brexit and covid, Ministers must do all that they can to ensure that those who are furthest from the labour market are able to retrain or upskill. It has never been more important to ensure that we make the best of every single person. We know that there are staff shortages and we can respond to that in two ways. We could say, “Well, we have got shortages in staff, so let’s just get people into those jobs and fill the gap with a body.” Or we could say, “Let’s make sure we upskill the people who are currently furthest from the labour market, so that they are able to make a sustainable, long-term contribution.” That is the approach adopted by the Labour party.
The Opposition believe that it is a travesty that people in receipt of universal credit can be penalised for taking up an opportunity that could help them move into sustainable employment. We understand that the Government want to prevent people from undertaking qualifications for the sake of it, but those in receipt of universal credit should be supported to undertake training that is deemed appropriate by their work coach, in line with the principles outlined in the Bill. I hope that Members recognise the importance of supporting the clause.
New clause 8 is designed to probe why the Government may be against people in receipt of other benefits developing their skills so that they get closer to the labour market. Many people who are on a variety of benefits, such as incapacity benefit and other legacy benefits, may be very nervous about losing their entitlements to them. We all know that it is much easier to be taken off those benefits than to be put back on them. With some patience, tolerance and support, those people would be able eventually to join the world of work. There is a false dichotomy between those who Jobcentre Plus says are ready to go into work and should be spending every hour of every day looking for a job and other people who the Government accept will never get into work. Instead, we should be supporting everyone, rather than threatening them. We tabled new clause 8 to understand for what reason the Government would be against people developing their skills in a manner that pushes them to the labour market, even if they are in receipt of benefits that do not prompt the immediate response from Government that they should be doing all that they can to find work. I commend the new clause and clause 17 to the Committee.
Matt Western
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Miller.
I support clause 17 and new clause 8, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield and me. The new clause relates to the universal credit conditionality clause that was inserted during Lords consideration of the Bill by the Lord Bishop of Durham and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle. It relates to the issues surrounding adult learners who are unemployed and in receipt of universal credit, who would remain entitled to that benefit within law if they were on an approved course.
To put it simply, the current welfare system actively discourages people from getting the skills that they need. A person loses their rights to receive unemployment benefits if they take an educational training course. Surely that cannot be right. The “Let them Learn” report from the Association of Colleges that was published recently highlights the great work of colleges with Jobcentre Pluses to support unemployed people into work. In fact, the Association of Colleges described the current system as “unjustifiable and incoherent”. Indeed, the principal of my local college wrote to me ahead of our consideration of the Bill to express her concern about the universal credit restrictions. She viewed them as causing barriers to retraining and upskilling. That cannot be right.
The truth is that unemployed people, or those in low-paid jobs, are the least likely to take out a loan for fear of risking greater indebtedness and poverty for themselves and their families. As someone who in the course of their career did courses at evening classes, I know that access to such courses is really important. However, if someone cannot afford to get to them, they simply will not take them up. The truth is that this will impact far more on certain groups than on others. We know that 53% of those on universal credit are women. We know that, as of July 2021, 30% of claimants were aged 16 to 29; 40% of people on universal credit are working.
How can those workers justify taking a cut in their monthly pay and finding time to reskill? Indeed, the Department for Education’s impact assessment reveals that the cost of study is the greatest barrier to further study. That is why we propose new clause 8 and will vote against the Government. We believe that the clause introduced by the Bishop of Durham and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle should be in the Bill.
Alex Burghart
We believe that it is important that the welfare system helps people to get into work as quickly as possible, but we are not blind to the fact that some people will need or desire additional training. I referred to the flexibilities we have introduced to allow people to do bootcamps—a very productive way of reskilling at speed. On my visits to Salford, Bedford and Doncaster I met people who had been referred by their work coaches and were acquiring new skills that would often lead them into new professions.
Similarly, as the hon. Member for Chesterfield mentioned, it is possible for people to be on apprenticeships while claiming universal credit if their pay is low enough, and courses for the new lifetime skills guarantee that the Prime Minister made will often be available to people who are on universal credit.
We have shown that the system is capable of flexibility. We do not believe that people ought to be able to claim benefit while on long courses. However, there are opportunities to skill up, move into work and still receive some protection from universal credit.
Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 50, page 22, line 6, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Secretary of State must also prepare and publish a review of student maintenance entitlements.”
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to review the maintenance support available to further education students and courses.
The amendment ensures that those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds have the opportunity to undertake level 3 qualifications in order to get a job or gain higher-paid qualifications.
The success of the lifetime skills guarantee depends on those who need training or upskilling being able to take up the opportunity. In his speech at Exeter college, the Prime Minister outlined, in a great fanfare, his intention—in the midst of the pandemic—that people should be able to retrain. It was clear that he appeared to have those people in mind, but little attention has been paid to how they will take up the offer if they cannot afford to put food on the table while they are studying.
We believe that it flies in the face of reason not to set out during the passage of the Bill maintenance support for those from marginalised groups and those furthest from the labour market. I believe that the Government are minded to say that they will respond in due course, but as the lifetime skills guarantee will not be fully implemented until 2023, which signals the Government’s too little, too late approach to the skills challenge, we believe that it makes sense to announce maintenance support in the Bill, which is why we tabled amendment 50.
Alex Burghart
Amendment 50 would require the Secretary of State to publish a review of student maintenance entitlements, to be conducted annually, I believe. We agree wholeheartedly with the importance of ensuring students are supported to enable them to succeed in their studies. The Government’s ambition for the lifelong loan entitlement is to help those studying at higher levels to have the opportunity to choose the best course or modules based on their learning needs, rather than just choosing the funding system that is most advantageous for them.
In our forthcoming consultation on the LLE, we are seeking to understand better the barriers that learners might face in accessing it, and how the availability of maintenance loans and other forms of support could help. It is crucial that we consider the importance of creating a sustainable student finance system.
Rachel Hopkins
I thank the Minister for taking my intervention. In the earlier part of the debate, when the Minister was not in place, we were not able to consider Sharia-compliant loans. Will the Minister please include that in his comments?
Alex Burghart
I believe we will come later in the debate to another clause that treats the subject of Sharia, and I will be happy to address the hon. Lady’s point then. It is something that the Government will consider.
It is crucial to consider the importance of creating a sustainable student finance system, alongside what will be necessary to ensure that the Government can offer all eligible students the opportunity to study. However, as with clause 18, imposing an annual reporting requirement would create an unnecessary burden upon Government and the taxpayer. The student support regulations are updated annually, as it is, providing the Government with a regular opportunity to introduce improvements. In addition, introducing a review requirement before the maintenance policy is finalised would be untimely, and would pre-empt the outcome of the LLE consultation.
The Bill already provides the necessary powers for maintenance support to be introduced as part of the LLE, if the decision taken is that it should, following the consultation. Advanced learner loans are currently available in further education. Learner support funds are available for adult learners aged 19 and over, and there are bursaries of up to £1,200 a year for students in specific vulnerable groups, such as care leavers. With that in mind, and given that the amendment is burdensome, pre-emptive and unnecessary, we cannot support it.
Matt Western
I rise to speak in favour of amendment 50, which would require the Secretary of State to review maintenance support available to further education students and courses. The Augar review recommended that student maintenance should be extended to cover students in further education as well as higher education. That was one of the important findings in that review. We have been waiting two and a half years for some outcome from the Government, which I hope we will get soon.
The Association of Colleges reminds us in its briefing that many adults will be unable to take up lifelong learning opportunities, because there is no support for living costs when taking a course at that level. Such people will be prevented from transforming their life chances. The Minister will be aware that the Government’s own impact assessment reveals that one of the main barriers to adult learners is the cost of study, including living costs.
Right across the higher and further education landscape, there are calls from many, including the Open University, for an extension of maintenance support to FE students. The Welsh model is interesting: the Welsh Government introduced reforms to tackle that issue by extending maintenance support including, importantly, means-tested grants to all students, regardless of mode of study, while maintaining low tuition fees for part-time study.
Elsewhere, in the written evidence, Birkbeck University argued for a maintenance grant to prevent further hurdles to taking up study. Universities UK states:
“We would…welcome further details on the government’s plans for introducing maintenance support for individuals studying through the”
lifelong learning entitlement
“and, specifically, what would the minimum intensity of study be for individuals to be eligible for maintenance loans.”
Those factors are important. My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish talked about his own experience the other day. I was lucky enough to go to university many decades ago—
Matt Western
It is hard to believe. The Minister is right on that point but, as a third child, I would not have been able to go were it not for the maintenance grant, back in those days. That is why being given a maintenance grant is very much a mobilising and enabling part of the provision of education, to allow young people the chance to study. Since the removal of the EMA—education maintenance allowance—many have not been able to access education, because they just cannot afford to take the courses without some form of maintenance support.
For those reasons, we tabled the amendment. I very much hope that everyone in Committee will support it.
Mr Perkins
Apologies for the slight delay, Mrs Miller, I was still musing on how long ago it was that my hon. Friend went to university. It was quite a shock. The points he made are important. For that reason, we believe the amendment has merit. We have heard what the Government have said. We will get the opportunity to vote on clause stand part, so we look forward to supporting it. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
The Government agree that many learners need to access courses in a more flexible way to fit their study around work, family and personal commitments, and to retrain as their circumstances and the economy change.
Existing equivalent or lower qualification rules, however, were designed to help maintain a sustainable system. As such, we are designing the lifelong loan entitlement not only to support students pursuing higher and further education flexibly, but to share the costs fairly. We want the lifelong loan entitlement to provide value for money to students, the education sector and the taxpayer.
The complexity of that balance and the transformative nature of the LLE is one of many reasons why we intend to consult on its detail and scope before legislating on eligibility. It is crucial that careful consideration of the needs of providers, learners and stakeholders informs our final policy design, and that we do not pre-empt the consultation’s findings; however, introducing an ongoing obligation to report annually on eligibility before the policy detail is yet finalised may prejudice the outcome of the consultation, as it could indicate a future path for ELQ rules before there has been a chance for open consultation to happen.
Beyond that, the Government believe that a yearly reporting duty in perpetuity would be an undue and disproportionate burden at this stage. Placing such a duty in primary legislation would be restrictive and out of kilter with prior similar legislation passed by Parliament on student finance. For example, the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 gave significant powers to the Secretary of State over student finance, with much of the detail of the policy covered in a complex suite of regulations, including eligibility, repayments and fee limits to name but a few.
It would be disproportionate to put a requirement to report in primary legislation when the system is already under continuous review and subject to frequent amendment. Previously, much of the detail on how the system works has been set out in secondary legislation, with necessary monitoring and review undertaken only after changes have been implemented and had time to embed. The Government will of course address plans for review and monitoring as we work towards the roll-out of the lifelong loan entitlement from 2025 and post implementation. I therefore believe that the clause should be removed from the Bill.
Mr Perkins
It is regrettable that the Government will seek to remove clause 18 from the Bill. It was introduced by the Lords for entirely the right reasons. On many occasions we have all seen the Government having to be dragged to the House in order to answer for their performance. The country also faces significant skills challenges. Who would have known a year ago that we would have spent so much of the last few months talking about the heavy goods vehicle driver crisis? Such things arise suddenly.
Given the dynamic state of skills policy—particularly, at the moment, legislatively but also in terms of employers’ ability to access skills—we think that clause 18 is proportionate. It requires the Secretary of State purely to prepare and publish a report on the impact on the overall level of skills in England and Wales of the rules regarding the eligibility for funding of those undertaking further or higher education courses. There is a lot of scope within that. The level of tuition fees in this country is so disproportionate to any other nation around the world, or any of the other major competitor nations in Europe, that inevitably it pushes students to access the courses that will lead them towards the jobs that pay the most.
There are many crucial public servants in this country who might not end up earning king’s ransoms but are performing roles of incredible importance to our country. A regular review of funding and maintenance support in the context of the level of skills is of real value. As a result of that review, the Government might think about being more flexible on tuition fees for certain courses, or taking specific steps to support learners in a variety of areas to study for the specific skills that the Government think will be of most use to our country and economy, and providing incentives for them to do so.
There are all kinds of different professions for which the Government rack their brains about how they can get more people to study. Each year we hear of courses in medical environments, for example, where thousands of places go unutilised. Such a review could push the Government to take the steps required to ensure that the country addresses those areas of skill shortages. It was a sensible amendment by their lordships, and it is regrettable that that very minimal commitment expected of the Secretary of State should be too much for the Government.
Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
I beg to move amendment 23, in clause 19, page 22, line 34, leave out subsection (3).
This amendment leaves out clause 19(3) of the Bill (regulations about courses of initial teacher training for further education to include provision about special educational needs awareness training), which was inserted at Lords Report.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 2—Lifelong learning: special educational needs—
“When exercising functions under this Act, the Secretary of State must ensure that providers of further education are required to include special educational needs awareness training to all teaching staff to ensure that all staff are able to identify and adequately support those students who have special educational needs.”
This new clause would place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that there is adequate special educational needs training for teachers of students in further education.
Alex Burghart
We can all agree that it is vital for teachers to be trained to identify and respond to the needs of all their learners. That must include those with special educational needs and disabilities. However, the Government do not prescribe the content of further education initial teacher training. We believe that experts from the sector are best placed to design training programmes to meet the needs of learners, using a clear occupational standard as their benchmark.
The new occupational standard for FE teaching, published in September, has been developed by representatives from the sector who themselves work alongside and employ teachers. The standard clearly articulates the key knowledge, skills and behaviour that FE teachers must demonstrate. That includes an explicit requirement to actively promote equality of opportunity and inclusion by responding to the needs of all students. We believe that the standard is the right place to set out the expectations of teachers and what their training should cover, and that view is shared by sector experts themselves.
The Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers has stated that the new occupational standard for teachers in the FE sector
“provides an appropriate framework for the design and delivery of FE initial teacher training programmes—including the new qualification that UCET and other sector groups are currently helping to develop”.
UCET is of the view that
“the standard and qualifications based on it will help to ensure that all new FE teachers are properly equipped to recognise and respond to the needs of their learners—including those with SEND”.
Furthermore, UCET has said:
“It is vital that providers of FE ITT should be able to use their expertise and judgement to tailor training programmes to the needs of trainees and learners within the framework provided by the occupational standard.”
It concludes that
“it would be unhelpful to remove this flexibility by mandating the content of FE ITT programmes in legislation.”
I believe that it is important that we listen to the voices of expertise in the sector and do not unduly tie their hands. We have been clear that we intend to make public funding available only to FE ITT programmes that meet the new occupational standard.
Clause 19(3) as drafted, although honourable in intent, is unhelpfully restrictive. It would require the Secretary of State, when making regulations for the first time under this power, to make provision relating to SEND awareness in FE ITT even if the regulations being made did not bear at all on the content of training programmes. This is, in our view, the wrong way to achieve the right aim.
I want to directly address new clause 2. The Government are already driving up the quality of teaching in further education and strengthening the professional development of the FE workforce. We provide significant funding for programmes to help to spread good, evidence-based practice in professional development. Examples are the T-level professional development offer, which integrates support for learners with SEND throughout its offer, and the FE professional development grant pilot. Making sure that teachers have access to high-quality training and professional development will ensure that learners, including those with SEND, receive the highest standard of teaching.
Our continuing professional development offer for teachers also includes provision delivered by the Education and Training Foundation. That training improves the capability and confidence of the FE workforce to identify and meet the needs of learners with SEND.
Ultimately, providers themselves must make decisions about what training is relevant and necessary for their teachers. That means that they can respond to the specific needs of their learners and those who teach them.
It is also important to note, outside professional development, that under the SEND code of practice there should be a named person with oversight of SEND provision in every college. Those people co-ordinate, support and contribute to the strategic and operational management of the college.
The Government are committed to ensuring that all learners, including those with SEND, are benefiting from outstanding teaching in the FE sector.
Mr Perkins
I rise to oppose Government amendment 23, and to discuss new clause 2, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle. I believe that clause 19 is an important clarification added to the Bill by the Lords. The Minister spoke passionately about the need for ensuring that those who attended ITT further education courses have awareness of special needs. However, it is precisely because of that that we believe clause 19 is sensible. Government amendment 23 removes clause 19(3), which ensures the duty for initial teacher training providers to provide special educational needs awareness training.
That is particularly important because a huge number of people, later in life, are identifying that they have learning difficulties, be that autism, attention deficit disorder, or Asperger’s syndrome. These were not picked up throughout their school career because there has been such a low level of awareness about such issues within much of the teaching profession.
We know that awareness of issues like autism has improved a great deal in recent years, but there are still many people going through our school system with other conditions, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and others. With access to the right support, teaching could have been provided that recognised their disability and enabled them to access the curriculum to the best of their ability. It would have also enabled them to understand themselves. That is a crucial point about special needs; we must help people to understand themselves. I have spoken to many people who say, “I always knew I was different, but I never knew what it was. It was only in my 20s or my 30s that I realised.” There is a family member of mine in their 40s who has recently identified having a disability of this kind.
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
I speak as someone with both dyslexia and dyspraxia; I was diagnosed when I was 12. Does the hon. Member agree that it is important to ensure that every single teacher—not just SEN specialists, but regular teachers—have a certain level of understanding of different types of disability, and that not all young people, or adults, process information in the same way?
Mr Perkins
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. That is precisely the value of this provision. It makes this not the responsibility of the special needs co-ordinator—who, if they get an opportunity to sit down with someone would have that professional awareness— but, instead, makes sure that people right across the sector are able to identify these needs. We would not expect every teacher to become a full SENCO expert, but it is about them having the awareness to identify that there may be issues that need to be given further consideration—that is what I think is of real value.
New clause 2 attempts to find a different way to deliver the same initiative as the one proposed by their noble lordships in clause 19, whose subsection (3) places a duty on teacher training providers to ensure that SEN training is part of their work. In new clause 2, the obligation is on all providers of FE colleges to ensure that all their staff have been provided with special needs awareness training. There are two different ways to deliver that training. It can be delivered at the point where someone is qualifying, or can be certified at the point where someone is employed. There is merit in either approach; simply to dismiss both approaches is really disappointing.
New clause 2 would place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that there was adequate special educational needs training for teachers of students in further education. Given the high number of students with special educational needs who access further or adult education, often as a second chance when they have had a negative experience of school, it is particularly crucial that trainee teachers in the sector have an awareness of the issues the students face.
We must remember that people within the further education sector are far more likely to have an identified special educational need than those in mainstream schooling. The sector needs this kind of awareness. The Department for Education’s own figures show that the percentage of pupils with a special educational need, but no education, health and care plan, has increased to 12.2%, continuing an upward trend.
Tom Hunt
As the hon. Member will know, it is important to provide support at that stage, but it is also important to start as early as possible. What are his views on the ten-minute rule Bill being introduced today by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), which would require the assessment of every primary school kid for dyslexia, and whether that should be extended to dyspraxia?
The Chair
I am sure Mr Perkins will draw that comment back to the subject of the debate here today, as opposed to what might be going on elsewhere.
Mr Perkins
I am fiercely conscious of that point, Mrs Miller. I take the restriction that has been issued by the Chair, but would say briefly that there is real value in the hon. Gentleman’s point about identifying issues as early as possible—I think every one of us would appreciate that point. But, accepting that that has not happened, it is crucial to ensure that people at every level in the further education environment understand and are aware of the issues.
The new clause proposed by the noble Lords has real value, and I urge the Government to consider ensuring in the Bill that people across our FE sector have that awareness. The Minister has said there may be many people in that environment who do not have the need to have that awareness. As I have laid out, it is my view that it should be the responsibility of everyone to ensure that they are able to identify various kinds of special need and know how best to support learners with special needs in all kinds of environments.
Matt Western
I rise to speak in favour of new clause 2 and against Government amendment 23. I have various concerns with clause 19 and where the Government seem to be going with the review on initial teacher training, including the market review that the Government are consulting on and where it seems to be heading. It would be easy to conclude that they are seeking to centralise control of how teacher training is being delivered and to move away from the diverse approach that we currently enjoy. I have real concerns about what clause 19 proposes, and specifically what the Government propose with amendment 23.
Alex Burghart
We fully understand the sentiment behind the changes that the Lords and the Opposition are trying to make, but we disagree with the way that they are going about them. We think that the occupational standard is the best place to contain such provisions and that the occupational standard is best owned by the profession itself. We believe that the profession ought to hold the ring on such matters. We do not want to set a precedent that every detail of initial teacher training should be set out in primary legislation. For that reason, we are acting as we are.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Alex Burghart
It is important that the further education sector has enough suitably trained teachers to deliver the high-quality outcomes all learners deserve and that we all want to see. That is why a consistently high-quality initial teacher training offer in further education is needed. Initial teacher training in further education is not regulated, nor is there any primary legislation to allow for regulation. The clause gives the Secretary of State the flexibility to introduce measures through secondary legislation to secure or improve the quality of further education initial teacher training provision. The clause does not place requirements on trainee or practising FE teachers. To be clear, the Government have no intention of reintroducing mandatory qualifications for individual teachers in the FE sector.
We are already working with the sector to bring about the change and improvement needed. For example, we worked with a group of sector employers to support the development of a revised employer-led occupational standard for further education teaching. The clause sends a clear message that the provision of high-quality FE initial teacher training is vital, and therefore that secondary legislation should be introduced to complement and strengthen non-legislative measures where appropriate.
Mr Perkins
We do not oppose the clause. It is of real importance that initial teacher training for the further education sector is put on a statutory footing. We think that this is of particular importance given the scope and scale of the sector, and that many people in FE—probably more than in any other academic establishment—move directly into lecturing from the workplace. There has often been a two-way path between people in all kinds of different vocational environments. For example, mechanics, plumbers and painter-decorators may sometimes practise their chosen trade and at other times move into the further education sector. For that reason, it is important that the best standards of training for those teachers is in place, so we welcome the Government’s putting this on a statutory footing.
Obviously, it remains a regret that clause 19(3) has been deleted. We will continue to press the Government to ensure that, although that provision has been removed from the Bill, there is a real commitment to ensuring a high standard of awareness of special educational needs. On that basis, we will not oppose the clause.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 19, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 20
Office for Students: power to assess the quality of higher education by reference to student outcomes
Matt Western
I beg to move amendment 60, in clause 20, page 24, line 13, at end insert—
“(5A) When measuring student outcomes under subsection (5), the OfS must take account of mitigating circumstances, such as the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 56, in clause 20, page 24, line 16, at end insert—
“(6A) The OfS must consult the higher education sector before determining a minimum level in relation to a measure of student outcomes.”.
This amendment requires the OfS to consult the higher education sector before determining minimum levels.
Amendment 57, in clause 20, page 24, line 17, leave out “not”.
This amendment requires the OfS to determine and publish different levels to reflect differences in student characteristics, different institutions or types of institution, different subjects or courses, or any other such factor.
Amendment 58, in clause 20, page 24, line 23, leave out “or subject being studied”.
This amendment is intended to probe the OfS’s powers of intervention at subject level.
Amendment 55, in clause 20, page 24, line 24, at end insert—
“(7A) When making decisions of a strategic nature in relation to a measure of student outcomes, the OfS must have due regard to the potential impact on the participation in higher education of students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.”.
This amendment seeks to ensure that the OfS’s measure of student outcomes does not jeopardise widening participation for students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.
Amendment 59, in clause 20, page 24, line 28, at end insert—
“(8A) The OfS must work together with the devolved authorities to minimise the potential for different assessments of the quality of higher education with a view to protecting the United Kingdom’s higher education sectors’ international reputation.”.
This amendment probes the impact that moving the English higher education sector out of line with the UK Quality Code will have upon the coherence and consistency of UK quality assessment and the UK’s HE sectors’ international standing.
Matt Western
It is a pleasure to be able to give my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield a bit of a break this morning, given that he has been doing so much hard work in the past hour or so. The amendments essentially relate to the role of the Office for Students. I have been in my role a short time—slightly longer than the Minister—but I have to say that I have some reservations about what the Office for Students is doing presently. I understand its remit and purpose, but I am not sure what direction it seems to be taking us in. That direction comes from its leadership. It is a shame that the chief executive is standing down. We need more continuity there, and I await the appointment of her replacement with great interest.
We have tabled several amendments. Amendment 60 would require the Office for Students to bear in mind mitigating measures—for example, the past 22 months of the covid-19 pandemic and the impact it has had on students and therefore on outcomes. When assessing quality, it is important that quality is understood in the context of such factors. In the case of the past two years, there has clearly been a huge impact on students and their ability to learn, despite the best efforts of lecturers and the teaching profession to deliver as much as possible as well as possible in really challenging circumstances, whether face to face or mostly online. So much of the normal teaching framework has been greatly challenged.
The most recent pilot of the student covid insight survey showed that students’ experience has changed dramatically because of coronavirus. On the academic experience, 29% of students reported being dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their experience in the first term. Statistics from the Library highlight employment levels for those aged 16 to 24; I am not talking about outcomes. It is easy to look at what has happened to employment as an obvious measure of outcome, but employment levels have fallen 9%, which has clearly had a huge impact on the student outcome as a result of the national crisis.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has also found that the impact of the pandemic has been very likely to disrupt the career progression of those in the early stages, with many graduates potentially delaying their entry to the labour market by staying in education. Research by jobs website Milkround provides us with further evidence. It shows that, compared with the typical 60%, just 18% of graduates are securing jobs this year—a third of the figure we would normally expect.
The purpose of the amendment is to identify and recognise the need to establish a link between what we might call force majeure events such as the pandemic and ensuring that the OfS is more flexible when considering student outcomes. It cannot be a static metric. That point is echoed by a significant representative body for the higher education sector, Universities UK, which states:
“Employment outcomes will also be impacted by national and local economic conditions.”
It is important that the OfS bears that in mind in any framework that it establishes for outcomes.
Amendment 56 has been tabled because we want to see true and substantive consultation with the higher education sector before the outcomes are defined. The Government should talk to the Universities UK representative body, which has been exploring the development of a framework in England for an institutional programme and course review process centred on best practice. Given that Universities UK represents 140 institutions, collaborating with them and exploring the work that already exists would be a sensible start for the Government to focus on. Universities UK also says that it is “unclear whether the baselines” of minimum assessment of standards
“will be subject to thorough consultation.”
I hope the Government will start a consultation programme with all the representative bodies to understand how they may structure student outcomes.
Alex Burghart
I rise to speak to this monster group of amendments: 60, 57, 56, 58, 55 and 59.
Amendment 60 would add to the power in clause 20 an obligation on the Office for Students to assess and consider mitigating circumstances such as the pandemic. The OfS is already required to take into account wider factors when assessing the performance of providers. It has a general duty to have regard to the need to promote equality and opportunity and is subject to the public sector equality duty. It also has a public law obligation to take all material factors into account when reaching a decision.
The OfS will therefore consider a range of different contextual factors that may explain the reasons for a provider’s performance before reaching any final judgment. For example, this may include factors such as the relative proportions of students from disadvantaged or under-represented backgrounds. This could also include information from the provider about the actions it has taken, or plans to take, to improve quality, and external factors that may be outside a provider’s control such as the pandemic.
The OfS has previously produced guidance on how it expects providers to comply with the quality and standards-related registration conditions in the light of the pandemic. It is well aware that particular circumstances may be in play at a particular time, including the disruption caused by the covid-19 pandemic.
Amendment 57 would leave out the word “not” and in doing so completely reverse the purpose of this clause. Students would be expected to accept that they might achieve different outcomes—and, in some cases, lower outcomes—depending on their background, which risks entrenching disadvantage in the system. That cannot be right. Every student, regardless of their background, has a right to expect the same minimum level of quality that is likely to improve their prospects in life. That is why we included the provision in this clause to make clear that there is no mandate on the OfS to benchmark the minimum levels of standards it sets based on factors such as particular student characteristics. The OfS will none the less continue to consider appropriate contexts, including student characteristics, and make well-rounded judgments when assessing individual providers.
Amendment 56 would require the OfS to consult before determining minimum levels of student outcomes. I reassure the Committee that, under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, the OfS already has a statutory duty to consult before publishing any revised version of its regulatory framework, including on quality measures. In relation to student outcomes specifically, it has already undergone one round of consultation, while a further consultation on specific outcome levels and how the OfS will take wider context into account will be published early next year. The amendment is therefore unnecessary.
Amendment 58 suggests that the OfS may be required to determine different expected outcome levels by reference to each subject, which would be inappropriate. Requiring the OfS to determine different minimum outcome levels for different subjects would mean that students studying certain subjects would be expected to accept different and, in some cases, lower outcomes than if they had chosen a different subject. All students should expect that minimum levels of continuation and completion rates, as well as the proportion of students that achieve employment commensurate with their qualifications, will be the same for all subjects.
Amendment 55 would require that the OfS has regard to widening participation for disadvantaged and under-represented groups.However, I assure the Committee that the OfS already has to take due regard of the impact of its decisions on disadvantaged and under-represented groups. The minimum expected levels of student outcomes will form only part of the overall context the OfS takes into account as it makes rounded judgments. When itexercises any function, it must, under section 2 of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, have regard to the need to promote equality of opportunity in connection with access to and participation in higher education, and that duty applies when the OfS looks at how disadvantaged students and traditionally under-represented groups are supported and what they go on to achieve. It includes access, successful participation, outcomes and progression to employment or further study. The OfS has a public law obligation to consider relevant wider factors, which could include, amongst other things, the characteristics of a provider’s students, where appropriate.
Amendment 59 would require the OfS to work with devolved Administrations to minimise different assessments of higher education quality. HE is a devolved matter, and it is right that each Administration should be free to drive up quality in the way they think best. I understand that there is a concern about the removal of direct reference to the UK quality code from the guidance in the OfS’s regulatory framework and its impact on the reputation of the UK’s higher education sector, but the OfS has already made clear that its regulatory requirements would continue to cover the issues in the expectations and core practices of the quality code, which will remain an important feature of the regulatory framework. The OfS is not proposing to abolish the UK quality code—indeed, it has no power to do so. The code will continue to be important in the sector and providers will still be able to use it.
I would like to take this opportunity to announce the Government’s intention to table an amendment on Report that will give the OfS an explicit power to publish information about its compliance and enforcement functions, in particular when investigating higher education providers for potential breaches of registration conditions, which will give the OfS protection from defamation claims when it does so. That increased transparency will be in line with other regulators’ powers and protections, including appropriate safeguards.
Rachel Hopkins
I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington and the proposed amendments, in particular those including the requirement to consult the higher education sector before determining the standards. My constituency, Luton South, is home to the fantastic University of Bedfordshire, which takes many non-traditional students—for want of a better term. The majority of its students are older and may be working and studying additional qualifications to support their work. Many come from disadvantaged and under-represented groups. It is vital that we understand the difference that universities like the University of Bedfordshire make to those people’s lives when considering the clauses and the amendments proposed.
Matt Western
I thank the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South for their comments. Let me pick up on the points my hon. Friend just made. Educators and educationalists are concerned that these measures could lead to a reduction in opportunity and access, and that many could feel marginalised in the education process. I am not a specialist and have no background in education, but I understand that many schools have started to direct and encourage students to take certain GCSEs, to stay on to take A-level, BTECs or whatever. They may be prevented from doing so because of concern about the results achieved by that school or college, which could dissuade them.
It can never be known at the start what will happen to a student with the right sort of teaching and course. That education could bring alive their interest in a subject. I would underline the sense of caution that motivates the amendments. The Government need to tread incredibly carefully, for fear of reducing access and participation in our education sector. I appreciate that you may wish to restrict the number of amendments put to a vote, Mrs Miller, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment proposed: 56, in clause 20, page 24, line 16, at end insert—
‘(6A) The OfS must consult the higher education sector before determining a minimum level in relation to a measure of student outcomes.”—(Matt Western.)
This amendment requires the OfS to consult the higher education sector before determining minimum levels.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Alex Burghart
Clause 20 clarifies the provisions set out in section 23 of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, known as HERA, which relate to the assessment of the quality of higher education provided by a registered provider. Section 23 of HERA currently places no restrictions or stipulations on how the Office for Students might assess quality or standards. Clause 20 provides some much-needed clarity. It puts beyond doubt the OfS’s ability both to determine minimum expected levels of student outcomes and to take those into account alongside many other factors when it makes its overall and well-rounded assessment of quality. It also makes clear that if outcome measures are to be used, the outcomes can be any the OfS considers appropriate.
The OfS looks at important indicators of high-quality higher education that are hugely valuable to students. They may include student continuation and completion rates and progression of graduates to professional or skilled employment or further study. The OfS is already regulating on that basis. The Government believe strongly that every student, regardless of background, has a right to expect the same minimum level of quality and the same opportunities to go on to achieve successful outcomes. Students from underrepresented groups should not be expected to accept lower quality, including poorer outcomes, than other students. That is why the clause also makes clear that there is no mandate on the OfS to benchmark the minimum levels of standards it sets based on factors such as particular student characteristics. The use of minimum levels for student outcomes is not and will not be a blunt instrument that relies only on data.
Absolute outcomes are only one aspect of a provider’s performance. To make a well-rounded judgment on a provider’s absolute performance, the OfS will consider a higher education provider’s appropriate context before determining whether a registration condition has been met. Alongside that work on baselines, the new Director for Fair Access is tasked with rewriting national targets to focus on social mobility and ensuring that higher education providers rewrite their access and participation plans. New and ambitious targets will be set to raise standards in schools, reduce drop-out rates at university and improve progression into high-paid, high-skilled jobs.
Clause 20 is an important element of the Bill because it serves to ensure that higher education provision delivers quality for all students, the taxpayer and the economy.
Matt Western
I do not have any further points to make and will not press any other amendments.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 20 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 21
List of relevant providers
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 29, in clause 21, page 25, line 10, at end insert—
‘(aa) for mayoral combined authorities or other authorities as defined by the Secretary of State, to keep a list of relevant education or training providers who meet the conditions specified by the authority in respect of that education or training;’.
The effect of this amendment is that mayoral combined authorities or other authorities as defined by the Secretary of State will be able to establish a list of their own relevant education or training providers.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 30, in clause 21, page 26, line 12, at end insert ‘including mayoral combined authorities or other funding authorities.’
This amendment is consequential on Amendment 29.
Amendment 31, in clause 22, page 27, line 8, after ‘(a)’ insert ‘or (b)’.
This amendment is consequential on Amendment 30.
Mr Perkins
It is a great pleasure to move the amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford), my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington and myself. The amendments concern the Government’s plans to have a list of preferred providers. What could go wrong with this Government and a list of preferred providers, I hear hon. Members ask? There have been reasons to question the Government’s record when it comes to relevant providers. The particular concern that the hon. Member for Bury South and I, and others, have is that when it comes to the Secretary of State and his Whitehall colleagues providing a list of providers to be considered appropriate by metro Mayors and combined authorities in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds or anywhere else, important local providers will be missed out.
The amendment was tabled because of those local providers, both private sector providers and social enterprises, which might not have the huge ability to do detailed tenders but are important and proven in many local areas. There is a real concern in Manchester from the metro Mayor, which I suspect is where the interest of the hon. Member for Bury South comes from, and in other areas, that their importance should be recognised.
The amendment says that provision should be made,
“for mayoral combined authorities or other authorities as defined by the Secretary of State, to keep a list of relevant education or training providers who meet the conditions specified by the authority in respect of that education or training”.
Amendment 30 would add,
“including mayoral combined authorities or other funding authorities”,
to clause 21. It is really important that those local providers can be utilised by local combined authorities and metro Mayors.
During the Bill’s stages, there has been much talk about devolution and the importance of local decision making, but at every turn, we see the opposite—the Secretary of State is clawing back power for himself. In this case, without the amendment, that would be at the expense of local decision making, because if the mayoral combined authority was in a position to say, “We’ve worked really closely with a provider,” but for whatever reason, the provider was not on the Secretary of State’s list, it could be missed out.
The amendment seeks to ensure that the Government, who once passionately championed devolution, do not allow Whitehall decision makers to prevent the continuation of local arrangements and relationships that are delivering for local communities. As I said, there is concern that the Secretary of State’s list of relevant providers will exclude local providers that may not offer the scale and scope of national providers but are proven and have a successful track record in local areas. I have been to Manchester and discussed in great detail the strong relationship that the Mayor’s office has established with local small and medium-sized enterprises and social enterprises that are doing great work locally.
It sometimes feels as though the Government have a love affair with major firms that promise them the world. We fear that smaller providers will inevitably be missed off the Secretary of State’s list and that local learners and local businesses will be the biggest losers. It is vital that mayoral combined authorities, and other authorities that have local expertise, can continue those agreements with existing providers and that there is no break in provision where funding contracts are in place for adult education. Again, it feels as though the clause seeks to centralise power in the hands of the Secretary of State without paying due consideration to local representation, which is why I am keen to support amendment 29.
Alex Burghart
The amendments aim to give mayoral combined authorities and other authorities the power to keep their own lists of relevant education or training providers, specify their own conditions and exercise discretion about whether certain conditions have been met by relevant providers. The list of post-16 education and training providers that can be established under the powers in the clause aims to put in place guiding principles for a coherent and consistent scheme to protect learners in the case of provider failure. This important, specific point is made in subsection (5), which says:
“A condition may be specified in regulations under subsection (1)(a) only where the Secretary of State considers that specifying the condition in relation to a relevant provider may assist in preventing, or mitigating the adverse effects of, a disorderly cessation in the provision of education or training by the relevant provider.”
The whole clause is there to prevent circumstances in which providers crash out of the market and leave those in training with nowhere to go.
Mr Perkins
The Minister has a tendency to sit down rather abruptly before he has had the opportunity to respond to things that have been raised, so I just wanted to catch him at this moment. Will he explain what about subsection (5) in any way secures the quality and robustness of those providers? Is it his view that the Secretary of State’s list will somehow ensure the finances or quality of that provider? What assurances can he give the hon. Member for Bury South and myself, and all those who have those local relationships, that those local relationships will not be the victim of this desire for consistency?
Alex Burghart
The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. If he looks at subsection (7)(b), he will see that one key thing we seek—this is relevant to the point I am making regarding preventing provider failure—is providers having relevant insurance cover, which we might consider through regulations. There have been a number of cases in the past where some providers have not had that, and there has been a real risk of a break in the provision given to certain students. We do not want to exclude small, local providers of the type he mentions at all. If ever it was felt that the Government were doing that, I draw his attention to subsection (10)(d), which says that an appeals process will be set out in regulations. I hope he can take some comfort from that.
Members will note written evidence from Learning Curve Group, an independent training provider, stating:
“Learning Curve Group welcomes the Government’s proposal…to include a register of providers who meet certain conditions as we believe this will increase overall quality and ensure high standards.”
We intend to work closely and collaboratively with mayoral combined authorities and other funding authorities on the creation of the list and the conditions that will apply. We will continue to engage with MCAs in designing the conditions and operation of the list. Through collaboration, we can ensure that we set a high bar for all providers for protecting learner interests. We certainly value the expertise and input that MCAs will have in this. As I said last week, we recognise the importance of the work of MCAs and their vital work in supporting local communities.
Mr Perkins
Subsection (7)(b) relates to the relevant provider having insurance cover. Will the Minister confirm whether that means insurance cover in the context of employer liability in the event of an apprentice or other adult learner being injured, or is it insurance cover in the event of the failure of the business and additional costs that might be attached to that? Will he clarify what the clause refers to?
Alex Burghart
It is the latter—in the case of business failure. The Bill sets out that we will consult on the conditions and provisions for being on the list prior to making the first set of regulations, to help ensure that those conditions manage and mitigate the risk of disorderly exit. That consultation will allow us to take into account fully the views of those affected by the scheme, including MCAs.
Mr Perkins
The Opposition are not opposed to clause 21 standing part, but there is a real danger that the way it is drafted will create much greater bureaucratic responsibilities. Inevitably, the result is going to be smaller providers not ending up on that list, either because they consider that their relatively small provision means that the Government’s requirements make it prohibitive for them to carry on, or because they get missed, as inevitably happens when dozens of local lists are turned into one major one.
We are not opposed to the Government introducing conditions and having standards and the register, but there is a real danger that the concerns raised by the hon. Member for Bury South and a number of different combined authorities will mean that really important local relationships will end up falling by the wayside and that provision may end up getting lost. We will press amendment 29 to a vote. Amendments 30 and 31 are conditional on amendment 29.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [ Lords ] (Sixth sitting)
Tuesday 7th December 2021
(2 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 7 December 2021 - (7 Dec 2021)
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 5 / Noes: 10 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 10 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 5 / Noes: 10 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 5 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 5 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 5 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 5 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 5 / Noes: 9 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Chair
A point of order was raised this morning about there not being a debate on new clauses 1 and 4 at the beginning of proceedings today. I am happy to cover the new clauses if the Government and Opposition want that. Although they could have been debated at the time, and Opposition Members did not take the opportunity to do so, out of a sense of fairness this is a way of getting through this slight wrinkle.
Clause 21
List of relevant providers
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
What a pleasure it is to reach our sixth and final sitting on this important Bill.
Clause 21 will allow the Government to introduce a list of post-16 education or training providers. To be on the list, providers will need to meet conditions that help to protect learners against the negative impacts of provider failure. It will also help to protect public funds by preventing or mitigating the risks of provider failure. Currently, there is a risk that the short-notice exit of a provider from education and training can significantly disrupt the experience of many young people and adults. This can be because of delays in finding a new provider and insufficient planning on what happens next in these circumstances. This clause focuses the operation of a list on the types of providers that the Department considers are most at risk of an unregulated and disorderly exit from provision—independent training providers.
While we value the role of ITPs in helping to provide a more diverse and innovative learning offer, it is not right that these types of providers should operate with less in-built protection for learners than other types of further education provider. Fundamentally, we want to protect learners and public funds if providers cease to provide education or training. Where other regulatory mechanisms are not in place, we want to ensure that there is a consistent set of requirements placed on providers to protect learners and public funds, even where the provision is funded by local commissioning bodies or through subcontracts from directly funded providers.
Where a provider is not directly funded by the Secretary of State—as can be the case with ITPs—the existing levers for the Secretary of State to protect learner interests are not as strong. Contractual conditions of funding to prevent disorderly exits may also not be consistent. The Bill will allow commonality and consistency across funding streams to mitigate provider failure risks. The clause also allows the Secretary of State to set out other matters in connection with the keeping of the list of post-16 education or training providers.
We intend to consult before deciding on the detail of the way in which the scheme will operate. The Secretary of State is required to do so before making the regulations that establish the list for the first time.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
May I record my thanks, Mrs Miller, for what you said a few moments ago about ensuring that new clauses 1 and 4 may be debated? I appreciate your flexibility.
We do not intend to divide the Committee on this subject, but I re-emphasise the point that I made in the discussion on the amendment. I entirely appreciate what the Minister says about the need to ensure protection for learners, but a small number of providers have a long track record of providing a small amount of provision that is none the less important in certain sectors and geographies. If this becomes a bureaucratic or economic minefield, they will simply withdraw from the sector, which will be the poorer for it. We received representations from the Manchester combined authority, which has a long history of working closely with smaller providers. It has real concerns that a national list will lead to smaller providers being missed out.
We do not intend to divide the Committee but we will continue to scrutinise the Government and ensure that the provisions put in place do not, as we fear they may if they are not carefully handled, exclude important, worthwhile providers from the list.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 21 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 22
Prohibitions on entering into funding arrangements with providers
Alex Burghart
I beg to move amendment 24, in clause 22, page 28, line 15, leave out from first “to” to “paid” in line 16 and insert “an agreement for the funding authority to provide funding to the provider includes a reference to an agreement or arrangements between the funding authority and the provider by virtue of which amounts can or must be”
This amendment makes clear that an agreement between the Secretary of State and an education provider that must be in place in order for student loans to be paid directly to the provider counts as “funding arrangements” for the purposes of clause 22. It also covers arrangements other than agreements.
Amendment 24 is a minor and technical amendment that clarifies that advanced learner loan funding routed through the Student Loans Company is in the scope of clause 22. This has always been the intention of clause 22(9), and this amendment is merely a technical adjustment to the drafting. It ensures that advanced learner loan funding arrangements are captured by the “funding arrangements” definition in clause 22. Without the amendment, clause 22 may not be adequately applied in relation to providers who receive advanced learner loan funding.
Mr Perkins
We appreciate that clarification.
Amendment 24 agreed to.
Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 22 is important in ensuring that a funding authority is prevented from entering funding arrangements with a provider that is not on the list. It also makes sure that the funding authority can take action to terminate funding arrangements in an orderly way should a provider cease to be on the list.
The short-notice exit of a provider from the provision of education or training can significantly disrupt the educational experience of young people and adults. The transfer of learners to another provider can take time, be extremely disruptive and increase the risk of learner disengagement. The provision of post-16 education or training is commissioned by various funding bodies and is often subcontracted. As a result, there is a wide variation in the range of obligations and requirements currently imposed on providers.
The provisions in the clause are intended to ensure that a consistent set of requirements is placed on providers and funding authorities to protect learners and public funds, even where the education or training is funded by local commissioning bodies or through subcontracts. The clause also sets out that a provider must not rely on anything in clause 22 as a reason for not carrying out existing obligations under a funding agreement. A funding authority could continue to enforce those obligations even if a provider was not on the list, as the contract would remain valid. This may be important to allow a provider to teach existing learners until they had completed their course where the risk posed by the provider could be managed.
The clause also includes the power for the Secretary of State to set out in regulations the particular characteristics of the funding arrangements that are subject to these funding controls. This is necessary so that the Department can ensure that the controls are applied proportionately. For example, de minimis requirements may be needed so that short-term and low-value arrangements for the provision of relevant education or training are not captured by the requirement for the particular provider to be on the list. The clause is essential in ensuring that there are certain restrictions and controls on the public funding of education or training providers in the scope of the list.
Mr Perkins
It is important to ensure that information is shared widely, not only with providers that might be outside mainstream education provision but with funding authorities such as mayoral or combined authorities, to ensure dialogue and so that smaller providers are not missed out.
The clause clarifies that providers must be approved and have an agreement in place for them to be allowed to have student loans paid directly. Building on the contribution I made in the debate on clause 21, it would be useful if the Minister clarified the steps the Government will take to ensure that only providers with quality offerings and financial stability and robustness receive direct payments and that these steps will not prevent quality, innovative smaller providers from accessing the important opportunities to attract new students.
Further to that, does the Minister anticipate that the extension of student finance will mean that a greater variety of private sector organisations will be able to receive student loan applications? I have met people in my constituency, and have written to his predecessor about other courses whose students have previously been excluded from getting student loans to access them, despite having a long track record of their students going into employment. To what extent does the Minister think the Bill will increase the number of learners who can get student loans for their courses, and how will he ensure that quality, innovative, smaller providers can access those opportunities?
Alex Burghart
The Government are fully aware that ITPs come in all shapes and sizes, and play an essential part in the skills ecosystem. We are very mindful that we do not want to drive good providers out of the market by creating a list. The sole purpose of the list is to ensure that all providers have in place provisions to ensure that they have contingency plans for their students should they go under. That is something that exists elsewhere in the skills space. We are extending it to ITPs, and intend to do so in such a way that will not create a bureaucratic overload. To the hon. Member’s point on student loans, it will very much depend on how the system evolves from this point.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 22, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 23
Funding arrangements: interpretation
Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 23 provides definitions for key terms in this part of the legislation relating to funding arrangements with post-16 educational training providers, and ensures that the correct legal person and funding arrangements that they are party to are in scope of the relevant obligations. The clause is essential to the interpretation of the list of post-16 educational providers, and should stand part of the Bill.
Clause 24 provides that the regulations for creating or keeping the list, altering the categories of education and training in scope of it, or amending primary legislation will be subject to the affirmative procedure. That means that they will be subject to an appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny over the use of those powers, and must be approved by both Houses prior to becoming law. The clause provides that the powers to make regulations in clauses 21 and 22 include the power to make supplementary, incidental, transitional or saving provision.
By way of example, once regulations have been made under clause 21, the Department may consider it necessary to amend statutory powers to provide financial assistance for relevant educational training so that they signpost the prohibitions that will apply, and which effectively constrain those financial assistance powers. One such power will be in section 2 of the Employment and Training Act 1973. Clause 24 will ensure that there is appropriate parliamentary scrutiny over the use of the powers, and should stand part of the Bill.
Mr Perkins
We appreciate that clarification. The clause and its subsections clarify the powers to make regulations under clauses 21 and 22, and we have no desire to oppose it.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 23 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 24 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 25
Provision of opportunities for education and skills development
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 53, in clause 25, page 30, line 17, leave out from “education” to end of line 17.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 54, in clause 25, page 30, line 17, leave out from “has” to “level.” and insert
“is earning below the Living Wage, as identified by the Living Wage Foundation.”
New clause 7—Level 3 qualifications provision—
“(1) Employer Representative Bodies may prescribe additional Level 3 qualifications, as part of the Lifetime Skills Guarantee.
(2) Additional Level 3 qualifications may be prescribed under subsection (1), in instances where the Employer Representative Body identifies a local need or skills shortage.”
Mr Perkins
The clause addresses the lifetime skills guarantee and the provision of opportunities for education and skills development. Subsection (1) says:
“Any person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to Level 3 supplied by an approved provider of further or technical education, if he or she has not already studied at that level.”
Amendment 53 would simply remove the final eleven words of the sentence. It is a probing amendment to test the reasons why the Government are seeking effectively to remove the word “guarantee” from the lifetime skills guarantee, and instead offer a significant limitation on the number of people who are able to study under it.
We think it is vital that people in low-paid employment have the chance to take additional level 3 qualifications to support them into better paid work or into new sectors. We also think it is crucial that people in industries or sectors that are diminishing have the opportunity to retrain. Substantial financial barriers would prevent them from accessing those courses.
When the Prime Minister made his speech announcing the lifetime skills guarantee in Exeter, he seemed to understand that point. The speech was all about the need for people to retrain and to be able to move from one sector where there were not going to be jobs in the future to jobs in other sectors. He wanted them to seize those opportunities. Unfortunately, the lifetime skills guarantee, which is going to take a long time to come into being anyhow, already has limitations.
Amendment 53 seeks to test the Government’s view on ensuring that more people are able to access a second qualification. Earlier, we gave the Government the opportunity to support a quite limited amendment on a second qualification.
I remind the Committee that a lifetime skills guarantee was in place for level 3 qualifications for everyone until 2013, when the former Chancellor George Osborne removed it. The decision to reintroduce this poor relation of that policy shows how the Government are learning at least some lessons from the mistakes they have made, but it lacks the ambition needed to reverse the failures of previous Government policy. More than 9 million jobs are excluded, many in sectors that have skills shortages and vacancies, such as tourism and hospitality.
I was speaking to a business in my constituency just this weekend that owns a number of establishments in the hospitality sector. It is desperate to attract members of staff into the sector. This is an organisation with a long track record of training up and developing members of staff, and ensuring that people make the best of their careers. It would be alarmed to hear that those kinds of opportunities are excluded from the lifetime skills guarantee. It is essential that the Government get this right. We hope they support our proposals.
Amendment 54 is an attempt to put on to a legal footing the promise made by the Secretary of State at the Association of Colleges conference in November. He said that
“from next April any adult in England who earns a yearly salary below the National Living Wage will also have the chance to take these high value Level 3 qualifications for free.”
That is precisely what the amendment seeks to do. It says that if anyone has a level 3 qualification and is earning below the living wage, as identified by the Living Wage Foundation, they would be able to take another level 3 qualification.
As we have laid out, we think that restricting the opportunities for students to take a second level 3 qualification is a huge missed opportunity. As the Committee has rejected our more ambitious amendment to allow all students the right to take a second level 3 qualification, we believe that the Government should at least be willing to support an amendment that supports what the Secretary of State has said.
New clause 7 relates to students wishing to do a level 3 qualification in an area where the local skills improvement plan has identified a local skills shortage. It would allow the local skills improvement plan to approve funding for a second level 3 qualification where local labour market shortages are identified.
The Bill contradicts itself. Reportedly, its aim is to ensure that skills policy is determined locally. New clause 7 would ensure that local skills improvement plans were able to identify that there was a skills need in the area and encourage people to retrain in that sector. Anyone who votes against that once again will seize power from local skills improvement plans and place it in the hands of the Secretary of State. We look forward to hearing what I imagine will be universal support for our amendments from hon. Members who are keen to support people in their constituencies.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
I rise briefly to support my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield in his amendments 53 and 54 and new clause 7. We have had this debate already in Committee and I still think that the Committee made the wrong decision to prevent learners having a second chance at a level 3 qualification for the reasons that I set out.
Those reasons were as valid the other day as they are now for these amendments, because we live in a dynamic economy where industries come and go. The industry that my town was historically dependent on, and that the town of my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South is equally famous for, is hatting. Those industries have pretty much died out, but the hatting industry made Denton famous. The Bowlers of bowler hat fame came from Denton, although they made their money at Lock & Co. Hatters in St James’s in London. However, that industry and those skills have gone.
In the past 50 or 60 years, my constituency has had to diversity and the workforce has had to retrain. That pace of chance will be prevalent in the decades ahead as technology advances, the global economy shrinks to make the world a smaller place, and international trade becomes the norm, meaning that we buy goods from other countries rather than make them here.
If we are going to have an industrial strategy that says that we want to be the lead nation in the new green industrial revolution, we need to ensure that we have the skills and the workforce to match that ambition. I am supportive of that and, if we are being honest, every Member of the House recognises the challenges and is supportive of it. That is not a top-level ambition, however; it has to be dealt with in the nitty-gritty of legislation.
We have a Bill going through Parliament that is rightly focused on skills and training and on ensuring that the next generation of the workforce has a built-in dynamism to be able to diversify, retrain and fill skills in the areas of the economy that have shortages. As the Opposition have said, that may mean someone has to have a second bite of the cherry at a level 3 qualification. If the subject in which someone has a level 3 is no longer fit for purpose, or relevant to the modern workplace, are we going to leave them languishing with inappropriate qualifications and skills that are no longer needed, or are we going to give them the opportunity to retrain, reskill and join the workforce, hopefully in highly paid, decent jobs? That is why I support amendments 53 and 54, which would put that idea on a legal footing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield rightly said.
The voice of local businesses and the economic partnership between local government, businesses, academia and training providers are setting out local skills improvement plans. They identify key skill shortages in their economic areas, and they should be given the flexibility to say, “You know what, in my area, we have an absolute shortage of skills in a particular sector. We want to make sure that our area is really dynamic in that sector and therefore it is a key priority for our partners to skill up to level 3 adequate numbers of the workforce.” That is sensible. It is devolution as it is meant to work, from the bottom up, and that is why I also support my hon. Friend’s new clause 7.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish, because I agree with everything he said.
The amendments and the new clause address the issue from the relevant two angles. They are designed to offer a genuine lifetime skills guarantee for individuals—one that is aspirational and does not fall back on the argument that because someone got a couple of A-levels 30 years, they cannot now retrain for a level 3 qualification to meet a skills need in the local area. I think about the changing world of work, and how much more is now digital or IT-based. There has been a shift in skills, which is driving our economy. Unless we agree to the amendments, so many people will be locked out from making a genuine shift in their skillset and acquiring a higher skilled job, which would put them on a sustainable footing. It is short-sighted to attempt to restrict that opportunity.
We have heard much about the responsibility of employers to lead the development of skills plans for their areas, given that they understand their local economies. New clause 7 is positive because it would genuinely enable employer representative bodies to shape what that level 3 qualification should be, based on the skills shortages in their areas. The new clause would meet the purpose of ERBs in developing the skills plans and ensure the lifetime skills guarantee for local people.
I support the terms of the amendments and the new clause. I should add that there are still a few hat factories in Luton producing artisan hats, and very good they are, too.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I will speak to the amendments and the new clause that appear in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield.
Of course we all want to see a high-skill, high-wage workforce. We need that for our economy. A crucial part of that is the retraining of employees. I am sure that most people in the room agree that the evolving workplace means that we need a process of continuous development if we are to adapt and ensure that our economy thrives, against an ever-competitive global marketplace.
Alex Burghart
Amendments 53 and 54 taken together would alter the eligibility criteria for the proposed legal entitlement to a level 3 qualification for all adults. Amendment 53 in particular is intended to make anyone in England eligible for those qualifications, regardless of their prior qualification level; and amendment 54 is intended to make anyone in England eligible if they earn less than the living wage.
Amendments 53 and 54 highlight the reason why we are opposed to putting such an entitlement into the legislation in the first place: it could constrain our ability to respond quickly and flexibly to adapt such entitlements to benefit adults who are most in need of support. For example, if we wanted to change the offer within the legislative framework, we would have to change the legislation. We have already announced that, from April next year, we will also expand the free courses for jobs offer to include any adult in England who earns below the national living wage or is unemployed, regardless of their prior qualification level. We are able to do that without needing legislation.
By targeting eligibility on the lowest-paid earners and the unemployed, we will ensure that we support those most in need of support to access better job opportunities and to improve their prospects. I hope that the hon. Member for Chesterfield agrees with that, given that amendment 54 seeks to target those same adults. However, it is also not a good use of public funding to expand eligibility in a non-targeted way to anyone, regardless of their wages or prior qualification level, which is what amendment 53 appears to do. We therefore do not support the inclusion of amendments 53 and 54 in the Bill.
Mr Perkins
That was a useful and interesting little debate. We heard a lot about the—I want say burgeoning, but at least still existing—hat industry. My hon. Friends the Members for Luton South and for Warwick and Leamington will be glad to know that I have seen at least two colleagues in hats recently—one was my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), who as they know is quite a trend-setter—so it might well be that a recovery in the hat industry is looming. It was a useful debate, and we heard some valuable contributions on why the amendments are important.
Turning to the Minister’s remarks, I accept that the amendment has similarities to and is possibly even more wide ranging than one that has already been rejected by the Committee, so we will withdraw it. However, we will press amendment 54 to a vote, because all that it seeks to do is to put on to a legal footing the promise that was made. I hear what the Minister says—“Don’t worry, we are going to deliver the policy; we just aren’t going to vote for it”—but I think there will be real value in ensuring that the Government commit to the thing that they say are going to do, which is about those who earn below the national living wage, as defined by the Living Wage Foundation, being able to access level 3 qualifications.
Given what we heard earlier in the passage of the Bill about the importance of local decision making, local skills improvement plans and local employers deciding their priorities, it would seem a sensible approach to allow them to identify local priorities and allow people to study a second level 3 qualification if addressing a known skills shortage. We will therefore look to press new clause 7, as well as amendment 54, to a Division. However, I beg to ask leave to withdraw amendment 53.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment proposed: 54, in clause 25, page 30, line 17, leave out from “has” to “level.” and insert
“is earning below the Living Wage, as identified by the Living Wage Foundation.”—(Mr Perkins.)
Alex Burghart
The Government agree with the ambition to ensure that people in England have access to education no matter their age. We are committed to helping everyone get the skills that they need at every stage in their lives.
In April, we launched the free courses for jobs offer as part of the lifetime skills guarantee. That gives all adults in England the opportunity to take their first level 3 qualification for free, regardless of age. It is not right, however, to put the free courses for jobs offer into legislation. That would constrain the Government in allocating resources in future, and make it harder to adapt the policy to changing circumstances. The Secretary of State recently announced, for example, that from April next year we will expand the offer to include any adult in England who earns below the national living wage or is unemployed, regardless of their prior qualification level.
Through the adult education budget, full funding is also available through legal entitlements for adults aged 19 and over to access English and maths qualifications and fully-funded digital skills qualifications for adults with no or low digital skills. In areas where adult education is not devolved, the adult education budget can fully fund eligible learners studying up to level 2 if they are unemployed or earning below around £17,300 per year.
The spending review has provided a fixed quantum for adult skills, and the level of provision that is funded in any year needs to fit that quantum. Funding increases to follow increased numbers of learners, or a higher-funded mix of provision, will have to be subject to affordability within the overall envelope. The spending review process, rather than legislation, is the appropriate way for determining how the Government allocate resources over the long term. Funding for the free courses for jobs offer will be available throughout the three-year spending review period, giving further education providers the certainty that they need to invest in the delivery of the offer.
Moreover, the Bill is not an appropriate place to create new legal entitlements when we are in the process of reforming further education funding and of carrying out a review of qualifications at level 3 and below. Those vital programmes will ensure our skills system is fit for the future. By creating a legal entitlement for anyone to access their first qualification up to level 3, we would cut across those vital reforms and pre-empt the consultation process.
I now turn to the proposal in the clause that any employer receiving apprenticeship funding must spend at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25. The Chancellor’s spending review commitment delivers the first increase to apprenticeships funding since 2019-20. Funding will grow to £2.7 billion by 2024-25.
There have been some changes in the make-up of apprenticeships since the reforms: a higher proportion of apprentices are now aged over 25. In 2020-21, 16 to 24-year-olds still accounted for 50% of apprenticeship starts. In the same period, level 2 and level 3 starts made up 69% of the total. I know that there are concerns about the fall in starts among young people. I recognise the value of apprenticeships to young people embarking on their careers, and I am determined to ensure that there are good apprenticeship opportunities at all ages and stages, but I am concerned about the implications of trying to address that in the Bill.
The clause restricts opportunities for older and younger employees, and it restricts employer choice. Eighty per cent. of the UK’s 2030 workforce is already in work, so it cannot be right that only a third of apprenticeships funding is made available to those who are over 25. We want older people to be able to use apprenticeships to progress or retrain. The Confederation of British Industry estimates that one in six workers—5 million people—will go through radical job change and require re-training by 2030.
Age should not be a barrier to opportunities to learn or a limiting factor in our ambitions. I do not want to restrict young people to starting at level 2 or 3 apprenticeships. I also want an 18-year-old with good A-levels to see an apprenticeship as a strong alternative to university. They should be able to start a level 6 apprenticeship and gain a degree.
Mr Perkins
There is a real concern about the number of apprenticeships that are available for people between the ages of 16 and 24. The Minister makes an important point, which I would not remotely disagree with, that many people, for a variety of reasons, seek investment in their skills beyond the age of 24. Of course, opportunities should be there for them, but the lifetime skills guarantee, which might more accurately be described as a one-off skills guarantee, is really important. I do not agree with his description of 50% of apprenticeships going to 16 to 24-year-olds as a really big achievement. Too little apprenticeship funding is targeted at those under the age of 25.
Many people are concerned that since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy businesses have sat on this pot of funds, looking to utilise them. They have often not taken people on at entry level, but instead utilised the apprenticeship levy to provide MBAs for level 6 or 7 qualifications for their managerial staff. That is really what clause 25(3) seeks to address. Had the Minister said, “We’ve got a different approach to targeting that,” that would have been one thing, but simply to wipe the clause from the Bill is very concerning, and will be met by real disappointment from many of those who share the view that too little apprenticeship funding is being targeted at those under the age of 25.
Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Colleges and designated institutions play a crucial part in their local communities by enabling young people and adults to gain the skills they need. In the small numbers of cases in which an institution is failing to deliver an acceptable standard of education or training, or is failing in other ways, Government must be able to intervene to secure improvement.
Existing powers under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 to intervene in colleges in the FE sector can be used in certain prescribed circumstances in which there are serious failings: mismanagement, for example, or financial or quality failures. In those circumstances, action can be taken to remove or appoint members of the governing body, or to give direction. Clause 26 extends those existing powers to allow for intervention where the education or training provided is failing, or has failed, to adequately meet local needs. Where the prescribed circumstances are met, clause 26 also enables the Secretary of State to direct the governing body to transfer “property, rights or liabilities” to another body.
The statutory intervention powers that we are amending through clause 26 are intended to be used only as a last resort. Our core support and intervention activity is delivered through administrative processes set out in the published guidance, “College oversight: support and intervention”. The Government are not seeking these powers in order to implement a new wave of mergers across the college sector—that is not the purpose of intervention. However, there is good evidence that structural change can, in the right circumstances, play a valuable role in securing improvement. We have also been clear that decisions on the college curriculum are for the governing body, not for Ministers to second-guess. We are working with Ofsted to increase the focus of inspections on how well colleges are meeting skills needs. The Government’s primary focus is on supporting colleges and designated institutions, and preventing things from going wrong.
In conclusion, strengthening the existing statutory intervention powers is necessary to ensure that, as a last resort, the Government are able to act where there is failure and there is no alternative means of securing improvement.
Mr Perkins
Clause 26 sets out in detail some additional powers relating to further education colleges in England, and the desire of the Secretary of State to intervene. The intervention regime for colleges is already complex, having been noted as a cause for concern by the Independent Commission on the College of the Future. Dame Mary Ney’s independent review of college financial oversight also identified the complexity of the regime, and in this Bill the Secretary of State is looking to find additional reasons to intervene, beyond financial failure. There is a real risk that this clause will just add to that complexity, going precisely against the apparent aim of establishing a simpler system.
Crucially, the Bill proposes new powers of intervention for the Secretary of State without giving colleges the freedoms to deliver. Last week, the Government passed an amendment that removed colleges from being strategic partners in the establishment of local skills improvement plans, so colleges are left accountable, but not empowered. Indeed, in a way, it goes further than that: if a college were to disagree with what was in the local skills improvement plan—if it were to consider that a local skills improvement plan that had been approved did not meet the needs of all of its learners—its failure to follow that plan could lead the Secretary of State to intervene and its being considered to be a failing college.
We accept that there needs to be an understanding of interventions, but there are questions that we would like to test the Minister on. First, why is it appropriate to hold colleges accountable for the delivery of LSIPs, but not treat them as strategic partners in developing those LSIPs? Secondly, do the new intervention powers apply equally to all post-16 education providers? If not—if they apply only to FE colleges—what consultation has the DfE undertaken with the Office for Students in order to ensure that this aligns with its approach to the oversight of higher education provision? Thirdly, what happens in circumstances where colleges believe that a poor or inappropriate LSIP has been produced that is not in the long-term interests of their locality? Do they simply deliver on a plan that they believe to be inappropriate, or are there mechanisms available to them to make representations on that point? If the needs of the local learning community have altered but the LSIP has not, how would a college be able to raise that? What consequences would be available to the Secretary of State if a college was seen not to fit in with what the LSIP said, even if the circumstances on the ground had changed?
Alex Burghart
As we have made clear throughout the Bill, the Government are on a mission to create an employer-led system in which the provision of skills reflects the skills that employers in a community need. We are absolutely set on ensuring that we get qualifications designed by employers to give students the skills the economy needs, at both local and national level. The clause sets about creating an accountability framework that places colleges in that sphere. We want colleges to respond to the ideas set out in a local skills improvement plan. However, as I have also made clear, these are absolutely powers of last resort. What we are really looking for is a profitable relationship between employer representative bodies and local providers. For that reason, we hope the clause will stand part of the Bill.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 26 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 27
Further education bodies in education administration: application of other insolvency procedures
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 61, in clause 27, page 33, line 19, at end insert—
“(2C) Before applying to a court for an education administration order in relation to a further education body in England, the Secretary of state will conduct a review of the impact of the closure of a Further Education institution on learning opportunities in the local area and provide a report to Parliament on steps taken to ensure that the opportunities for learners are not restricted by his application for an education administration order.”
Amendment 61 is a probing amendment that would require the Secretary of State to review further education provision prior to applying for an education administration order for a college. There should also be a review of the impact of closing a college; if the impact of such a closure would be a reduction or complete removal of provision, we would request that the Secretary of State report to Parliament to allow for appropriate parliamentary scrutiny.
It is crucial for the Secretary of State to ensure that local areas have adequate further education provision before deciding to merge and close colleges. The colleges most likely to be closed are often those in more rural areas, those that are smaller, those that are facing specific challenges or those in communities that face specific challenges because they do not have the density of population. Although we recognise that there may be financial collapse as a result of their geographic isolation, that should not necessarily mean that the provision their students rely upon disappears with the merger of the college.
It is important to have scrutiny at both a local and national level. We believe that it should be parliamentary scrutiny, to ensure that the Secretary of State commits to reporting to the House before announcing such a decision, and to ensure that there is a review of the impact of a closure on the local labour market and on the courses available to people in that local community.
Alex Burghart
Amendment 61 would require the Secretary of State to conduct a review of the impact of the closure of an FE institution on learning opportunities in a local area and provide a report to Parliament on the steps taken to ensure that opportunities for learners are not restricted ahead of an application for an education administration order. We will hear about education administration orders in the next few minutes.
I appreciate what Labour Members are trying to do, but the effect would be to delay an application for an education administration order, which would run counter to the purpose of the amendment. First, if an FE body becomes insolvent, it risks being placed into a regular insolvency procedure by a creditor or its board. The primary objective of a regular insolvency procedure is to prioritise the interests of creditors. This means that any closure scenario could result in the best returns to creditors being prioritised over the needs of keeping the body open for learners. Going down a standard insolvency route with a college will prioritise creditors, risking students studying there being pushed to one side.
Mr Perkins
I listened carefully to the Minister. As I said at the outset, this is a probing amendment to identify the extent to which the interests of learners are considered within education administration. I also listened to the Minister’s point regarding the creditors of such an institution, which was important and well made. I accept what he said about the need to go into education administration with due urgency. In that process that follows, which he laid out, there is a real need for the Government to say more, perhaps through a parliamentary statement, for people to better understand the situation on the ground in regard to future provision and those affected by any change in that provision. Notwithstanding that, it is not our intention to push the amendment to a vote.
Mr Perkins
Within my intention not to push the amendment to a vote, I would like to give way.
Matt Western
It is like “Just a Minute”. I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I just want to elaborate on the point in his concluding remarks about how many colleges face financial uncertainty. According to the Times Educational Supplement, it was one in seven in a recent survey. We saw with Hadlow College—one of the two that the Minister was referring to—that 2,000 students suddenly lost their places. That can have a huge impact on a town and a region.
Mr Perkins
It absolutely can. Cases such as that impact not only the learners affected at that very moment, but on the provision for the next generations coming through. It has a very detrimental impact on the local community. My hon. Friend’s point is well made. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 27 proposes to clarify ambiguities in the Technical and Further Education Act 2017 regarding the use of company voluntary arrangements—a procedure allowing a company or corporation in insolvency proceedings to come to an agreement with its creditors over the payment of debts. Company voluntary arrangements can be used as an exit route for normal administration, as set out in insolvency legislation.
Company voluntary arrangements can also be used as an exit route from education administration under the FE insolvency regime, which we have just been debating. That has been clarified in case law, which has been in place since March 2020, when the High Court of Justice Business and Property Courts of England and Wales ruled that in the education administration of West Kent and Ashford College, education administrators had the power to propose a company voluntary arrangement.
We are using the opportunity to legislate in the Bill to clarify ambiguities in the current legislation and cement that existing case law into legislation. To be clear, we are cementing what the courts have already decided on. To achieve that, clause 27 proposes to extend the existing power of the Secretary of State for Education to make regulations related to the application of insolvency legislation to FE bodies so that express provision may be made in respect of the use of company voluntary arrangements.
Clause 28 deals with the potential conflict related to the treatment of secured creditors as between the transfer scheme provisions of the Technical and Further Education Act 2017 and the provisions of the Insolvency Act 1986, as applied by the 2017 Act. Specifically, the proposal amends schedules 2, 3 and 4 to the 2017 Act, making it clear that, where a transfer scheme looks to transfer secured assets free of the security, that can happen only with either the consent of the secured creditor or a court order. That is in line with protections for secured creditors in normal administration in insolvency proceedings.
Clause 28 also cements into legislation the Government’s response to the technical consultation for the insolvency regime for further education and sixth-form colleges, which was made in June 2018. We have informed the three main lenders to the FE sector—Barclays, Lloyds and Santander—of our proposed changes, and I am pleased to report that they are supportive. Barclays said:
“As a lender with significant loan exposure to the English FE sector (and desire to continue to support colleges with new loans) we are in favour of the changes proposed. The Transfer Scheme changes in particular provides welcome clarity on a point that had previously had a negative impact on sector risk profile and our appetite to lend.”
These clauses are good for the sector and good for the law, and I believe they should be good enough for us.
Mr Perkins
As the Minister was reading out that very positive quote from Barclays about his clause, it occurred to me how rarely he has had the opportunity to read out support for his Bill over the course of its passage. That is unsurprising, of course, when he is pressing ahead with amendments that 86% of respondents to his consultation are against. None the less, it was good to hear that full-throated support for this proposal from Barclays.
We do not intend to vote against clauses 27 or 28. I will simply make the point that the financial pressures facing our further education sector over the past 11 years, and particularly the past 12 months or so, have been truly unprecedented. I regularly meet representatives of colleges who are absolutely at their wit’s end, and not only about the scale of the funding cuts they have experienced over the past 11 years, but about the extent to which last-minute decisions are constantly made that leave them in a position in which they have to make redundancies in order to stay afloat, only then to discover sometimes that there is a change in the Government’s policy and they have to recruit for some positions that they had made redundant only a few months before.
So it was with the recent announcement about the adult education clawback. I have asked parliamentary questions on this issue. A number of colleges received a clawback from their adult education fund and were told that there was no right to any appeal. Then the previous Secretary of State said that they would allow appeals and I believe that in some cases the appeals were granted. In the meantime, however, those colleges were forced to cut their cloth accordingly.
Consequently, I say to the Government that although we do not oppose clauses 27 or 28, we believe that there needs to be a much greater sense of responsibility about the Government’s role in the financial distress that many of our colleges are currently suffering, which my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington referred to earlier, and about the impact on those colleges of the constant last-minute decision making that they have suffered over the past 11 years.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 27 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 28 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 29
Meaning of “relevant service” and other key expressions
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 29 is the first of a chapter of clauses that relate to the criminalisation in England and Wales of contract cheating services, which are more widely known as essay mills. Taken together, this chapter of clauses will make it an offence for an organisation or individual to complete, or arrange for another person to complete, all or part of an assignment on behalf of a student. It also criminalises the advertising of these cheating services. Essay mills threaten to undermine the reputation of our education system and to devalue the hard work of those who succeed on their own merit. They also prevent students from learning themselves and risk students entering the workforce without the knowledge, skills or competence they need.
Clause 29 provides clarity on the exact meaning of the key terms used throughout this chapter of clauses; removes the potential for unintended consequences to arise from the clause; and allows for fraudulent essay mill companies, their employees and contractors to be captured by the legislation. Because of the way that we have defined “relevant service”, we have also ensured that generally permitted study support, such as revision guides, will not be in scope, but essay mill companies that complete assignments on behalf of students will be in scope.
Clause 30 criminalises providing essay mill services or arranging for such services. It is therefore crucial in our fight against essay mills. It provides a powerful legislative tool to tackle these deplorable organisations and individuals.
I will talk briefly about the practicalities of the offence that we are creating. It will be for the prosecution to prove that the cheating service has been provided to the student. However, the burden of proof in relation to the defence is on the defendant. For example, the defendant would need to prove that they could not have known, even with reasonable diligence, that the student would or might use the material provided to complete an assignment. For example, simply asking a student to sign a contract that states that they will not use the work in a certain way is not a defence. Clause 30 states that clearly.
If someone were to be found guilty, they would be liable to be punished with a fine. The appropriate fine will be determined by the courts in accordance with Sentencing Council guidelines. Clause 30 will help to tackle the existence of these companies and to fine them appropriately if they continue to carry out these illicit services.
Mr Perkins
Clause 29 defines the term “relevant service” and other key expressions. We have no desire to vote against it.
I am interested in the representations that the Minister has received about the way clause 30 is drafted. Subsection (4) will immediately set those with more experienced legal minds than mine—there are such people in this place—to consider how difficult it may be to achieve a successful prosecution under these provisions. If there is a defence that enables a defendant to say, “I had no idea what the legislation was”, that starts to bring home how difficult it might be to get successful prosecutions in this area.
Matt Western
I have a few points to add to my hon. Friend’s remarks. In principle, these clauses make some important points about essay mills and the advertising of relevant services. There is a long-overdue need to legislate to prevent such services, and this will give the issue the importance that the sector has been demanding for some time. Back in 2018, something like 40 vice-chancellors wrote to the then Secretary of State demanding action on this issue. We are three years on. The problem has grown to an industrial scale and needs tackling.
The problem has become so—well, I would not say endemic, but it is widespread, and there are many students out there who seek to access these services or feel under pressure because of the need to get good grades. There was a case not so long ago where Coventry University students were blackmailed by an essay mill company, which said that if they did not pay yet more money, it would tell their university. There is a lot to be covered in this respect, and that is why the clause is very important.
Alex Burghart
I am pleased to see that the Opposition support our move to legislate on this matter. We are all of one mind that cheating services actually end up undermining the good work of the vast majority of students, and they introduce an unnecessary element of doubt.
I reassure the Opposition that the Bill has been carefully drafted with some excellent Government lawyers. Clause 33 is designed to ensure that convictions are much more likely and that some of the easy defences—for example, that these services were just providing information and had no idea that it would be used in cheating services—cannot be used as a get-out-of-jail card. We are confident that it is a major step forward in combating this insidious crime and we look forward to its enactment.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 29 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 30 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 31
Offence of advertising a relevant service
Mr Perkins
I beg to move amendment 61, in clause 27, page 33, line 19, at end insert—
‘(2C) Before applying to a court for an education administration order in relation to a further education body in England, the Secretary of state will conduct a review of the impact of the closure of a Further Education institution on learning opportunities in the local area and provide a report to Parliament on steps taken to ensure that the opportunities for learners are not restricted by his application for an education administration order.”
This probing amendment is designed to find out the Government’s anticipated tariff for such offences. To what extent is it seen as a serious offence? To us, it is absolutely obvious that the fine needs to be of a sufficient sum to make it not worth providing such services. Although we support the Government’s intentions, we seek further clarification about the level of the anticipated tariff for such an offence. Will perpetrators get off with a fine that costs them the equivalent of a week’s dinner money, or are the Government taking such offences seriously? Will they set the fine at a high enough level to act as a deterrent?
To return to the question to which I do not believe the Minister responded when we considered clause 29, in the event of a cheating service that is utilised by five students, would that be judged as five offences or one?
Alex Burghart
I am sorry, I forgot to reply to that. It would be five offences.
Mr Perkins
That is useful clarification. Can the Minister also clarify whether perpetrators would be guilty of a civil or criminal offence? Would they get a criminal record? In the event that a business was perceived to be providing those services, what would be the impact on that business? Or is an individual judged to have committed the offence? I would be grateful for that clarification.
Overall, we believe it is vital that there is a level playing field. We support the Government’s intention to prevent the use of fraudulent services, such as essay milling, and we believe that the fines should be such to act as a deterrent. We also believe that there should be a corresponding damage to reputation provision when people or businesses commit that offence. It is crucial that the amount of the fine and the publicity surrounding those fines reflect the severity of the offence. As we have said, the practice significantly undermines the efforts of all students who work hard to achieve their qualifications legitimately.
Matt Western
It would be interesting to hear from the Minister what form of penalty the Government imagine. We heard the probing question from my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield about the case of five individuals. Can the Minister elaborate on what sort of penalties he envisages for the business behind the essay mill? If he does not agree with our suggestion, what scale of punishment does he believe would be appropriate? Is it more akin to dropping litter, fly-tipping or another offence?
Alex Burghart
We are in agreement that essay mills need to be driven out of business, and that is why the clauses are in the Bill. In response to the hon. Gentleman’s points, these are serious criminal offences.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
I suspect that the Minister is about to say that the Sentencing Council will have a view on the issue, and actually it is for the Sentencing Council to determine the length and type of sentences that might be involved in criminal activities.
Alex Burghart
My hon. Friend is extremely prescient, and I congratulate him on that. This is a criminal offence and we want to see it seriously punished. However, for reasons I will set out, we do not think that amendment 62 would solve the problem in the right way. It would amend clause 31 by setting a minimum penalty of a fine of no less than £5,000 for the offence of advertising a cheating service. As drafted, the Bill does not state the level of fine payable on conviction. Instead, conviction of either offence carries the penalty of an unlimited fine—as the name implies, that is a fine imposed without financial limit. That approach carries serious potential consequences and provides a significant deterrent effect to those planning to advertise contract cheating services.
The Government do not believe that setting a minimum amount is appropriate, where maximum fines are unlimited. Setting a minimum fine of £5,000 risks that level of fine being seen by essay mill providers as a likely fine, rather than a minimum. Sentencing and the precise size of a fine should be matters for the independent judiciary, in accordance with Sentencing Council guidelines, based on the full facts of the case. I would draw hon. Members attention to the fact that Ireland, which has a similar legal system and a similar offence, imposes a fine of up to €100,000 per offence and/or a prison sentence. That is the sort of thing that might go through the minds in our justice system. We do not therefore think that the amendment is necessary.
Mr Perkins
I accept what the Minister says. I do not accept that introducing a minimum fine of £5,000 would necessarily lead to essay mill services thinking that that would be the likely level, but I take his point. The amendment was a probing amendment to try to reach some understanding of the Government’s position. If there have been fines of the level that he outlined, that will be heartening for all those who want to see the issue addressed. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 31 makes it an offence to advertise essay mills. Marketing and advertising are the lifeblood of any successful industry, and we do not want this industry to be successful or to have lifeblood. Many essay mill companies use marketing techniques that seem to indicate that they offer legitimate academic writing support for students, when in fact they are providing cheating services. Students who use essay mills risk their academic education and future employment prospects if they are caught cheating. Anecdotal reports indicate that some essay mills are even seeking to blackmail students who have used the services, as the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington mentioned. The clause will put beyond doubt that advertising cheating services in England and Wales is not just unethical but illegal, and will provide the means to prosecute those who fail to comply with the law in England and Wales.
Mr Perkins
I have already outlined our support for this move. We believe that this is a serious offence. It is important that any perceived legitimacy of essay mill services is aggressively challenged. On that basis, we will support the clause.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 31 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 32
Offences: bodies corporate and unincorporated associations
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 32 relates to which bodies can be prosecuted under the essay mill provisions in the Bill. Cheating service providers can range from UK-based organisations registered at Companies House with offices and permanent staff to lone individuals operating with minimal infrastructure. Where offences are committed by companies, unincorporated bodies and partnerships, the clause enables certain individuals, such as the directors of companies, to also be prosecuted in particular circumstances. It also sets out some relevant procedural rules. For example, it clarifies that proceedings for offences committed by an unincorporated body should be brought in the name of the body and not its members, and any fine imposed on conviction of an unincorporated body should be paid out of the funds of the body. The clause will enable the legislation to function with legal certainty. Clause 33 sets out the definitions of certain terms in this chapter, allowing for absolute clarity on the intended purpose of the clause.
Mr Perkins
We welcome clause 32. It is important that where offences are committed by bodies of this sort there are consequences for their officers. The clause ensures that directors, managers, secretaries or other similar officers of the body corporate are guilty of an offence, if an offence under this chapter is committed by their body corporate and either they are known to have consented and been in connivance, or it is attributable to neglect of their duties under the organisation. We will therefore support clause 32. Clause 33 is simply an interpretation clause that makes sense of the terms in clause 32.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 32 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 33 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 34
16 to 19 Academy: designation as having a religious character
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 34 provides the Secretary of State with an order-making power to enable the designation of 16-to-19 academies as having a religious character. It also provides for the Secretary of State to make regulations about the procedures relating to the designation. In addition, it sets out the freedoms and protections relating to religious education, collective worship and governance that the designation provides. The clause will ensure that when existing sixth form colleges designated with a religious character convert to academies they retain their religious character and associated freedoms and protections. It will also enable new and existing 16-to-19 academies to be designated with a religious character in the future. The Government are committed to supporting existing sixth-form colleges to convert to academy status. I am pleased that a significant proportion of them have already taken that step, and are making a strong contribution to strengthening the academy sector.
Clause 35 improves the efficiency of administration of the further education sector. It is thankfully rare for a further education body to enter into insolvency proceedings. However, where a designation order can form part of a rescue procedure, we need to ensure that it can take place swiftly, minimising disruption to learners and costs to the taxpayers. For some FE bodies in financial difficulty, it may be desirable to transfer the college institution from the insolvent FE body to a new solvent company as part of the process of exiting insolvency proceedings. To ensure that the institution remains within the statutory further education sector in order to keep it appropriately regulated, it would then need to be immediately designated accordingly. Existing legislation requires the Secretary of State to make a statutory instrument when he seeks to carry out such a designation. That process can take several months, and needs a completion date to be specified significantly in advance, which could complicate and delay the exit from insolvency proceedings. Delays impose a longer period of disruption on learners and could generate extra costs to the taxpayer. As such, clause 35 allows the Secretary of State to use an administrative order, which can be enacted relatively quickly, to designate an institution as being within the statutory further education sector.
Clause 36 relates to the high-level quality rating for higher education providers without an approved access and participation plan, which is currently an award under the teaching excellence and student outcomes framework. Higher education providers with a TEF award currently benefit from an uplift to their fee limit, meaning that they are able to charge a higher level than HE providers without such an award. There is currently an error in the legislation that could prevent a timely link between TEF awards and a provider’s fee limit. To take an example, let us consider a provider that does not have an approved access and participation plan. If that provider is entitled to the TEF fee uplift in any academic year, it is dependent on whether it had an award on 1 January in the calendar year before the relevant academic year. That means that a provider seeking to charge the TEF fee uplift in academic year 2022-23 could only do so based on an award that was in force in January 2021, rather than January 2022, which was the original intent. Clause 36 will correct that error and ensure a more timely link between fee limits and the TEF award, helping to further incentivise excellence in higher education.
Mr Perkins
Sorry, I have got all tangled up here; give me a moment, Mrs Miller. For the sake of those listening on the radio, my hearing aid has got stuck in my mask.
Mr Perkins
Sorry, what did you say? [Laughter.]
We do not intend to divide the Committee on clauses 34 to 36. We think it is important that the law does not discriminate against academies or institutions for having a religious character designation, should they wish to do so. Clause 34 would change the rules so that when the Department next seeks to create 16-to-19 academies, it will be possible for organisations to apply to set up one with a religious character. Ministers intend to change the law to ensure equality for technical education in school careers advice, and to allow religious sixth forms to academise. A group of 14 sixth-form colleges that are Catholic run have so far been prevented from doing so due to their religious character; this clause would overturn that obstacle.
We recognise that there are many excellent academies out there, just as there were many excellent state-maintained schools. We think it is regrettable that the Government have decided to prioritise academies over schools run by local authorities. I have a very personal reason for saying that: my children went to an outstanding school that was run under the local council. Unfortunately, due to its finances, it was forced into a position where it took on academy status, and ultimately, that academy was described as a failing school. The desire to drive that school into academy status caused really significant problems. It is my view that the academies that the Labour Government created were a positive thing, and that there are many excellent academies out there. However, we think that the Government should remain neutral on this issue, rather than trying to force schools down one route or the other.
Notwithstanding that, we support the changes in clause 34. Sixth-form colleges should not be discriminated against if they have a religious designation and wish to become academies.
Clause 35 assigns a designation to terms in the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. We can support the clause given that is sets out the designations of institutions in the FE sector relating to the 1992 Act. Clause 36 is a technical change that clarifies the relevant date, for purposes of fee limit, for certain higher education courses, as set out by the Minister. We are happy to support the clause, which sets out the determination of the fee limit.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 34 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clauses 35 and 36 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 37
Extent
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Alex Burghart
Clause 37 sets out the territorial extent of the provisions. Obviously, Westminster does not normally legislate on devolved matters without the consent of the relevant devolved Administration. However, we have sought the support of the Welsh Government to lay a legislative consent motion where there is an impact on the competence of Senedd Cymru. We have agreed with the Scottish Government and with the Northern Ireland Executive that legislative consent motions are not required.
Clause 38 sets out when provisions in the Bill come into force. General provisions on extent commencement and short title come into force on the day of Royal Assent. Subsection (2) sets out the provisions that will come into force two months after the Act is passed. All other provisions will come into force on a day, or days, appointed by the Secretary of State through regulations made by statutory instrument.
Mr Perkins
Clause 37 sets out the extent of the Bill. I heard what the Minister had to say about the Welsh Assembly; can he just confirm that he has consulted the Welsh Assembly on the extent to which this Act applies to Wales and, given that there are differences between what is offered in England and in Wales, that there is nothing in the Bill that has led to problems in that relationship? Notwithstanding that point, we agree with the extent to which the clause applies to England and Wales, and also the specific provisions that extend to Scotland and Northern Ireland. We agree with clause 38 on commencement and understand what it is saying.
Alex Burghart
I reassure the hon. Gentleman that we have consulted Welsh Ministers, and we are of one mind with our counterparts in Wales.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 37 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 38 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 39
Short title
Alex Burghart
I beg to move Government amendment 26, in clause 39, page 42, line 13, leave out subsection (2).
This amendment removes the privilege amendment inserted in the Lords.
For Bills starting in the House of Lords, a privilege amendment is included to recognise the right of this place to control any charges on the people and on public funds. It is standard practice to remove such amendments at this stage of the Bill’s passage through the House of Commons.
Mr Perkins
The Labour party is always enthusiastic for powers to be centred in the hands of those with democratic accountability, so we are very keen on clause 39. The Government have not yet had an opportunity to explain why they thought it was sensible to start the passage of the Bill in the other place, notwithstanding the excellent job that their lordships have done, which the Minister has sought to wreck over the course of the past week and a half. It would be interesting to hear from the Government why they made the decision to start the Bill in the other place. Notwithstanding that, we have no reason to oppose the amendment.
Alex Burghart
I have been a Minister for only a short time, and I have to say I am unaware why the Bill started in the Lords, but I have nothing but admiration for their lordships, who did a wonderful job. Obviously, we have had to amend some of their amendments in order to make the Bill as good as it can be, but I am sure that everyone can see that the parliamentary process is being done to the full, even if it is being done this way round.
Amendment agreed to.
Clause 39, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
New Clause 1
Information about technical education and training: access to English schools
“(1) Section 42B of the Education Act 1997 (information about technical education: access to English schools) is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (1), for “is an opportunity” substitute “are opportunities”.
(3) After subsection (1) insert—
“(1A) In complying with subsection (1), the proprietor must give access to registered pupils on at least one occasion during each of the first, second and third key phase of their education.”
(4) After subsection (2) insert—
“(2A) The proprietor of a school in England within subsection (2) must—
(a) ensure that each registered pupil meets, during each of the first and second key phases of their education, at least one provider to whom access is given (or any other number of such providers that may be specified for the purposes of that key phase by regulations under subsection (8)), and
(b) ask providers to whom access is given to provide information that includes the following—
(i) information about the provider and the approved technical education qualifications or apprenticeships that the provider offers,
(ii) information about the careers to which those technical education qualifications or apprenticeships might lead,
(iii) a description of what learning or training with the provider is like, and
(iv) responses to questions from the pupils about the provider or approved technical education qualifications and apprenticeships.
(2B) Access given under subsection (1) must be for a reasonable period of time during the standard school day.”
(5) In subsection (5)—
(a) in paragraph (c), at the end insert “and the times at which the access is to be given;”;
(b) after paragraph (c) insert—
“(d) an explanation of how the proprietor proposes to comply with the obligations imposed under subsection (2A).”
(6) In subsection (8), after “subsection (1)” insert “or (2A)”.
(7) After subsection (9) insert—
“(9A) For the purposes of this section—
(a) the first key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 13, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year;
(b) the second key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 15, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year;
(c) the third key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 17, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year.””—(Alex Burghart.)
This new clause replaces clause 14. It removes requirements about university technical college access to pupils, requires access to pupils to be given in each key phase once (rather than three times), requires proprietors to ensure pupils meet at least one provider (or a prescribed number), and makes technical changes.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Alex Burghart
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
I will now discuss new clause 1, which seeks to replace clause 14. We all agree that we need to strengthen provider access legislation. The Government introduced provider access legislation in 2018 to ensure that all young people get information about technical options when planning their careers, but too many schools have disregarded the law and are reluctant to promote alternatives to A-levels and university. We announced our three-point plan to improve compliance with that legislation in the “Skills for Jobs” White Paper back in January, and that included plans to strengthen the duty.
As it stands, clause 14 would require schools to deliver nine provider encounters per pupil—three during each of the first, second and third phases of their education. We are concerned that nine encounters would place unnecessary pressure on schools and risk taking up too much curriculum time. The clause would also name university technical colleges on the face of the Bill as one of the providers that every pupil must meet where practicable. That would give more weight to one provider than the rest, and we want to act in the interests of all providers, not just university technical colleges. The new clause strengthens existing provider access legislation by requiring schools to provide a minimum of three meetings with providers of technical education or apprenticeships for pupils in school years 8 to 13.
Mr Perkins
We understand the reasons for the new clause, but what is the Government’s view about why the existing Baker clause has not been as successful as they might have liked? Has it taught the Minister anything with regard to the limitations of the statutory guidance, on which he may have chosen to reflect, and to why having things on the face of the Bill often carries greater weight than purely putting things into statutory guidance or secondary legislation?
Alex Burghart
The hon. Gentleman knows full well that Governments often keep things in statutory guidance in order to retain flexibility. The last Labour Government did that time and again. As a mere parliamentary researcher, I remember consideration of what is now the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, in which there were many examples of powers introduced through statutory guidance and secondary legislation. It is a time-honoured custom that is there for good reason.
In this case, we believe that there is a need to strengthen practice. In particular, I want to mention the need to strengthen quality. The other day, I was talking to a friend who has a 16-year-old daughter and who is herself in education. Her daughter had come home saying, “There is absolutely no way I’m going to do an apprenticeship.” My friend asked why and her daughter replied, “Because the man who came to talk to us today was so boring it has put me off.”
We need to ensure that we have interventions of quality. That is very much where our position is centred. The new clause includes the power for the Secretary of State to set out further details about the number and type of providers that pupils should meet under the terms of this duty. Putting the detail in secondary legislation will give us flexibility.
The new clause strikes the correct balance between widening pupil access to information on technical options in apprenticeships, without placing undue pressure on schools. It will set out in primary legislation that every state school must provide the three encounters of which I have spoken. Of course, we must ensure that those provider encounters are of high quality. That is why, for the first time, we are setting parameters for the content of the encounters in primary legislation.
We want to ensure that every encounter is meaningful and gives pupils the opportunity to explore what the provider offers, what career routes those options could lead to and what it might be to learn or train with that provider. We intend to consult school and provider representatives on the underpinning statutory guidance to ensure that we have provider access legislation that works for them and, most importantly, for young people.
With the Government’s large-scale reforms to technical education, it has never been more important for every young person to understand the full range of options that are available to them. The new clause will be crucial in ensuring that every pupil, whatever their ambitions, can explore apprenticeships, T-levels and other technical education qualifications. We want to send a clear message that schools must open their doors to other providers, so that pupils get broad and balanced information about all their options.
Mr Perkins
The Minister outlines why he believes the new clause is necessary. Given his remarks at the end there, I have to say that he would have better achieved what he set out to achieve had his party not voted against clause 14. All new clause 1 does is weaken the clause 14 that was in the Bill and that the Committee voted against this morning.
Notwithstanding that, we recognise that the new clause will be better than not having it at all. It removes requirements for university technical college access for pupils. The Minister suggested that that would be prioritising UTCs above other organisations, but I did not see it like that. I thought that they were simply referred to as another provider, and no doubt ones that Lord Baker is particularly enthusiastic to see given access.
The points that Lord Baker made in his contribution in the House of Lords are important, however, and they need to be considered. The noble Lord suggested that many schools—through either lack of time or a deliberate attempt to ensure that their students looked only at the school’s own sixth form, for financial or other reasons—were not implementing the original Baker clause and were indeed subverting the opportunities that were placed in front of children. I would be interested in hearing whether the Minister agrees with Lord Baker about that, or whether he believes that there are other reasons why alternative providers are not getting access to young people at each of those three crucial stages.
The Committee will be aware that, as part of the Labour party’s offer at the next general election, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) has brought forward a plan for the equivalent of two weeks’ compulsory work experience for every pupil, and for face-to-face professional careers advice to be something that every student can rely on. We think it vital that children and young people have access to professional and appropriate careers advice. Work experience can be genuinely life-changing for many young people, particularly those from more deprived backgrounds. It is crucial that work experience is seen as a mark of an excellent school provision, rather than an additional thing that is nice to do.
It has very much been my experience that many schools leave the responsibility for work experience to the child and their parents to sort out. Effectively, the only commitment that schools require is that the child does not die or get injured while they are there. There is no real assessment of the quality of that work experience, so the milkman’s son ends up doing a milk round, while the MP’s son spends a week in an MP’s office—everyone just does the stuff that they already know. Worst of all, some children do work experience in a school, which is the one environment that they have been in for their entire lives, and that is considered acceptable.
Alternative opportunities for young people to look at different environments and learn about different opportunities are absolutely crucial. As clause 14 was rejected, we will support the new clause, but we believe it less ambitious than what their noble lordships had already introduced. Much of what the Minister said about the importance of the sector is undermined by his tabling of a clause that is weaker than the one that came from the Lords.
Question put and agreed to.
New clause 1 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.
New Clause 2
Lifelong learning: special educational needs
“When exercising functions under this Act, the Secretary of State must ensure that providers of further education are required to include special educational needs awareness training to all teaching staff to ensure that all staff are able to identify and adequately support those students who have special educational needs.”—(Mr Perkins.)
This new clause would place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that there is adequate special educational needs training for teachers of students in further education.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Perkins
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The new clause, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), relates to access to sharia-compliant lifelong learning loans. It is important that students do not feel excluded from applying for lifelong learning loans because they are not sharia-compliant. There are many different aspects to loans under sharia law. Though their effect may be similar to that of other loans, the way in which they are set up and implemented is different, and the funds are also utilised in different ways.
It is incredibly important—and I think this is recognised by Members of both main parties—that action is taken on sharia-compliant lifelong learning loans. It is regrettable, however, that thus far nothing has been done. We have been given to believe that the Augar review may result in sharia-compliant lifelong learning loans, but we have not yet seen anything to that effect. My right hon. Friend’s new clause therefore encourages the Secretary of State to
“make provision by regulations for Sharia-compliant student finance to be made available as part of the lifelong learning entitlement.”
Alex Burghart
I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss sharia-compliant student finance. The Government have been considering an alternative student finance product, compatible with Islamic finance principles, alongside their other priorities as they conclude the post-18 review of educational funding.
New powers were taken in section 86 of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 to enable the Secretary of State to make alternative payments, in addition to grants and loans, to enable the implementation of ASF. Clause 15 already makes provision for such alternative payments to be made as part of the lifetime loan entitlement. As such, when coupled with the existing provisions in HERA, the new clause would not give the Secretary of State any additional powers. The clause 15 provisions for alternative payments would come into force should the Government decide to commence the provisions in HERA that enable alternative payments to be provided to students. The Government will reach a decision on the availability of a sharia-compliant student finance product as part of the full and final conclusion of the post-18 review, and will provide an update on ASF at that time.
In relation to the second part of the new clause, the Secretary of State may already lay student support regulations using the affirmative procedure contained in section 42 of the Teaching and Higher Education 1998, should he choose to do so. The new clause would not add any powers beyond those already under the Bill or existing legislation, and so should not be added to the Bill.
Rachel Hopkins
I rise to support new clause 4, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham. The Minister says we will see the outcome of the post-18 review with regards to HERA. However, the reason why it is so important that the new clause is added to the Bill relates to further education. Because no finance or loans fit with the principles of Islam, many people end up saving up until they have sufficient funds to be able to afford their degree. The whole point of the Bill is the emphasis on ensuring that people can up their skills at level 3. If they are not able to access a loan that is compliant with the principles of Islam, and if they are on a low income, they really have no chance of being able to save up to afford to fund up front from their savings. The proposal of a lifelong learning entitlement through a loan therefore becomes a vicious circle, and they will not be able to access the training and gain the skills that they need.
For many people, this really is a matter of urgency if we are genuinely going to help people to reskill or upskill, particularly for many constituents of mine in Luton South. It is important to push the Government on this, particularly because HERA was published in 2017, and because of the commitment from the former Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, in 2013 when this first started to be talked about. This long-term delay and lack of action is not good enough. I support new clause 4.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Perkins
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The new clause was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). It would introduce a national review and plan for addressing the attainment gap and intends to ensure that everybody is supported to obtain the level of English and/or maths skills they need by requiring the Department for Education to have a plan to close the attainment gap based on a review of current policies and barriers to attainment in English and/or maths. Our attainment levels as a nation, particularly in maths, are noticeably behind many of our competitor nations, and particularly the major nations in Europe. It is crucial that there are both local and national strategies to raise attainment for English and maths at grade 4.
I think there is widespread agreement on that across the House. The Government’s approach has often been to say, “Well, until you have achieved this, you cannot do that.” The Labour party’s approach has always been much more of a carrot. We recognise that there needs to be greater investment, specifically in picking out those students who, for a variety of different reasons—whether as a result of learning disabilities or of social disadvantages—are less likely to attain grade 4 level in English and maths. We think it is crucial that we have a strategic approach to attaining that.
A large amount of the recent catch-up funding that was identified by the Government was never actually provided, and there has been a discrepancy between the amount of the catch-up funding that was directed to those in the most deprived communities and the amount that was provided overall. Catch-up funding, more than anything else as a result of the lockdown, particularly needed to be focused on those in the most deprived communities, who saw that attainment gap grow over the course of the covid pandemic. That the Government have a strategic plan and are operating a national review of the attainment gap—particularly setting out to achieve the reduction in their cap within six months of the passing of the Bill—is an important amendment. We therefore support the new clause.
Alex Burghart
New clause 5, tabled by the hon. Member for Rotherham, seeks to require the Secretary of State to undertake a national review and have a plan for addressing the attainment gap within six months of the Act passing in relation to those who have not achieved grade 4 or above in GCSE English or maths. The Government are clear that supporting people who are yet to achieve GCSE grade 4 or above in English or maths—the equivalent of level 2—is of the utmost importance, given that good levels of English and maths are linked to better economic and social outcomes. We want young people and adults to have the literacy and numeracy skills to thrive in work, education and life. That is why we already have a clear plan and are taking significant steps to support those who have not achieved grade 4 or above in English and maths.
All learners aged 16 to 19 are required to continue studying English and maths if they do not have a level 2 qualification in these subjects already, including, for example, those studying T-levels. Additionally, apprenticeships in particular have an exit requirement in English and maths in order to complete the programme. We also support adults by fully funding GCSE and functional skills qualifications in English and maths up to level 2 through the adult education budget. In addition, as of next year, we are rolling out Multiply, a new £559 million programme for adult numeracy, announced by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor at the spending review. This will significantly increase the provision and opportunities for adults to improve their maths skills.
More broadly, we have reformed functional skills qualifications, which are a widely acceptable alternative to GCSEs, improving their rigour and relevance. The Government have also established 21 centres for excellence in mathematics, designing new and improved teaching resources, building teacher skills and spreading best practice across the country through their wider networks. In response to disruption to education during the pandemic, a further £222 million has been provided to continue the 16-to-19 tuition fund for an addition two years from the 2022-23 academic year, allowing students to access one-to-one and small group catch-up tuition in subjects that will benefit the most, including English and maths.
Improving English and maths attainment is already a key part of the Government’s plans across higher, further and technical education. In 2020, 68% of 19-year-olds held grade 4 or above in both English and maths GCSE, which is an increase of 6 percentage points since 2013-14, the year before we required students to continue studying English and maths. This is a major step forward. The OECD’s 10-yearly survey of adult skills showed that in England people aged 16 to 65 currently perform significantly above the OECD average for literacy and around the OECD average for numeracy. The Government continually review the impact of policy, so a formal review at this time is not necessary.
Andrew Gwynne
I am heartened by what the Minister highlighted in his response to my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield about some of the Government’s attempts to close the attainment gap, but the reality is that it still exists and we should redouble our efforts to close it. I feel passionately about that because failing to get a good GCSE in English and maths can hold a young person back and deprive them of real opportunities later in life.
I know that from experience, because as I mentioned last Tuesday, in 1990 I left high school with a clutch of good GCSEs, but they did not include maths. I really struggled with maths at high school, much to the frustration of my dad, who was a maths teacher. It turned out that I had dyscalculia, so I struggled with numbers.
Mr Perkins
Those of us who have been on the Committee in the last week or so may well have been wondering what the next episode in the life story of my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish was, and we were not disappointed. [Laughter.] Joking aside, he makes an incredibly important point.
Too often in this place, there is a suggestion or an implication that if only the teaching was a bit better or there was a bit more application, everyone would have those GCSEs in maths and English. Actually, as my hon. Friend has laid out and as many others will know, students who are brilliant in many regards can have barriers that prevent them attaining those grades. It is a crucial issue for us. Thousands of other people out there have had their dreams similarly dashed by being unable to achieve those qualifications, so I appreciate what he has just said, which adds weight to the debate on new clause 5.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Alex Burghart
On a point of order, Mrs Miller. I hope you will indulge me for a few moments so that I can thank you and Mr Efford for the way in which you have shepherded us through these six sittings. It has been an honour and a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, particularly as this is my first Bill Committee on the Front Bench—
The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Michael Tomlinson)
Hear, hear.
Alex Burghart
Who knows? Perhaps it will be the last. It has been a pleasure to hear a debate of this quality, to enjoy Opposition Members’ paeans to the heady days of Thatcherism when there were great opportunities in the Manchester region, and to hear their fulsome praise for former Conservative Secretaries of State for Education. It is has been a privilege to listen to the sometimes philosophical debates about whether BTECs are brands. I feel that for the sake of future historians, we should put in Hansard how cold it has been in Committee Room 14. On one occasion, an hon. Lady had to bring in a blanket and wrap herself in it. Mrs Miller, thanks to you and Mr Efford, we have survived, and we look forward to taking the Bill forward.
Mr Perkins
On a point of order, Mrs Miller. On behalf of all my colleagues here, I add my thanks to you and Mr Efford for the work that you have both done and for your support through this debate, which has been very good natured and constructive, even if it was not, ultimately, as successful as we might have desired. I also place on record our thanks to the Clerks, who have been tremendously helpful in the enormous amount of work that we asked them to do. As always, we all very much appreciate the quality and timeliness of their work, and their diligence. I thank everyone who served on the Committee for their varying contributions, whether they were here for all of it or not.
The Chair
I thank the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman for those kind words. I thank you all for your constructive debate throughout the Committee, and I thank the Clerks and Hansard.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill, as amended, accordingly to be reported.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]
Monday 21st February 2022
(2 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 21 February 2021 - large version - (21 Feb 2022)
20:56 - The House divided: - Ayes: 154 / Noes: 298 - Question accordingly negatived.
21:12 - The House divided: - Ayes: 154 / Noes: 298 - Question accordingly negatived.
21:24 - The House divided: - Ayes: 158 / Noes: 291 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 1—Apprenticeships for prisoners—
“Notwithstanding any other statutory provision, prisoners in English prisons may participate in approved English apprenticeships, as defined by section A1 of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009.”
The aim of this new clause is to ensure that prisoners can start Apprenticeships while they are serving their sentence.
New clause 2—Provision of opportunities for education and skills development—
“(1) Any person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to Level 3 supplied by an approved provider of further or technical education, if he or she has not already studied at that level.
(2) Any approved provider must receive automatic in-year funding for any student covered by subsection (1), and supported by the Adult Education Budget, at a tariff rate set by the Secretary of State.
(3) Any employer receiving apprenticeship funding must spend at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at Levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25.”
This new clause would provide for education and skills development up to a Level 3 qualification for any person of any age supplied by an approved provider if they have not already studied at that level.
New clause 3—Amendments to section 42B of the Education Act 1997—
“(1) Section 42B of the Education Act 1997 is amended as follows.
(2) After subsection (1) insert—
“(1A) In complying with subsection (1), the proprietor must give a representative range of education and training providers (including, where reasonably practicable, a university technical college) access to registered pupils on at least three occasions during each of the first, second and third key phase of their education.”
(3) After subsection (2) insert—
“(2A) The proprietor of a school in England within subsection (2) must—
(a) ensure that each registered pupil meets, during both the first and second key phase of their education, with a representative range of education and training providers to whom access is given, and
(b) ask providers to whom access is given to provide information that includes the following—
(i) information about the provider and the approved technical education qualifications or apprenticeships that the provider offers,
(ii) information about the careers to which those technical education qualifications or apprenticeships might lead,
(iii) a description of what learning or training with the provider is like, and
(iv) responses to questions from the pupils about the provider or technical education qualifications and apprenticeships.
(2B) Access given under subsection (1) must be for a reasonable period of time during the standard school day.”
(4) After subsection (5)(a), insert—
“(aa) a requirement to provide access to a representative range of education and training providers to include where practicable a university technical college;”
(5) In subsection (5)(c), after “access” insert “and the times at which the access is to be given;”
(6) After subsection (5)(c), insert—
“(d) an explanation of how the proprietor proposes to comply with the obligations imposed under subsection (2A).”
(7) After subsection (9), insert—
“(9A) For the purposes of this section—
(a) the first key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 13, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year;
(b) the second key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 15, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year;
(c) the third key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 17, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year.”
This new clause is intended to replace Clause 14. This clause will ensure that section 2 of the Technical and Further Education Act 2017, commonly known as the Baker Clause, is legally enforceable.
New clause 4—Green Skills Strategy—
“The Secretary of State must, before the end of the period of 12 months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, publish a Green Skills Strategy, setting out a plan to support people to attain the skills, capabilities or expertise through higher education, further education or technical education that directly contribute to, or indirectly support, the following—
(a) compliance with the duty imposed by section 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008 (United Kingdom net zero emissions target),
(b) adaptation to climate change, or
(c) meeting other environmental goals (such as restoration or enhancement of the natural environment).”
This new clause would require the Secretary of State to publish a national green skills strategy which would set out a plan to support people to attain skills which will directly contribute to or indirectly support climate change and environmental goals.
New clause 5—Universal Credit conditionality review—
“The Secretary of State must review universal credit conditionality with a view to ensuring that adult learners who are—
(a) unemployed, and
(b) in receipt of universal credit
remain entitled to universal credit if they enrol on an approved course for a qualification which is deemed to support them to secure sustainable employment.”
This new clause is intended to ensure greater flexibility for potential students in receipt of universal credit to take up appropriate training that will better equip them for employment.
New clause 6—Skills levels in England and Wales: review—
“(1) Within one year of the passing of this Act, and each year thereafter, the Secretary of State must prepare and publish a report on overall levels of skills in England and Wales and their economic impact, including regional and demographic breakdowns.
(2) The report under subsection (1) must in particular examine—
(a) cohort sizes and compositions of all qualifications from entry level to level 8,
(b) cohort skill achievement rates, in terms of result breakdowns,
(c) cohort placement success rates, in terms of numbers in further qualifications or new employment within 12 months after achieving each qualification,
(d) job retention and labour market turnover,
(e) labour productivity, and
(f) job satisfaction and fulfilment.
(3) The report under subsection (1) must be laid before both Houses of Parliament.”
This new clause would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on overall skills levels and economic output across England and Wales.
New clause 7—Lifetime skills guarantee—
“(1) All persons have the right to study a fully-funded approved course for a qualification up to level 3 supplied by an approved provider of further, higher, or technical education if they—
(a) do not currently hold a level 3 qualification, or
(b) currently hold a level 3 qualification and would benefit from re-training.
(2) The Secretary of State must prepare and publish a list of approved courses for the purposes of subsection (1).
(3) The Secretary of State must consult on the list of approved courses to ensure that they are compatible with national levelling up and skills strategies.
(4) The Secretary of State must review the list of approved courses at least every six months with a view to ensuring that they reflect the skills needed as the economy changes.”
This new clause places the Government lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing, ensuring that those without an A-level or equivalent qualification, or who hold such qualification but would benefit from reskilling, are able to study a fully funded approved course.
New clause 8—National Strategy for Integrated Education —
“(1) The Secretary of State must, before the end of the period of 12 months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, publish a National Strategy for Integrated Education.
(2) A strategy under this section must—
(a) support the creation or development of courses offering integrated academic and vocational content, or a range of academic and vocational modules which can be combined into hybrid qualifications, at levels 4 to 8;
(b) support the creation or development of institutions offering courses under paragraph (a);
(c) set out a role for training programme providers in designing courses under paragraph (a).
(3) The Secretary of State must consult the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, Ofqual, and Quality Assurance Agency on any strategy to be published under this section.
(4) The Secretary of State must make regulations within 24 months of the passing of this Act to provide for such elements of the strategy as require enactment through statutory provisions.”
New clause 9—Integrated compatibility of modules and accreditation—
“(1) The Secretary of State must publish a National Accreditation Framework for Modular Learning. A framework must include guidance on—
(a) the unbundling of modular components of courses and qualifications;
(b) the stacking of modular components of courses and qualifications; and
(c) the transfer of modular components between institutions,
for the purposes of ensuring—
(a) (i) transparency;
(ii) mutual recognition of qualifications across academic, vocational and integrated further and higher education institutions; and
(iii) clarity on the options available to learners for unbundling or stacking modules into an overall qualification which meets the needs of their own professional development, and skills gaps within the national labour-market.
(2) The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, Ofqual, and Quality Assurance Agency must assist in the preparation of any framework under this section.
(3) A framework under this section must set out a role for the Institute, Ofqual and the Quality Assurance Agency in ensuring the effective operation of the framework.”
New clause 10—Role of employers in employee reskilling—
“(1) The Secretary of State may make regulations for the purpose of ensuring that employers provide—
(a) a minimum number of hours per year for in-work training and skills development for employees; and
(b) a minimum number of hours of retraining support for courses chosen at the discretion of former employees who have been made redundant, as part of an employer’s redundancy package.
(2) The minimum numbers of hours under section (1)(a) and (b) are to be set by the Secretary of State.
(3) In this section, “employer” has the same meaning as in section 4.
(4) The Secretary of State may, by regulation, establish a skills tax credit, for the purpose of—
(a) making allowance for funding the provision of time and training under subsection (1); and
(b) incentivising and rewarding employers for investing the skills development of their employees.”
New clause 11—Transition to 16+ education—
“(1) The Secretary of State may make regulations requiring local authorities to fulfil the function of an admissions authority with regard to admissions to further education courses provided within their administrative jurisdiction, for the purposes of ensuring admission to further education is allocated in an open and fair manner.
(2) Regulations under this section may require local authorities to run admissions processes in relation to further education in a manner comparable with the processes set out in Part III of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 in so far as they relate to the admissions processes for primary and secondary education.
(3) In this section, “further education” has the same meaning as in the Education Act 1996 (see section 2 of that Act).”
This new clause would allow the Secretary of State to require local authorities to run admission to further education in a manner comparable to admissions for primary and secondary education.
New clause 13—Access to Sharia-compliant lifelong learning loans—
“(1) The Secretary of State must make provision by regulations for Sharia-compliant student finance to be made available as part of the lifelong learning entitlement.
(2) Regulations under this section are to be made by statutory instrument, and a statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”
This new clause allows the Secretary of State to make provision for Sharia-compliant LLE loans.
New clause 14—Recognition of skills in the energy sector—
“(1) Within six months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must publish an Energy Sector Skills Strategy, for the purposes of—
(a) achieving cross-sector recognition of core skills and training in the offshore energy sector, including the oil and gas sector, and the renewable energy sector; and
(b) ensuring training and training standards bodies within the offshore energy sector adopt a transferable skills and competency-based approach to training.
(2) The strategy must target all workers, whether directly or indirectly (sub-contracted or agency) employed, or engaged through day-rate or self-employed contract models.
(3) When producing the strategy, the Secretary of State must consult with—
(a) workers within the offshore energy sector;
(b) unions within the offshore energy sector;
(c) energy companies; and
(d) training standards bodies relevant to the offshore energy sector.
(4) The Secretary of State must implement the strategy within 12 months of the passing of this Act. The Secretary of State may make regulations to provide for such elements of the strategy as require enactment through statutory provision.”
This new clause would facilitate cross-sector recognition of skills and training between the oil and gas sector and the renewable energy sector.
New clause 15—Retraining guarantee for oil and gas workers—
“(1) The Secretary of State must guarantee access to training, grants, resources and other support facilities to workers in the oil and gas sector, including—
(a) assessment of existing skills and training;
(b) understanding of skills matrices for careers in the offshore energy sector, including renewable energy and oil and gas;
(c) advice on alternative green energy jobs; and
(d) funding to complete training relevant to the green energy sector;
for the purpose of proactively supporting oil and gas workers wishing to transition to careers in the green energy sector, regardless of their current contract status.
(2) Support under this section must be made available to—
(a) all workers, whether directly or indirectly (sub-contracted or agency) employed, or engaged through day-rate or self-employed contract models; and
(b) workers who have recently left the oil and gas sector.”
This new clause would establish a retraining guarantee for oil and gas workers seeking to leave the sector, supporting them in transitioning to green energy jobs.
New clause 16—National review and plan for improving levels of adult literacy—
“(1) Within two years of the passing of this Act, and every two years thereafter, the Secretary of State must review adult literacy levels in England, for the purpose of improving adult literacy levels.
(2) A review under this section must identify the number of adults with literacy levels—
(a) below Entry Level 1,
(b) below Entry Level 2,
(c) below Entry Level 3,
(d) below Level 1, and
(e) below Level 2.
(3) The findings of a review under this section must be published in a report, which must be laid before Parliament.
(4) A report under this section must include a breakdown of the levels of adult literacy by local authority area.
(5) When a report under this section is laid before Parliament, the Secretary of State must also publish a strategy setting out steps the Government intends to take to improve levels of adult literacy in England.”
This new clause would require the Secretary of State to, every two years, review levels of adult literacy in England, publish the findings of that review and set out a strategy to improve levels of adult literacy in England.
New clause 17—Availability of humanities, social sciences, arts and languages courses—
“(1) The Secretary of State must review the availability of humanities, social sciences, arts and languages courses at Entry Level through to Level 4 in a specified area to which a local skills improvement plan relates.
(2) The outcome of a review under this section must be—
(a) provided to the relevant employer representative body for a specified area; and
(b) laid before both Houses of Parliament.
(3) Where a review under this section identifies inadequate availability of courses in a specified area, the Secretary of State must take steps to remedy this inadequacy, to ensure courses are available in all specified areas.
(4) A review under this section in relation to a specified area must be conducted each time the Secretary of State approves and publishes a local skills improvement plan for that specified area.”
This new clause requires the Secretary of State to review the availability of humanities, social sciences, arts and languages courses at Entry level to Level 4 in areas to which an LSIP applies. It would also require the Secretary of State to take steps to remedy inadequate availability of the courses.
Amendment 2, page 2, line 36, after “authority” insert
“and further education providers in the specified area”.
This amendment would provide for employer representative boards to develop local skills improvement plans in partnership with local further education providers.
Amendment 18, page 3, line 6, at end insert—
“(ba) draws on responses to a public consultation conducted by the relevant local authority for the specified area on the education and training that should be made available in the relevant area, and”
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to draw on responses to a public consultation run by the relevant local authority, when publishing a local skills improvement plan for a given area.
Amendment 16, page 3, line 10, at end insert—
“(d) lists specific strategies to support learners who have or have previously had, a statement of Special Educational Need or an Education and Health Care Plan into employment, including but not limited to provision for supported internships.”
This amendment would require local skills improvement plans to list specific strategies to support learners who have or have previously had, a statement of Special Educational Need or an Education and Health Care Plan into employment, including but not limited to provision for supported internships.
Amendment 14, in clause 2, page 3, line 15, after “England” insert
“with the consent of the relevant local authority, Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and, where relevant, Mayoral Combined Authority”.
This amendment provides for local authorities to give consent in the designation of employer representative bodies, to ensure employer representative bodies are representative of the areas they cover.
Amendment 4, page 3, line 20, after “employers”, insert
“and any relevant community, education, arts, faith and third sector organisations”.
Amendment 5, page 3, line 41, at end insert—
‘(6) The functions of the Secretary of State under this section may also be exercised by a relevant mayoral combined authority in England, where the designation relates to an area within their administrative jurisdiction, provided that education and skills are within the relevant authority’s devolved competence.”
Amendment 17, page 3, line 41, at end insert—
‘(6) Representative bodies which are employers, and employer organisations which are members of employer representative bodies, must sign up to the Disability Confident employer scheme within six months of being designated, or becoming a member of, the employer representative body.”
Amendment 6, in clause 3, page 4, line 18, at end insert—
‘(5) The functions of the Secretary of State under this section may also be exercised by a relevant mayoral combined authority in England, where the designation relates to an area within their administrative jurisdiction, provided that education and skills are within the relevant authority’s devolved competence.”
Amendment 12, in clause 6, page 7, line 23, at end insert—
‘(2A) The Institute shall perform a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy, paying particular regard to considering whether sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below are available.”
This amendment would require the Institute to perform a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy, and would require the Institute to pay particular regard to ensuring that sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below are available.
Amendment 15, in clause 7, page 10, line 37, at end insert—
‘(2A) Subsection (2) does not apply to the withdrawal of level three courses for the period of four years beginning with the day on which this Act is passed.”
This amendment seeks to reintroduce the Lord’s amendment (amendment 29), preventing IfATE from withdrawing approval of established level 3 courses including BTECs for four years.
Amendment 1, page 17, line 28, leave out clause 14.
This amendment is consequential on NC3.
Amendment 8, in clause 14, page 17, line 28, at end insert—
‘(A1) Section 42A of the Education Act 1997 (Provision of careers guidance in schools in England) is amended as follows—
“(d) is provided by a person who is registered with the Career Development Institute, and who holds a level 4 qualification.”’
Amendment 13, page 18, line 5, at end insert—
“(aa) ensure that each registered pupil receives two weeks’ worth of compulsory work experience,
(ab) ensure that each registered pupil receives face to face careers guidance, and”.
This amendment would require every school to provide face to face careers guidance for every pupil and two weeks’ worth of compulsory work experience for every registered pupil.
Amendment 7, page 19, line 1, at end insert—
‘(9B) Local Authorities shall have oversight of the provisions in subsection (2A) and subsection (5), for the purposes of ensuring the provision of careers advice is consistent and high quality.”
Amendment 3, in clause 15, page 20, line 29, at end insert—
‘(3) After section 22(2)(c) of the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 insert—
“(ca) for the establishment of a system of means-tested financial grants, for the purpose of ensuring that financial hardship is not a dissuading factor in the take-up of higher education or further education modules or courses.”’
Amendment 11, in clause 34, page 40, line 20, at end insert—
“(e) Sections [Recognition of skills in the energy sector] and [Retraining guarantee for oil and gas workers].”
This amendment is consequential on NC14 and NC15.
Government amendments 9 and 10.
Alex Burghart
It is a pleasure to open the debate on Report of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. We had a very good debate in Committee, and I look forward to contributions from Members from across the House today.
I rise to speak to new clause 12 and amendments 9 and 10 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. The Government announced their intention to table new clause 12 in Committee last November. It inserts three new sections into the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, and will give the Office for Students, the higher education regulator in England, an explicit power to publish information about its compliance and enforcement activity in relation to higher education providers.
It is important that the OfS is able to publish such information in the form of notices, decisions and reports, and it is in the public interest that it should be transparent in its work, particularly when it is investigating providers for potential breaches of the registration conditions placed on them by the regulator. Publication by the OfS regarding its compliance and enforcement functions will demonstrate that appropriate actions are being taken by the regulator, and that will ensure that the reputation of higher education in England is maintained, and that we bear down on poor provision.
Members can be reassured that this power will be discretionary, as there may be reasons why the OfS may not consider it appropriate to publish certain information. The new clause provides, in proposed new section 67A(5) of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, various factors that the OfS must take into account when deciding whether to publish, including the public interest, but also whether publication would or might seriously and prejudicially affect the interests of a body or individual. The OfS should be transparent about such work, showing the sector, students and the public that it is intervening when necessary, and consequently providing confidence in the regulatory system.
New clause 12 also includes provision in proposed new section 67C to protect the OfS from defamation claims when, for example, it announces the opening of an investigation or publishes regulatory decisions. This protection provides qualified privilege, meaning that there is protection unless publication is shown to have been made with malice.
Other regulators, such as the Competition and Markets Authority, Ofsted and the Children’s Commissioner, have similar powers and protections. We are seeking a power and protection in this new clause to ensure that the OfS has what it needs for the purpose of transparency, and note the need to be as consistent as possible across the statute book. We believe there will be little material impact on the sector as a result of this change, as it simply allows more transparency about what the OfS is already doing.
Publication of notices, decisions and reports will become increasingly important as the OfS scales up its work on driving up quality in higher education and on protecting freedom of speech and academic freedom under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.
Amendment 9 brings new clause 12 into force two months after Royal Assent, and amendment 10 amends the long title to cover new clause 12. I hope the House will support these amendments.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I rise to speak to amendments 12 to 16. I start by saying how much I welcome the interest among right hon. and hon. Members in improving this Bill. It is disappointing that the Bill was scheduled for debate on the first day back from recess, when the Government could have predicted that there would be a considerable number of other important statements, and so the House has less than two and a half hours to debate the 35 amendments before us. The further education sector has often been described as a Cinderella service and has often felt that its crucial role as the economic heartbeat of this country is undermined; there is nothing in the scheduling of this Bill or today’s debate to contradict that view.
Notwithstanding that, it is always a great pleasure to debate further education policy. Our country’s Government have presided over a productivity crisis, created a cost of living crisis because they are a high-tax, low-growth Government, and serially under-funded and undermined the institutions that are key to addressing those failings. Yet there is widespread recognition of the need for change, so there was considerable anticipation when the Government announced they were bringing forward a skills Bill to address a generation of failure.
We all remember that the White Paper that preceded the Bill was described as a “once-in-a-generation reform”, but Ministers seem determined to resist any substantive changes to the skills Bill. I wish those Conservative Members who have proposed amendments to the Bill well, but I am not hopeful that the Government are of a mind to allow their Bill to be improved.
We have a skills Bill here that is silent on apprenticeship reform. Our disappointment about the omission of apprenticeships from the Bill is compounded by the absence of any recognition that the apprenticeship levy has, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, “failed by every measure”.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. With great respect to the Government, the issue for me is the lack of detail when it comes to apprenticeships. Does he feel, as I do, that apprenticeships can play an important part in tackling the deficit by giving people a learning structure and valuable work experience that provides both the qualifications and the holistic skills needed for economic growth? If we want to do something to build economic growth, we need apprenticeships.
Mr Perkins
I could not agree more. I am glad to see the hon. Gentleman has overcome any shyness he may have had about speaking in this House and has decided to contribute to this debate, as he seems to contribute to them all, but he makes an important point. Apprenticeships are the gold standard as far as the Labour party is concerned. We believe they should be the heart of the Government’s approach, and it is hugely disappointing that apprenticeship numbers are down by a quarter since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy.
The apprenticeship levy has reduced the number of small businesses that have felt able to contribute to taking on apprentices; it has reduced the number of level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships and it is a significant failure in that regard. Indeed, our amendment 12, which asks for the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to
“perform a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy, paying particular regard to considering whether sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below”,
is the only opportunity to discuss the future of apprenticeships in this debate.
The funding of level 3 qualifications—an issue of contention since the Government tried to denigrate BTECs, to a widespread and welcome backlash—remains out of the scope of the Bill. Our amendment 15 seeks to reintroduce the four-year moratorium added in another place, to prevent hasty decisions from being made that could widen skills shortages and remove the opportunity to take BTECs. In Committee, the Government even rejected adding the one-year moratorium, which would extend funding of BTECs until 2024, to the Bill. I understand that the Secretary of State has confirmed that BTECs will continue to be funded until 2024, which is welcome, but it is disappointing that the Government were not willing to allow that to be added to the Bill.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the pain around BTECs is because they are usually the gateway for students on lower incomes, students from minority backgrounds and students with disabilities to get into further education? Taking that away is the very opposite of levelling up.
Mr Perkins
I absolutely agree with all of that. BTECs are also a qualification that is understood and respected by employers. They have a long-standing track record; they are respected by learners and understood by institutions. I am not hostile to the idea of improving them, if something can be done to bring in a better qualification. There is real merit in the potential of T-levels, and as a brand they have immediate buy-in, but the Government need to tread carefully. T-levels are changing shape in front of our eyes. They were brought in as a vocational qualification, but the Secretary of State’s current favourite anecdote is about a student from Barnsley who he met, who said he can go to any university he wants.
The T-level qualification started off on a vocational path, but the Government are now saying that it is a route towards universities—[Interruption.] It could potentially be both, but I must say that the Secretary of State’s predecessor, when it was discovered that Russell Group universities were not accepting T-levels, was very sanguine about it. He said, “They’re not about universities. They’re all about going towards the world of work.” This qualification is changing shape in front of our eyes, and the Government need to be careful before they get rid of things that work and replace them with their new qualification.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
One concern I have around T-levels, which I have raised with the Government before, is the work placement aspect and the fact that the availability of the T-level is therefore based on the availability of businesses to provide those work placements. My fear for areas such as Hull, which I represent, and others around the country is that if they do not have the placements, they cannot have the T-level. Therefore, that opportunity is denied to many students, unlike the generalisation of a BTEC, which means that wherever people are in the country, they can study for the same qualification.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend characteristically raises an important point, and she is entirely right. When I go and speak to FE colleges, there is widespread concern about the availability of the amount of T-level work experience that is required. Particularly in some communities that do not have high numbers of larger employers and for the smaller colleges, we think there will be real difficulty getting the amount of work experience that is currently envisaged. I suspect that if we look at this qualification in two or three years’ time, it will not have the same demands for work experience; that remains to be seen. However, I share my hon. Friend’s concern.
The amendments proposed by the Opposition and many of the 29 other amendments proposed by hon. Members on both sides of the House seek to make substantive changes to the Bill that could make a real difference and offer a possibility that it will fulfil the proud boasts we have heard from the skills Minister, and his predecessor about the scale of reform proposed.
The other huge disappointment that many of us feel about the Government’s approach to this whole question is their failure to get what further education and vocational education is all about, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) mentioned a moment ago. Further education is magical and transformative. For so many people who leave our statutory educational providers disillusioned and uninspired by education, FE has been life-changing. In my family, it was learning in FE that changed my son’s life and career opportunities; the same thing happened 20 years before for my sister, and I know it has happened for so many other people in all our constituencies. Yet the Government’s approach to this sector has been to inflict eye-watering cuts on it while continually repeating the same lament about employers not being in charge.
As we listen to the latest skills Minister’s claims about his reforms, it is worth recalling what went before them. In January 2011 the then skills Minister, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), said that the entire focus of our Government’s skills strategy was in
“building a training system that is employer led.”
In 2015 the former Chancellor, George Osborne, told us that we now had a system in the hands of an employer-led institute of apprenticeships, and his skills Minister at the time said of the levy:
“At the heart of the apprenticeship drive is the principle that no one better understands the skills employers need than employers themselves.”
Two years further on, in 2017, the Government said:
“The Apprenticeship Levy is a cornerstone of the government’s skills agenda, creating a system which puts employers at the heart of designing and funding apprenticeships to support productivity and growth.”
A year later, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) described local enterprise partnerships as
“business-led partnerships…at the heart of responding to skills needs…that will help individuals and businesses gain the skills they need to grow.”
So if the reforms in 2011, 2015, 2017 and 2018 all put employers in the driving seat, and if putting employers in the driving seat is the solution to addressing our productivity and skills crisis, why are the Government now coming back saying that there has been a generation of failure?
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
I was a BTEC graduate and I went to Wakefield College. Does my hon. Friend agree that hollowing out further education to the tune of 40%, and the gold standard of apprenticeships, goes against the very essence—the very notion—of levelling up? The Government should ensure that they are a driving force behind that with employers, and they are falling short.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Government have been at pains to denigrate BTECs. They should be very careful before they do that, particularly before they are absolutely clear that the thing they intend to replace them with has come through its pilot and they fully understand the consequences of the introduction of that policy.
It seems that after 11 years of reforms, all of which we are told have failed because the Government now need to make reforms to put employers in the driving seat, the Government’s approach is to abandon devolution and to outsource responsibility for skills policy to local chambers of commerce in the form of local skills improvement plans. We are used to this Government believing that services can be run better by the private sector than by Government, but they are now even outsourcing policy. We have real concerns about the way that LSIPs are envisaged in their current form. Of course employers, private and public sector, must be sat at the table, but so too should educational establishments, including independent providers and FE colleges, so too should those with local democratic accountability—local authorities and metro Mayors—and the voice of learners must be heard. Our amendment 14 seeks to do just that, ensuring that employer representative bodies will not just consult but reach agreement with metro Mayors, LEPs and local authorities prior to the publication of the LSIP. There are many concerns that LSIPs as currently envisaged will focus on strategies to help those closest to the labour market who can most easily slot in and solve employers’ skills shortages. Our amendment 16, inspired by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham, seeks to ensure that local skills improvement plans list specific strategies to support learners who have had a statement of special educational needs or an education, health and care plan, which will include supported internships.
Since 2010, the Government have consistently undermined the sector with the scale of their funding cuts, particularly to adult education. By scrapping Connexions, they left a generation of schoolchildren without careers advice. The introduction of the levy has seen starts decline, priced small and medium-sized enterprises out of the system, seen entry-level apprenticeships plunge, and prevented many 16 to 24-year-olds from gaining their first rung on the ladder. That is why we have proposed amendment 13, which enacts the policy announced by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) at the Labour party conference that reintroduces statutory two weeks’ worth of work experience and face-to-face careers guidance for every pupil, which was foolishly abolished by the 2010-15 coalition Government. We also seek to ensure that schools are assessed and recognised for the quality of their work experience and careers guidance offer, just as they are on other aspects of their provision.
I will not go through all the remaining 29 amendments proposed by hon. and right hon. Members, but I express particular support for new clause 2 in the name of the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) and others. Without that, there is no lifetime skills guarantee. We should recall what the Prime Minister said in his much-heralded Exeter College speech in September 2020:
“Of the workforce in 2030, ten years from now, the vast majority are already in jobs right now. But a huge number of them are going to have to change jobs—to change skills—and at the moment, if you’re over 23, the state provides virtually no free training to help you.”
I agree. Yet this Bill, which seeks to give legislative form to that speech, would exclude the very people that the Prime Minister was referring to. Indeed, we believe that the right hon. Member for Harlow’s amendment does not go far enough, and we tabled an amendment in Committee more closely aligned with new clause 7, proposed by the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore), but at least new clause 2 would make a lifetime skills guarantee for the first level 3 qualification a statutory right.
We also support the right hon. Member for Harlow’s new clause 3—the so-called Baker clause—which would ensure that every pupil had three meaningful interactions with the world of work at each of the three key phases of their education. This would ensure that more students would have more informed choices about their career options and the wide range of opportunities open to them. The right hon. Gentleman has been outspoken about the ways in which the current Baker clause, which he oversaw in his time in Government, is not working, and we support his intention to address it today. He, and the right hon. Member for Kingswood and the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), propose amendments that ask very valid questions of Ministers. I hope that their lordships will take notice of the level of support that there is for strengthening the Bill and preventing what is currently set to be a huge missed opportunity. I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has once again brought to our attention his new clause 13 concerning sharia-compliant loans, while in her new clauses 14 and 15 the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) poses some important questions concerning the lack of a coherent energy transition strategy.
This Bill remains a huge missed opportunity that will not offer the reform needed for our country to tackle the very real skills shortages that blight our local economies and damage the life chances of individuals across our communities. We hope that the Government will recognise that Opposition Members, and many of their own Members, wish to help them strengthen the Bill—the same is true of Members in the other place—and that they will look kindly on our amendments without the need for them to be pressed to a vote. We also hope that an approach will emerge that sees employers, metro Mayors, local authorities and others work collectively to develop a skills and qualifications system fit for purpose and able to compete with the very best across the world.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I remind everybody that at Report stage those making contributions should really be referring to the amendments or new clauses—this is not the time for general speeches.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
In rising to speak to my new clauses 1, 2 and 3, I give notice that I do not intend to press them to a Division.
The Government have already made it clear that they will make changes to prisoner apprenticeships. I am conscious of the financial considerations that need to be given to new clause 2. I have faith that the Secretary of State for Education believes deeply in skills and vocational education, and I hope to be able to continue to work with him to make improvements with regard to careers guidance and the Baker clause. I thank the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) for his support for my new clauses.
I welcome this Bill, which will revitalise an incredibly important part of the education sector that has seen its per-student funding reduced since 2010, although it is now going up again. The lifetime skills guarantee, the kickstart programme and the increase in support for FE colleges offer a revolutionary approach to building an apprenticeship and skills nation like never before. I commend the Secretary of State, Ministers and the former skills Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), on bringing forward this legislation.
Robert Halfon
I am delighted to give way to a former member of the Education Committee.
Emma Hardy
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), I support the right hon. Gentleman’s new clauses. Does he agree that we urgently need the lifelong loan entitlement consultation before we try to bring forward primary legislation—this Bill—to ensure that when that legislation comes, it actually deals with the problem that we are all trying to address?
Robert Halfon
I am all for consultations, but I want this Bill to happen as soon as possible. I have wanted something like this for many years. I do have issues with it that I am going to talk about, but I am very excited about it and just want it to happen without any further delay.
As I mentioned, I support the Bill as a whole, but I have always lived and worked by the mantra, “Good, better, best.” When I was growing up and learning to walk, my old physio used to say, “Good, better, best, may you never rest, until your good is better and your better is your best”—it is the sort of thing you see on a toilet wall sometimes, but it has been my mantra, and it is what I want for this Bill. That is why I proposed these three new clauses to make sure that the ladder of opportunity can be extended to those most in need.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
My right hon. Friend came to my constituency to visit Thorn Cross prison and to look at the education taking place in that open prison. Does he agree that it is because of businesses such as Timpson, which spends a lot of time working with prisoners and former prisoners, that we can ensure that many prisoners leaving the confines of prison find meaningful employment? However, it is important that we help those prisoners with that transition, so starting things such as apprenticeships in prison is really important.
Robert Halfon
My hon. Friend is right. By the way, the prison that the Select Committee visited is an extraordinary place—it was like going to a further education college for prisoners in category D. It had a jobcentre to get the prisoners into work and into skilled jobs. It is the kind of prison that should be replicated around the country.
As for Timpson, no one could say anything bad about that wonderful company—I say that as someone who gets his shoes, his belt and his watch fixed there. I have met employees who are former convicts, and they are extraordinary people. Timpson is a remarkable company and I hope that many other companies follow its example—just so that you are clear, Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not get any money for this, and I have no interest to declare.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
New clause 1 is excellent, and I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that it is good news that the Department and the Ministry of Justice want to work together on it. However, will he join me in urging Ministers to take special note of the position of women offenders and of the opportunities that apprenticeships can offer them?
Robert Halfon
As so often, the hon. Lady has got it absolutely right, and I am sure the Secretary of State has heard what she said. I hope very much that that is part of the regulations that he and the Justice Secretary introduce.
New clause 2 would provide funding for level 2 education and skills training for any person of any age, providing that they can demonstrate their intent to progress to level 3. The Education Committee’s adult skills and lifelong learning inquiry identified significant problems with low basic skills. Over 9 million working-age adults have poor literacy or numeracy skills, and 6 million adults do not have a level 2 qualification. Some 49% of adults from the lowest socioeconomic group have received no training since leaving school, and in the last 10 years just 17% of low-paid workers moved permanently out of low pay.
The lifelong learning entitlement is a really welcome intervention, allowing adults to undertake level 3 qualifications—the equivalent of an A-level—to retrain for different and better-paid jobs. However, we know that many of these adults will not have the skills needed to go straight into level 3 without further support. Level 2 qualifications are a key stepping-stone for progression for low-skilled adults. They provide those who have left school without GCSEs or equivalent qualifications with a vital chance of learning. Not having that stepping-stone of support is like asking someone who has little maths ability to dive straight into the deep end of A-levels without first learning to swim by taking GCSEs.
However, I recognise that there is a financial cost and that we are in difficult financial times. In 2018-19—the last year before covid—the adult education budget had a £56 million underspend nationally. More recently the trend of underspend has continued. In London only £110.6 million—60.7% of the £182 million given out to grant-funded providers through the adult education budget—had been spent by April 2021.
Investing in level 2 provision provides value for money for the taxpayer. Estimates suggest that for every £1 spent the net value is £21 and that could contribute an additional £28 billion to the economy. The Further Education Trust for Leadership review estimates that an additional £1.9 billion per year could be used to fund level 2 qualifications in maths, English and digital skills for the 4.7 million adults without such qualifications.
I get the financial restraints, which is why I will not press this new clause to a Division. However, I ask that the Government genuinely commit to look at funding options in the next spending review and particularly at using the underspend from budgets such as the adult education budget, even if they just introduce these provisions for maths and English. I would welcome the Minister’s views on that when he responds.
Finally, let me turn to the new clause I care most about. New clause 3 seeks to increase the number of careers guidance encounters that young people have at school and to toughen up what is called the Baker clause. As has been mentioned, I was the skills Minister responsible for bringing in the Baker clause in 2017, but despite the good intentions of all involved it has not been implemented correctly.
Mr Perkins
I have had so many encounters with young people doing apprenticeships. When I have spoken to them, they have said, “Although I’m doing an apprenticeship, they were hardly spoken about at school.” Everyone at their school seemed to be funnelled towards the sixth form, and lots of their friends and families had not heard of apprenticeships. That is precisely why this new clause is so important. We need to make sure that every young person, whether an A-grade student or not, has the opportunity to consider apprenticeships and other alternative strategies, as well as sixth form. That is why I really welcome this new clause, and I strongly encourage the right hon. Gentleman to put it to a vote.
Robert Halfon
I thank the hon. Gentleman, and he is absolutely right. I go all over the country, and my first speech in this House was about apprenticeships and careers. I have done everything possible since I have been an MP to promote apprenticeships across the country, and I have employed apprentices in my office. Whenever I go around the country and meet apprentices, the most depressing thing is that eight out of 10 say their schools told them nothing about apprenticeships—sometimes it is nine out of 10, and sometimes it is 10 out of 10. Worse, I have met degree apprentices doing the most incredible, high-quality apprenticeships in engineering or whatever it may be who have offered to go back to their schools to talk to the kids—to do one of those encounters—about apprenticeships, but the schools have said no. Why? Because we have a culture in this country of university, university, university. That is partly because every teacher has to be a graduate, and I hope that the Secretary of State will one day allow degree apprenticeships in teaching, not just postgraduate degrees in teaching. We have a culture that is university, university, university, when it should be skills, skills, skills.
The reason why I am not pushing the new clause is that, in my discussions with Ministers, they say they are going to deal with this problem properly. If I did not believe them, I promise you I would bring through the new clause, and those in the House who know me and who know how I campaign know that.
Jim Shannon
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. His last point, which was reiterated by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), is particularly important. Not every person is academically inclined. Not every person can get a degree. Not every person can progress in education. However, many people can grasp the opportunity of an apprenticeship. Back in Northern Ireland, which the Bill is not aimed at, we try to make those opportunities available through secondary schools and further education colleges. Businesses come in and show pupils the opportunities so that they can grasp that this is something they can succeed at. It is about giving young people the expectation and the opportunity to do something that they want to do and to do it well.
Robert Halfon
Of course I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The only thing I would say is that we must never see apprenticeships and skills as something lesser, or say that someone doing skills is not good enough for university or academia. It is quite the opposite, actually, with many apprentices now earning more than graduates. Graduates often cannot get jobs, and apprentices are getting higher wages.
To do an apprenticeship, gain a skill or go to an FE college is a great thing in life that should be seen as prestigious. We should not look down on that. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) talked about the Cinderella sector but, as I have always said, we should not forget that Cinderella became a member of the royal family. We should banish the two ugly sisters of snobbery and underfunding, which I hope the Secretary of State wants to do.
It grieves me to say that schools are not complying with the Baker clause, which has been mentioned in interventions. How can it be, if we are trying to build a skills nation, that we are not giving young people the chance to learn about the technical and vocational educational pathways that exist to support their careers? I worry about the traditionalists, still running rampant, who just want everyone to go to some kind of old-fashioned Oxbridge-type university. As I said, their attitude is university, university, university, when it should be skills, skills, skills. We need the curriculum to better prepare people for the world of work. It should be “Goodbye, Mr Chips” and “Hello, James Dyson” and I urge Ministers to listen to James Dyson—I will be inviting him to the Education Committee for our skills inquiry—because he and many others understand what needs to happen to the curriculum.
My new clause 3 would toughen up the legislation and require schools, technical colleges and apprenticeship providers to talk to pupils about vocational options. It would provide for nine careers guidance meetings in total, with three in each key year group—years 8 and 9, years 10 and 11 and years 12 and 13—rather than just the miserly current offer of three meetings in total. One meeting a year is nothing. We need this stuff going on all the time, with as much encouragement as possible. I actually think that asking for just three meetings a year is low and cautious, so I am trusting the Government to move at least some of the way on this.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman is being generous with his time. I speak as a former careers adviser and someone who used to train careers advisers, so this is music to my ears. I speak as a former adviser not through being in this place but because the right to and guarantee of impartial professional careers guidance have been decimated over time. I support the good intentions behind new clause 3 and agree 100% that we need parity of esteem between vocational and so-called academic education.
Robert Halfon
I really appreciate that support. The hon. Gentleman knows so much about this area, so having his backing means a lot.
I have visited my wonderful Harlow College nearly 100 times since being elected in 2010. FE colleges and apprenticeship providers give disadvantaged people the chance to climb the educational ladder of opportunity and to meet our skills needs. They earn while they learn—no debt to worry about—and they get a good wage, and 90% of them get jobs in the company that employed them as an apprentice. We have much to do on this, but we will only change things in this country if we transform the culture around careers. We really mean it when we say that we want people to go into schools and encourage a skills-based education and that the curriculum must prepare people for the world of work.
I stress again—this is my final point, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I know many people want to speak—that this lifetime skills Bill is a wonderful Bill. I am incredibly happy that it is backed by billions of pounds, which should be welcomed. We are offering every single person a level 3 qualification in a core subject, which is revolutionary. We are giving more support for further education, which is wonderful. I just ask the Minister to accept my suggestion or to really move on this to make a difference, so that when it comes to levelling up we know that skills, apprenticeships and further education are No. 1 in the Government’s priorities.
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
I rise to speak in support of new clauses 14, 15 and 11, which at their core support a just transition for North sea oil and gas workers by removing the barriers they face in transitioning into renewable energy, and ensuring that they can access the support and training needed. I may press new clause 14 to a vote if necessary.
In recent weeks, Ministers have rightly emphasised the need to support oil and gas workers. However, they have done so by resorting to more investment in extraction in the North sea, contradicting the advice of the International Energy Agency and threatening the ambition of the Glasgow climate pact to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°.
Research published in 2020 by Friends of the Earth Scotland, Platform and Greenpeace shone a light on the experiences of offshore oil and gas workers—I will come to some of their comments in a minute—and revealed a high level of concern about employment, job security and working conditions. However, it also showed a significant appetite to be a part of the transition to a zero-carbon economy, with over 80% of those surveyed saying they would consider moving to a job outside the oil and gas industry and over half choosing to transition into renewables and offshore wind if they had the opportunity to retrain and were supported in doing so. New clauses 14 and 15 would help to realise that ambition, while ensuring that in achieving our climate goals we do not leave communities behind and repeat the mistakes of the past.
The Minister may point to the North sea transition deal, announced by the Government last year. However, in reality that initiative has failed to provide any real support for workers to transition into renewables, either in investment or policy. Unfortunately, as things stand, training is a barrier and not a passport to future success. Training certificates for wind energy and the oil and gas industry are not transferable between the sectors or recognised by the two separate training standards bodies, with both OPITO and the Global Wind Organisation claiming that their training courses are too specific.
That means that offshore workers seeking to transition into renewables from oil and gas are required to complete entirely new training courses, which often come at a prohibitive cost. That is an insurmountable barrier for workers who are already paying an average of £1,800 a year, out of their own pockets, to maintain their training and safety qualifications. While some courses are unique to different environments, many cover core skills that run across the offshore energy sector, including first aid, fire safety and working at heights. Rather than narrowly focusing on courses, we should move to a skills-based approach, with standardised training where possible and top-up training available for specific environments.
Paul, an offshore oil and gas worker, says very clearly that the
“biggest problem that faces the energy work force wanting to make the transition from offshore oil and gas to renewables is the cost of the extra training needed. Some of the GWO (renewable training governing body) training is essential but most of it is a duplication of the courses used in offshore oil and gas.”
That comment is reinforced by Jack, another worker, who says he has
“thought about working in renewables, but that’d be thousands of pounds you’d have to pay to work in both industries. It’d just be too much, it costs an absolute fortune just to stay in one sector… Shelling out all this money does cause stress, and it does have an impact on your family and your living costs. There are lots of people worrying about how they’re going to pay the mortgage.”
This situation simply cannot go on.
Before recess, the Government announced that they were hitting the
“accelerator on low-cost renewable power”
by moving to annual contracts for difference auctions, yet to genuinely realise this ambition, offshore workers must be supported to transition into renewables, not face multiple barriers to do that. This is a skilled workforce whose knowledge and experience are absolutely essential if we are to achieve the UK’s climate goals in a timely manner.
What would these amendments do? New clause 14 would require the Secretary of State to produce and implement a strategy to achieve the cross-sector recognition of core skills and training in the offshore energy sector, and to ensure that training standards bodies adopt a transferable skills and competency-based approach to training. Crucially, this strategy would apply to all workers whether they are directly employed or contract workers, and they would have to be consulted in its development. This amendment would enable oil and gas workers to access jobs in renewable energy. It would also mean that, while there are not sufficient jobs in renewable energy as capacity continues to be built up, workers are able to take contracts in both sectors and then move between them. It would prevent a skills drains as people leave the energy sector altogether due to difficulties with finding work, and the cost and time involved in maintaining training certificates.
New clause 15, which is complementary, would establish a retraining guarantee for oil and gas workers seeking to leave the sector, thereby supporting them in transitioning to green energy jobs. It would also ensure that they are able to access advice on suitable jobs based on their existing skillsets, as well as the funding and training needed to transition. Again, all oil and gas workers are eligible for the retraining guarantee, as well as those who have recently left the sector. This amendment would provide clear pathways for oil and gas workers into clean energy, meaning they are not left behind in transitioning to a zero-carbon economy. It would also be infinitely more affordable if accompanied by new clause 14, meaning that workers are not required to duplicate training courses. Amendment 11 would ensure that the new clauses are applicable to Scotland, which is of course essential to facilitate a just transition for workers in the North sea.
These amendments are backed by the workers who operate in this industry. Crucially, they reflect the concerns of workers and their call for cross-sector recognition of skills and training. Some 94% of respondents to a 2021 survey of offshore workers said that they would support an offshore passport that licenses accredited workers to work offshore in any sector through a cross-industry minimum training requirement. An offshore training passport is also backed by the RMT and Unite Scotland. These organisations have also called for the establishment of a training fund for the offshore passport as part of the North sea transition deal. The RMT is backing these amendments, and as Lewis—no relation—a drilling consultant from Aberdeen with 40 years of experience in the oil industry, says, “An offshore passport would be a fantastic thing. I think it is absolutely brilliant and essential for my future.”
As it stands, the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill is a missed opportunity for climate. A recent Green Alliance report revealed a significant skills shortage in every major sector of the economy, from energy efficiency to battery manufacturing and the energy industry. The Bill could have been an opportunity to close the green skills gap and prepare us for the zero-carbon economy of the future. On Second Reading, the Secretary of State said:
“Skills are about investing in people all across our country, about strengthening local economies”.—[Official Report, 15 November 2021; Vol. 703, c. 381.]
These amendments would deliver just that, ensuring that offshore oil and gas workers are able to gain the training and skills they need to access good green jobs, while ensuring that we support communities affected by the UK’s transition to a zero-carbon economy and maintain vibrant local economies. These amendments also complement the objectives of the Bill to
“ensure everyone, no matter where they live or their background, can gain the skills they need to progress in work at any stage of their lives”,
and to
“increase productivity, support growth industries and give individuals opportunities to progress in their careers.”
I hope that the Government look closely at these amendments and recognise that there is much more they need to do to genuinely support oil and gas workers and to make a just transition in this sector a reality.
Mr Perkins
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for adding his name to this amendment, as a lead sponsor, and I think he has made a very important point. Coming off the back of COP26 and all the warm words we heard then, does he agree with me that for the Government, over the course of the next six months, simply to publish an energy sector skills strategy—we are not expecting them to go any further than that at this stage, but simply to show that they have a plan—is the very least that people listening to those warm words from the Prime Minister at COP26 would expect?
Clive Lewis
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I agree entirely. We can already see, before the ink is dry on the COP26 agreement, that the Government are back-tracking. We only have to look at history. Many Conservative Members will look at what happened in the 1980s with the demise of the mining industry and say, “Well, we were the first to ensure that we decarbonised our economy”, when actually this was a tragedy. If we look at what happened with deindustrialisation and what happened in the mining industry, we see that actually the whole reason for the necessity of the levelling-up agenda is that there was not a just transition. This is an opportunity for us to ensure that we do not make the same mistakes as we have in the past, and that we play our part in making sure that we get to net zero in a timely manner. I think that is what most people in this House and out in the country would want, and on that I shall finish.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak today in support of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. Ensuring that everyone has access to high-quality training and education throughout their lives is vital. I come from a family of teachers, and I retrained in my 40s so that I myself could teach, so I am particularly passionate about the opportunities that the Bill will open up. I want to take this opportunity to highlight the support of my local FE college for some of tonight’s proposed amendments.
Much is said of talent being spread equally across our country, but opportunity is not. That is particularly true in North Devon: it is not just in the country where opportunity is not equally spread, but in our county as well. We are over 60 miles from any university, and our youngsters do not in general see university as a natural next step post 18. Devon is particularly short of highly-qualified young people. Just 24% of 20 to 29-year-olds have a degree, which is one of the lowest levels in the country. It is against this backdrop that our excellent and sole further education college, Petroc, which educates over 9,000 learners and works with hundreds of employers, is well placed not only to welcome this Bill, but to highlight areas it would like to see strengthened.
Like me, the college highlights how coastal and rural areas such as North Devon have particular challenges that are masked by aggregating data, even to a county level, when our county is the size of Devon and has such variance in opportunity across its beautiful rural and coastal spread. The college was keen that I should highlight its support for new clause 7, as it is particularly concerned that the lifetime skills guarantee includes subsequent level 3 courses, so that those without an A-level or equivalent qualification, or those who hold such a qualification but would benefit from reskilling, are able to study on a fully-funded and approved course. This would facilitate adults being able to remain in North Devon and acquire new skills, enabling them to take advantage of the new jobs opening up in the area, whereas at present staying in North Devon means remaining in low-paid, low-skill employment, despite the multiple high-skilled job vacancies that do not match our local skill base.
We also hope that steps can be taken to revisit universal credit conditionality, as in new clause 5, so that those on benefits are encouraged to increase their skills to enable them to seek better employment. I recognise the challenges in this space, but similarly we need to encourage those who, due to the seasonality of our vital tourism and hospitality economy, spend part of each year on universal credit, as in North Devon, to upskill so that they can work throughout the year, as well as to encourage employers to stay open longer and extend our tourism season, given the growth in winter visitors we have seen post pandemic.
North Devon, like many other remote, rural and coastal locations, has particular challenges in raising aspiration, improving educational outcomes and enabling adults to upskill.
Emma Hardy
The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and I just want to echo the support for universal credit conditionality. I represent an urban seat that faces similar but different challenges from hers, and I completely support the idea that universal credit should still be allowed; we do not have an issue of seasonal workers, but we do have an issue of people on universal credit not always being able to get the opportunity to do the training they want, because they are forced to take zero-hours contracts instead. As the hon. Lady says, there is opportunity everywhere, but only if we make it so. I just wanted to speak in support of what she was saying on this.
Selaine Saxby
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and I spend much time discussing the opportunities of universal credit on the Select Committee on Work and Pensions.
Unlike the cities, remote rural and coastal locations such as those in my constituency face particular challenges in raising aspiration, improving educational outcomes and enabling adults to upskill. It is vital that more acknowledgement be given to the needs of these communities, which do not always fit well into a city-centric system. I very much hope there will be opportunities to work with the new education team to further develop this vital Bill, so that it works even better for remote and rural constituencies and really does deliver equal opportunity across communities such as North Devon.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
We know that a Bill is flawed when not one, not two, but three previous Education Secretaries and Ministers from across the political spectrum seek to amend it. The Lords Baker, Blunkett and Willetts worked hard to stop the ending of funding for BTECs, qualifications taken by more than 250,000 students last year, so it is a shame that the Government sought to remove the Lords amendment. I back amendment 15 in the name of the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), which supports funding for BTECs for a further four years.
The Liberal Democrats support T-levels, but the newer courses are only 25% practical and 75% academic, which puts them out of reach of some students who achieve lower grades in their GCSEs—exactly the cohort who flourish on the employment-focused BTEC pathway. We need to allow T-levels extra time to bed in. Frankly, an extra year for BTECs, as proposed by the Secretary of State, is simply not enough.
New clause 11, which is in my name, seeks to address a gap that we have identified in support for 16-year-olds as they transition within the education system. This gap exacerbates inequalities. Some young people face making life-changing decisions on the spot, with no clear idea about their options and the likely consequences. One example I heard from my constituency involved two boys who did not quite make their expected GCSE grades. Their chosen very popular local school for sixth form refused to offer them a place on their choice of A-level courses, because others with higher grades were prioritised ahead of them, and only offered them places on under-subscribed, less academic courses. A decision had to be made immediately. One of the boys had parents who had not been to university, and who struggled to provide him with appropriate advice; he was not offered advice from elsewhere. That cannot be right.
Unlike reception, 11-plus, and even university admissions, there is no oversight of 16-plus admissions, yet arguably it is the most crucial point—a time when a student’s options are permanently narrowed. There is no central body managing the process, no appeals process, and no data gathered to track whether the local offer matches what the learners want to study. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) and I have tabled an amendment that would give local authorities the powers and resources to run admissions for this crucial 16-plus transition in the same way that they do for primary and secondary education, and it would include a full register to ensure no young person slips through the cracks. Although I will not press this amendment to a Division tonight, I hope Ministers will look seriously at this important issue, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.
There are many good amendments on local skills improvement plans, and it is important that recommendations be taken on board from bodies such as the Local Government Association, who would require LSIPs to be developed in partnership with local authorities and further education providers. The views of interested parties such as local employers, and other education providers including universities, must be taken into consideration, too. Also, the needs of disabled people should be front and centre when developing all these plans and policies, as one of the amendments suggests.
Finally, on universal credit, I am incredulous that a Government who claim they want to make work pay and move people from welfare into high-quality, well-paid jobs—which all of us across the House would support—have removed a Lords amendment allowing students to keep their universal credit entitlement while studying. Education is the pathway between unemployment and fulfilling, interesting, valuable employment, so why would any barriers and disincentives be placed in the way? I urge the Government to reconsider their position on this issue and to support new clause 5, which comes from their own Back Benchers.
In conclusion, this Bill gives us the chance to realise that education should be an opportunity for life, whatever people’s circumstances. That opportunity should be freely available, whether to a young person starting out in life, a parent who is ready to go back to study, or someone who wants to retrain to improve their job prospects. Given the immense skills shortages this country is facing, and the green and digital revolutions we are experiencing, this Bill is a very welcome step forward, but it has serious flaws. It is a shame that some excellent amendments from the Lords have been thrown out, and that a number of those in today’s amendment paper are not being considered or accepted by this Government. I urge them in particular to look again at the defunding of BTECs, transitional arrangements for 16 year-olds, and barriers to education for those on universal credit.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. We need to start the wind-ups at a quarter to nine, so if everybody could take about six minutes— interestingly, the last speaker’s contribution was exactly six minutes—we should all be able to get in, and I will not have to introduce a time limit.
Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)
I will do my best, Madam Deputy Speaker, to squeeze my remarks on the 12 amendments in my name into six minutes, but I apologise in advance if I run slightly over.
To echo the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), we are all here to make a good Bill better—to make it the best possible Bill—and I hope that the Minister will reflect on my amendments, which I do not intend to press to a Division, so that we can continue the dialogue and make sure that the Bill truly shines by the end of this democratic process.
My new clause 4 would require the Secretary of State to publish a green skills strategy. This has been recommended by the Institute for Government and the Confederation of British Industry, and has been backed by several Members from across the House. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Education have already commissioned a report from the new green jobs taskforce, which laid out several recommendations on how to deliver on the Government’s green jobs target in the “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution”. That included publishing a net-zero strategy to promote good green jobs, yet we know that the UK will need 170,000 more workers to qualify each year in home insulation, renewable energy and electric vehicle manufacturing, and infrastructure upgrades if we are to meet our net-zero targets. The think-tank Onward has predicted that approximately 1.7 million jobs will need to be created in the net-zero industries by 2030, of which 1.3 million are in occupations that require strong, low and medium-level technical qualifications, which are in critically short supply. It is a no-brainer: the Government should make the concession at the Dispatch Box, either in this House or the other place, that we should, although perhaps not in this Bill, look at publishing a green skills strategy. That is vital for the joined-up thinking and whole-of-Government approach that is needed for net zero.
I will seek to bundle up the next series of amendments, appropriately enough, into mini amendment modules, but I first declare an interest: I tabled these amendments as chair of the Lifelong Education Commission, which I established in lockdown; having been reshuffled out of Government, I decided, with time on my hands, that I would set up this commission. I have received administrative support from the think-tank ResPublica, which has helped me prepare the amendments and a number of reports.
New clause 6 would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on overall skills levels and economic output across England and Wales. It can be taken with amendments 7 and 8, which would require careers advisers to hold a level 4 qualification, and which would give local authorities oversight of the provision of careers guidance for the purposes of ensuring consistency and quality. If the Bill is to succeed, there needs to be a better joined-up effort to monitor changes in the UK’s skills provision and how that is reflected in the economy. An annual report would allow data sets to be created that would provide information at national and local levels, so that areas of success and concern could be identified for targeted support. That should cover all qualifications from entry level to level 8, and details should be given on the size and composition of each cohort.
To help local authorities better craft their local skills improvement plans, such a review should include relevant information about local labour markets, and data on job retention, labour market turnover, and different measures of labour productivity. That is important for transparency, but we should be mindful of the need to balance that against data burdens on institutions, including education providers. An annual report should therefore build on existing work carried out in market intelligence on post-16 skills and education data.
On careers advice, the level 4 qualification requirement that I set out in amendment 7 should apply to all school, college and university career advisors. The Government should also take steps to ensure that mandatory registration with the Career Development Institute is not needlessly burdensome or expensive. That means crafting a national careers strategy at the same time, and working closely with further education colleges, who are best placed to design and deliver dedicated careers advisory courses.
I turn to new clause 7, which I will consider with amendment 3. The new clause would place the Government’s lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing, ensuring that those without an A-level or equivalent qualification, or those who hold such a qualification but would benefit from reskilling, can study a fully funded approved course. Retraining or reskilling sometimes means gaining a qualification a lower level than others that we have already reached in our learning trajectory, and anyone who wants to gain an equivalent or lower qualification should be able to access Government funding for that.
The ELQ rules should be explicitly removed as a condition for claiming a lifelong loan entitlement. Neither the lifetime skills guarantee nor the lifelong loan entitlement are truly lifelong if people who already have a level 3 to level 6 qualification are excluded from obtaining any more funding. The programme needs to be as broad and simple as possible to encourage—not discourage—participation, and should cover all provision up to level 3, irrespective of whether learners are taking a full qualification or taking one for the first time. That means removing all barriers, including any limits on repeating level 3 qualifications.
Amendment 3 would expand financial support for higher and further education courses to include means-tested grants for the purposes of ensuring that financial hardship is not a barrier to reskilling. The Bill still has limited detail about the exact structure of the LLE and how it will operate, such as the minimum credit level required to access it. In the light of that, I welcome the launch of a panel under the Minister for Higher and Further Education to review the structure and purpose of the LLE. As long as the LLE relies on a system of loans rather than grants, it will be difficult to encourage uptake in adult skills improvement among young people without assets, savings or other reserves to serve as a financial cushion. The LLE therefore risks becoming a clear clause of inequity between age groups in the education system. An 18-year-old choosing which education path to go down will have a different perspective on loan debt from someone in their 30s, 40s or 50s. As we advance through our careers, we accumulate more financial commitments, such as rent or mortgage payments and the costs of family care and support, and that makes career jumps much harder to undertake than career starts. A proper commitment to lifelong learning needs an explicit national decision about what we are prepared to fully fund. We need a national system of means-tested grants, targeted at the most disadvantaged.
I turn to new clause 8, which I will consider with new clause 9. New clause 8 would require the Secretary of State to publish a national strategy for integrated education. It would set out a plan for developing courses that had a mixture of academic and vocational content at levels 4 to 8, and would support the creation and expansion of institutions offering such courses. New clause 9 would require the Secretary of State to set out a framework of national guidelines for the unbundling, stacking and transfer of modular course credits between institutions. It would also set out a role for Ofqual, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to ensure that such a framework operates effectively. I will not go into further details on that; needless to say, such flexibilities need to be worked out at a far more granular level, and any credit system will need to be more sophisticated than just letting learners accrue a certain number of points.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
To be of assistance, I am going to put in place a six-minute time limit. If we cannot stick to my helpful guidance, not everybody will get in.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
We are having an interesting debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) on the case that he set out from the Front Bench by rightly highlighting that, every couple of years, the Government say they will solve the skills problem by putting employers at the centre, and it never works, so they come back and do the same thing again. He was also right to highlight the failure of the apprenticeship levy, about which the Government were warned.
I rise to speak to new clause 13 in my name. Nine years ago, the Government pledged to introduce alternative student finance, but it still has not been delivered, barring large numbers of Muslims from higher education. The problem became a serious one in 2012, when tuition fees were drastically raised and student loans became essential for pretty much everybody. For some British Muslims, having to take an interest-bearing student loan simply meant that they could not go to university at all. Riba—interest—is prohibited in Islam as it was in Christianity until the middle ages. Some Muslim young people defer university until they have saved to pay the fees outright. Some, with a heavy heart, take out a loan and feel bad about it ever after. Others do not attend at all. That is the reality facing young British Muslims today.
Last October, Muslim Census published the findings of a survey on the scale of the problem. It concluded that, every year, 4,000 Muslim students opt out of university altogether because alternative student finance is not available, 6,000 choose to self-fund, severely limiting their course choice and student experience, and four in five who took loans felt conflicted as a result, sometimes leading to mental health consequences requiring clinical intervention. It is in nobody’s interests to fail such a large group of bright young people who we need to contribute their full potential in the years ahead. As Prime Minister, David Cameron promised to change that. At the World Islamic Economic Forum in London in 2013, he said:
“Never again should a Muslim in Britain feel unable to go to university because they cannot get a student loan - simply because of their religion.”
The promise he made was very clear. Nine years later, there is still not even a timetable for keeping it. It looks to young Muslims as if Ministers simply cannot be bothered.
A year after David Cameron’s speech, a Government consultation attracted 20,000 responses—a record at the time—on a proposed takaful system, in which students pay into the system to guarantee each other against loss. This co-operative structure is generally recognised as sharia-compliant. Repayments, debt levels and cost to the Government would be the same as for conventional student loans. But progress since then over eight years has been glacial. In November 2015, a Green Paper said:
“we are looking to develop the ‘Takaful’ product more fully.”
A White Paper the following year said there was a “a real need” to support students who felt unable to use interest-bearing loans and that:
“we will introduce an alternative student finance product for the first time”—
which—
“will avoid the payment of interest”.
That was seven years ago. In 2017, campaigners hoped the new Higher Education and Research Act 2017 would enable a takaful loan model. Ministers then said that the May 2019 Augar review would cover it. It did not, but ever since Ministers have used the forthcoming response to that report as a justification for still not doing anything. The response to the Augar review was supposed to be published at the time of the spending review, but six months later there is still no word.
British Muslims make up nearly 5% of the UK population and almost 10% of students. In the borough I represent, Muslims are about a third of our population. It is extremely hurtful that the Government simply cannot be bothered to keep the promise they made nine years ago to so many people. Thousands of young Muslims miss out on university. Others struggle over the conflict between what they believe and their hopes for higher education. Our system should not be doing that to people, as the Government recognised nine years ago. New clause 13 requires the Secretary of State to at last make the long-awaited regulations. I hope the House and the Minister will support it.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I rise to speak on new clause 4 and will make a brief round-up in support of new clauses 2, 5 and 7.
On new clause 4—our proposal for a green skills strategy—I and others firmly believe that we have a green skills emergency and that net zero cannot happen without know-how. Existing workers, who in some cases are already losing their jobs due to covid or chronic instability in the oil and gas sector, can be brought over to new industries such as wind, low carbon, hydrogen and energy-efficient homes. Meanwhile, young people want to work in sectors they know are good for them and good for the planet. Providing green skills is therefore a positive part of the net zero debate. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister, and the Department, to seize this opportunity, with his leadership and influence over other Departments. Young people will not only be prepared for the future, but provide solutions for the future.
I welcome the much-needed focus on how the country will deliver its net zero targets, and what they mean for individuals and families. That honest conversation cannot come soon enough. We have lived with our 2050 targets for some time now. The majority of people want to protect the planet and ensure they leave a healthy environment for their children, grandchildren and future generations. Yet people are nervous. With inflation and energy prices starting to bite and the cost of paying for the pandemic in the background, it is understandable that suggestions that they are going to be forced into changing their cars, changing the way they live or insulating their homes in an expensive way are quite terrifying for some. However, when I speak to families who are worried about that aspect of the 2050 targets, they are absolutely clear that they recognise there are jobs to be had not only for them, but their children.
We know that the market will do a lot of the work of creating demands for a skilled net zero workforce, but the market also needs help to plug gaps to ensure the right qualifications are in the right place. Unfortunately, education settings are not quite there yet. They need more support to deliver courses and qualifications. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) made a few points about what we are missing. Only 5% of mechanics know how to fix an electric car. In 2019, only 3,500 workers could install energy-efficient measures. It is estimated that we will need an additional 20,000 engineering graduates a year.
In Stroud, a combination of businesses—Active Building Centre, South Gloucestershire and Stroud College, The Green Register—have come together. We recognise there is a lack of standardisation in qualifications, and a lack of understanding and confidence on the part of the public around being able to hire people who know what is best for their homes and next steps. If we do not grasp this issue, we will not provide that confidence to the public and to the tradespeople who want to retrain and reskill. They will not invest in a course if they do not think it will be important next year and the year after. They want guidance from the Government and they need to know that the public will believe in it. I fear that if we do not do that, we will end up with cowboys in the market or people not taking the actions we know they need.
It is not just my amazing Stroud experts who talk to me about this issue all the time, but small, medium and big companies. I have had some good conversations with SSE, which was one of the first companies in the world to publish a just transition strategy. It sets out a number of principles for supporting the transition to net zero in a socially just and fair way. Key principles for green jobs and skills include guaranteeing fair and decent work, and attracting and growing talent. It has created principles for action and I urge the Department to look at them if it has not already done so. I believe the example recommendations for the Government fit very neatly into what we think could be a green skills strategy by the Department for Education, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Government as a whole.
Arguably, the Government do not need to wait for Back-Bench MPs to agitate for a green skills strategy and nor does it really need to be in legislation. My hon. Friend the Minister can agree to create a green skills strategy, or get his bosses to do so, and set out a plan to support people to attain education that creates the support and meets environmental goals. I therefore urge the Education team to work with us those of us on the Back Benches to do that work and support the plans. We can certainly bring some fantastic examples to make that a reality.
Very briefly, in conjunction with my local further education college, South Gloucestershire and Stroud College, which the Minister very kindly came to visit, I support new clauses 2 and 7, which put the lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing and extend it to level 3 courses, so that those without A-level or equivalent qualifications will still benefit from fully funded courses. I believe that the college spoke to the Minister about that when he was with us. I also support new clause 5, on reforming benefit entitlement rules, so that people on benefits can still attend college while unemployed without losing out. However, I am very grateful for the passage of the Bill at pace.
Kate Green
There are very many sensible amendments before us this evening. I am very pleased to support new clause 16 on adult literacy, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood), and to add my name to new clause 13, which my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has just spoken about, on an issue of great importance to my constituents. Many Muslim families are unable to access non-compliant funding and are forced, as a result, to either wait many years while they save up to pay outright or take out a loan they feel uncomfortable with that is incompatible with their faith. I also know of families who have been able to send only one child to university, an invidious decision for any family to have to make. As we have heard, it is simply ridiculous that nine years after David Cameron first, and rightly, committed to taking action on sharia-compliant funding, we still have no timeline even for when the Government intend to bring forward proposals.
Andy Carter
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) and to speak in this debate, because I spoke in the last such debate, and I was part of the Bill Committee, too. I will refer to new clause 1 and touch on new clauses 14 and 15, but I will start by echoing many of the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon). This really is important legislation. Not only does it build on the commitment made in the Government’s 2019 manifesto to overhaul the training system in this country—a system that helps to support public services, existing businesses and the businesses of the future—but, most importantly, it prepares our future workforce with the skills that they will need to propel their careers, helping them to secure rewarding, valuable and well- paid jobs.
My recess week very much felt like preparation for this debate. I spent time at University Technical College Warrington meeting the students and their teachers. It is a fantastic skills-based school for young people aged 13 and above, including up to sixth form. I urge the Minister, wherever possible, to promote UTCs, because they provide something very special in many communities across the country.
After that, I joined the Minister for Higher and Further Education, the right hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), on a visit to my sixth-form college, Priestley College, to meet some of the first students in the country who are taking T-levels and, just as importantly, to hear from some of the employers that are offering them placements. It was a fascinating insight that I will talk more about in a second.
On Friday, I then met some of the new work coaches at the jobcentre in Warrington. They are helping people who are looking for work to match their skills to the current vacancies and to help them to navigate, where appropriate, the opportunities that allow them to return to college or to update their qualifications so that they can engage with employers. One of the Bill’s fundamental aims is to ensure that people can access training and learn flexibly through their lives with information about what employers really want to see. I pay tribute to the team at the Jobcentre Plus office on Tanners Lane who are very focused on helping young people, in particular, to find a way into employment through apprenticeships—on the dual effort of people not only getting into work but earning while they are learning.
I mentioned that, on my visit to Priestley College, we heard from some of the young people studying T-levels for the first time. They are the first cohort to do so, with Warrington having been chosen as one of the pioneering locations for the new approach. The message that came back from students was that T-levels were a really positive decision for them. As well as hearing from students who were studying digital production, design and development, and education, we also heard from the managing director of a digital marketing company based in Stockton Heath called Alcimi. It was one of the first companies to offer a placement to the students. What came across clearly was that the business had genuinely benefited from having young students as part of its team for a short period. On top of that, the community benefited because the company had set the students a community-orientated project, and the students had really benefited, because they had been into the workplace and had seen how a digital business worked today and the sort of things that they could expect in future. There is a huge benefit to come from T-levels.
I would like to touch on new clauses 14 and 15, which the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) spoke to. I understand some of the points that he is making with the new clauses. I am very pleased to see the north-west getting support from Government to press ahead with the game-changing HyNet project—dealing with hydrogen carbon capture and storage—creating probably about 5,000 jobs. We will need to improve skills in that area and develop a future workforce. Filling those roles is a huge challenge, but the Government’s approach through local skills improvement plans is the route to solving that problem, rather than necessarily forcing this to relate to previous areas of employment, as new clauses 14 and 15 would.
I say to the Minister, and I raised this in Committee, that areas such as Warrington, which sit mid-way between two very large mayoralties—Greater Manchester and Merseyside—have people who grow up and study in one area and will then want to work in the other. It is important to make sure that employers in the wider skills area—perhaps in the mayoralties—that are looking to recruit from somewhere such as Warrington take account of the needs of those areas, too.
Finally, I will briefly mention new clause 1. The Chair of the Education Committee has come to visit Thorn Cross Prison, where a tremendous amount of work is going into retraining prisoners as they come to the end of their time inside. Many of the prisoners there are very keen to engage in their future development with apprenticeships, so I am keen for the Minister to continue to look at that.
I very much welcome the Government’s approach. They are tailoring skills and the workforce to the local area, and it is being led by business. I look forward to supporting them this evening.
Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)
According to the National Literacy Trust, more than 7 million adults in England have very poor literacy skills. That is 16.4% of the adult population. Someone who struggles to read and write, or who cannot read or write at all, experiences disadvantage daily. It is a form of deprivation that can lead to isolation and poverty and cause deep personal frustration, as was clear in Jay Blades’s programme “Learning to Read at 51”, which I highly recommend to hon. Members and Ministers.
My new clause 16
“would require the Secretary of State to, every two years, review levels of adult literacy in England, publish the findings of that review and set out a strategy to improve levels of adult literacy in England.”
We cannot afford to leave people to fend for themselves, barely able to read and write. Of course, it makes no economic sense either.
I also believe that it is important that there is a rich and varied educational offer in all parts of the country, as well as strong skills provision. Education is not just about finding a job, hugely important though that is, but about personal development, engaging with the world, pursuing interests and developing critical thinking. I am concerned that the Bill may lead to a reduced educational offer and a narrowing of educational opportunity because of its focus on employer representative bodies leading the development of local skills improvement plans.
A person living in an area where most available work is in agriculture may want to pursue a completely different career path. How can their local employer representative body cater for them? The Minister will be aware that Billy Elliot lived in a mining community but did not want to go down the mine. His local employer representative body would doubtless have said, “There’s no call for ballet dancers round here,” so his talent and passion would have gone to waste. Surely it cannot be right that people’s ambitions should be constrained by the needs of local employers.
We ignore the value of our cultural sector at our peril. My new clause 17 would require the Secretary of State
“to review the availability of humanities, social sciences, arts and languages courses at Entry level to Level 4 in areas to which an LSIP applies. It would also require the Secretary of State to take steps to remedy inadequate availability of the courses.”
From my own experience as an adult education tutor, working in an area of deprivation, I know the importance of offering courses that people can enjoy. I know, too, how transformational adult education can be, and that one of the best ways to support people to access the labour market is to build confidence, expand horizons and offer educational opportunity.
My amendment 18
“would require the Secretary of State to draw on responses to a public consultation run by the relevant local authority, when publishing a local skills improvement plan for a given area.”
There is immense expertise and insight in every community, so it makes sense to draw on them. Such a consultation would be open to local providers, educationists and trade unions, as well as the general public. It could prove to be an important local conversation about the potential that is there to be developed.
If adult education is to expand and flourish, it is important that barriers to learning are removed. If someone is in receipt of universal credit, they should not be disincentivised from engaging in training or education, so I support new clause 5, which stands in the name of the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous). I also support amendment 12, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), which
“would require…a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy, and…to pay particular regard to ensuring that sufficient apprenticeships at level 3 and below are available”,
and new clause 1, in the name of the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), which would enable prisoners to participate in apprenticeships.
I urge the Government to take action to address the very high levels of poor literacy among adults, to ensure the provision of a broad curriculum in adult education that includes the arts, social sciences and humanities as well as vocational training, and to give local people, providers and trade unions the opportunity to have a say in the post-16 education and training made available in their communities.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
I welcome the Bill because it provides the means to address problems that have hung over the UK for far too long and to meet future challenges. It has been closely scrutinised, both in this Chamber and in the other place. Some amendments have been made that the Government have accepted, but there is still room for improvement.
I urge the Minister to take on board new clauses 2 and 3, which are in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), and new clause 4, which is in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore). I would also be grateful if the Minister gave full consideration to new clause 5 and amendment 2, which are in my name. New clause 5 would enable people who are trapped in low-paid, insecure roles with limited progression opportunities to acquire the skills to progress into well-paid, secure and rewarding jobs, thereby delivering levelling up and eliminating the productivity gap that has been part of the UK economy for far too long.
Emma Hardy
It is always a genuine pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), who spoke passionately and articulately of his desire to support, through new clause 5, the people who need that support the most. It was an excellent speech with which I wholeheartedly agreed.
I will not detain the House for too long in speaking about my amendment 17, which is intended to provide additional support for people with special educational needs and disabled people. The Bill proposes that there should be an employer representative body in each area to create local skills improvement plans, to which colleges would have regard. The implication is that colleges would train their students in the skills that they need, thereby improving the labour supply—that is the theory—but the Bill, in its current form, is silent on how that will work for students with special educational needs or disabilities. One of the aims of the national disability strategy is to reduce the disability employment gap, but we see no evidence of that in the Bill as it stands. I tried to raise those points in Committee, although unfortunately I missed some of the sittings because of covid.
I would like the Minister to go away and have a look at a few issues. First, LSIPs should explicitly include actions to tackle the disability employment gap. Although there have been positive moves to narrow it in recent years, the gap remains significant. That is one of the points I raised with the Minister in Committee. Figures show that the employment rate of disabled people is 28.4 percentage points lower than that of people who are not disabled.
Secondly, LSIPs should be informed by consultation with organisations representing the needs of disabled people. We know that, all too often, disabled people feel that their voices are not being heard in those forums. I think it will be a missed opportunity if we do not use the Bill, and the new process of local skills planning that it offers, to help ensure that people with disabilities are asked to contribute to their local economy, and that their voices are heard in the discussion about what that future local economy looks like. An amendment to this effect was voted down in Committee but has been incorporated in the Department’s statutory guidance. I hope that reviewing the extent to which employer representative bodies acted upon this element of the guidance, and what impact it had, will form part of the evaluation of the LSIP trailblazers.
Finally—this is the issue that amendment 17 seeks to address—the Bill should contain measures to ensure that ERBs are composed of employers who demonstrate reputable practice in relation to equality and diversity in employment, in respect of matters including disability. We do not want a board of employers planning and determining skills policy if they have no record of being inclusive and decent, because without inclusive and decent employers on the board, there will not be an inclusive and decent LSIP. That is why my amendment states:
“Representative bodies which are employers, and employer organisations which are members of employer representative bodies, must sign up to the Disability Confident employer scheme within six months of being designated, or becoming a member of, the employer representative body.”
It is a small amendment that simply seeks to ensure that there is the best possible LSIP. If that is to happen, we need the best possible employers. We want employers with a record of treating disabled employees well.
There is another point that I raised with the Minister, and I hope he has had a chance to consider it again. The definition of “local”, and the difficulties of defining a geographical region, arose in Committee, and I have not yet seen any proposals explaining how that will be dealt with. To many Members, the definition must seem fairly obvious—why is it contentious that we do not know what constitutes a local region?—but, as I pointed out to the Minister, the local enterprise partnership in Hull is different from the local authority because it covers more than one region. It is different from some of the big employers such as the Humberside police and fire and rescue services, which are different from the chamber of commerce, which is different from the Ofsted regional body, which is different from the regional skills commissioner area, which is different from the new organisation proposed in the Government’s White Paper—a board to look across the Humber at large businesses and zero carbon, which has not even been created yet. All those bodies have slightly different geographies, so I am keen for the Minister to explain the definition of “local” in his local skills improvement plans.
Sarah Champion
I largely welcome the aims of this Bill to improve the quality and funding of post-16 education, but it will do little to tackle the major skills shortages in key sectors including health and social care, manufacturing and engineering. It introduces local skills improvement plans, which would be created by employer representative bodies to assess local skills needs and help shape the courses that further education providers should offer to fill those needs.
In principle, these measures are good, but the Bill is significantly weaker in its current form than it was on Second Reading, after it had been thoroughly improved by amendments voted for by the Lords. I was deeply disappointed that during Committee stage in the Commons, Conservative Members voted to reverse these changes, which would have hugely benefited students from all backgrounds. I urge the House to take this opportunity to support Labour’s amendments, especially amendments 15 and 16.
Previously, the Bill would have retained funding for BTECs for at least four more years, ensured that no student would be deprived of the right to take two BTECs, and allowed students to keep their universal credit entitlement while studying. It would also have required LSIPs to be developed in partnership with local authorities and further education providers, rather than just by the employer representative bodies. Now all those sensible and valuable improvements to the Bill have been scrapped, and I urge the Minister to reconsider.
I am particularly outraged by the Government’s plan to scrap funding for BTECs. BTECs make up the majority of level 3 qualifications in this country, with nearly a quarter of a million young people taking at least one last year. For many young people, they are the most effective pathway to higher education or skilled employment. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) has made the important point that last year 230,000 students took a level 3 BTEC. It is the Government’s goal that in four years’ time only 100,000 students will be taking T-levels, which are the proposed replacement. Even if they achieve this, that could leave a gap of 130,000 students who will not be working towards an equivalent qualification if BTECs are no longer funded.
Who will be most affected by these changes? The Government’s impact assessment acknowledges that students with special educational needs and students from disadvantaged backgrounds are disproportionately represented on courses that risk losing funding. Some might be unable to achieve a level 3 qualification if these plans go ahead, so again I urge the Minister to reconsider. Research published by the Social Market Foundation in 2018 showed that students accepted to university from working-class and minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to hold a BTEC qualification than their peers. Is this retrograde step really what the Government would consider to be levelling up?
I was proud to work with Natspec in tabling a series of amendments that would have strengthened the provision of LSIPs for students with special educational needs and disabilities. Some 21% of all students in general further education colleges have a learning difficulty or disability, and the figure rises to 26% among 16 to 18-year-olds. There is no mechanism in the Bill to encourage or require employers to use local skills improvement plans to help address the disability employment gap, which stands at nearly 30%.
My amendments would have required the LSIPs to include positive actions to improve the employment prospects of disabled people, and required members of employment representative bodies to demonstrate a commitment to equality and diversity, so that they can create an inclusive plan for all, especially disabled people. These amendments were debated in Committee, and though I regret that the Government did not agree to put these conditions in the Bill, I am pleased that the Minister gave assurances that these key requirements would be in statutory guidance. I thank the Minister for that, and I ask him to confirm his commitment to working with organisations such as Natspec and the Association of Colleges on the guidance to make it as effective as possible.
Disability employment and the needs of young people with SEND should not be thought of separately, or as an issue that will relate only to forthcoming SEND Green Paper. They must be integral to the Government’s plan for further education, and to addressing the nation’s skills needs.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)
I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. It was a pleasure to serve as a member of the Bill Committee on this important piece of legislation. I support all the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), but I want to focus my comments on amendments 14 and 15. However, I think it is also right to mention new clause 13, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), relating to sharia-compliant lifelong learning loans—something that is very important for many of my constituents.
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend makes a strong point about the vocational nature of BTECs. I recently went to Derby College, and I saw five times more students doing BTECs than the equivalent T-level courses. It would be great if, ultimately, T-levels proved themselves and students moved towards choosing them, but does she agree that, while such small numbers are doing T-levels, it would be a huge mistake to shut the path to BTECs in favour of something that is largely unproven?
Rachel Hopkins
My hon. Friend makes an important point with which I thoroughly agree.
Our creative sector is a key export to the world and is part of our global influence. Why should young people in Luton not have the ability to train in these areas? They will not necessarily be able to follow a T-level in this subject area, so I totally agree with my hon. Friend.
I hope the Minister will accept Opposition amendment 15 to prevent the defunding of many successful and much-needed level 3 BTECs.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
Further education should be about creating a workforce that meets the needs of our national and local economies. It should be about lifelong learning that gives everyone the power to follow the path that best suits them. It should especially be at the front and centre of our covid recovery and, last but not least, it should help us with the transition to net zero.
There was plenty of room to improve this Bill when it was introduced, and there still is. I regret that, so far, the Government seem to be missing this opportunity, but it is never too late. I favour new clause 4, which would require the Secretary of State to introduce a green skills strategy for higher, further and technical education. There is a key opportunity for further education in our effort to reach net zero, but less than 1% of college students are on a course with broad coverage of climate education. I commend the work of the excellent Bath College, which is already making strides to embed climate education in its curriculum, but the Government should step up, too.
We all know how important it is to manage the transition to net zero, which brings me to new clauses 14 and 15 and amendment 11 tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). The offshore training regime is a barrier to offshore oil and gas workers transitioning their skills into the renewables sector. A new offshore training scheme is needed to facilitate cross-sector recognition of core skills and training in the offshore energy sector and to provide a retraining guarantee for oil and gas workers who wish to transition to careers in the green energy sector. What a missed opportunity it would be if we did not help people working in such industries, which will soon no longer be in place, to transition to a career in industries such as the renewables sector.
The Government say this Bill will transform opportunities for all, so why have they reversed changes that could significantly improve the accessibility and flexibility of qualifications—we have heard some powerful contributions on this—especially those aimed at learners with special educational needs and disabilities? Over a quarter of all 16 to 18-year-olds in further education have a learning difficulty or a disability, and I pay tribute to Project SEARCH, a partnership run by Bath and North East Somerset Council, Bath College and Virgin Care.
Nationally, too, many disabled people face huge difficulties in accessing employment after leaving school. Our disability employment gap stands at 30%.I therefore add my support to amendment 16, which would require local skills improvement plans to list specific strategies to help into employment those learners who have or have had an education, health and care plan. Again, this seems to be another missed opportunity to help those in society who face the biggest disadvantages to access employment, which is what they want. Whenever we talk to disability groups, what they want is employment; helping these groups into employment should be at the core of this Bill.
Although I will support the Bill on Third Reading, I am disappointed that the opportunity to transform further education has been so entirely missed.
Alex Burghart
With the leave of the House, I will speak to some of the amendments that have been discussed this evening. It has been a real pleasure to have been involved with this Bill on Second Reading, in Committee and on Report this evening. I feel the strength of feeling across the House for the skills agenda. This is an extraordinarily exciting time for skills, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) made clear. Never in my lifetime has there been such a hunger for skills in the economy, and that is a hunger that this Government will feed, because we are building a system in which qualifications, co-designed with employers, will give students the skills the economy needs. We will see good opportunities, allowing everyone to take a step forward in their life and career, and qualifications, backed by employers, that feed the needs of the economy.
In the time I have, I want to get through as many of the amendments as I can. First, I will address new clause 1, which stands in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow, the Chair of the Education Committee. I pay tribute to his fight for the cause of apprenticeships for prisoners; I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor made an announcement to this effect on 11 January, and I am happy to put on record that my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow was instrumental in driving this forward. We do not need to accept this new clause because we have seen that this can be done in secondary legislation, and that changes to primary legislation are not needed.
I turn to new clause 2, also tabled my right hon. Friend, and to new clause 7, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore), who did sterling work when he was on the Front Bench. Those provisions both seek to place a level 3 entitlement on a statutory footing. The Government are delighted by the enthusiasm of Members on both sides of the House and in both Chambers for our free courses for jobs offer and the lifetime skills guarantee that the Prime Minister announced last April. As the House will know, it gives adults who do not have a level 3 qualification the opportunity to get a qualification in high-value subjects for free, regardless of age. That major step forward will transform life chances. We do not think it is right to put this offer into legislation; that would constrain the Government in how they allocate resources and make it more difficult to adapt the policy to changing circumstances, including for adults most in need. For example, only last November, the Secretary of State announced that from this April, the offer will expand to include any adult in England who is unemployed or earns below the national living wage annually, regardless of their prior qualification level.
New clause 2 also includes a provision requiring any employer who receives apprenticeship funding to spend at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at level 2 and 3 before the age of 25. We fully respect what the new clause is trying to do, but we point to the great progress we are already making on this score. In the first quarter of last year—the most recent one for which we have figures—62% of apprenticeship starts were for people under the age of 25, and level 2 and 3 apprenticeships accounted for 71% of all starts. That is wonderful stuff. Also, during the recent National Apprenticeship Week, I met a huge number of young and not-so-young people studying level 6 apprenticeships, which are making an enormous difference to their life, giving them huge opportunities in a way that is a greatly respected by employers. I do not wish to see arbitrary levels fixed in legislation.
Amendment 12, tabled by the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), seeks to require a review of the operation of the apprenticeship levy, particularly at level 3 and below. We discussed this issue at some length in Committee. I reiterate that the Government have already radically reformed apprenticeships to put employers at their heart, increasing investment and improving quality. As I just said, we are starting to see major improvements at levels 2 and 3.
The Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
One year ago, the Government published their White Paper titled “Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth”. We set out our ambition to deliver landmark reforms to post-16 education and training. For too long, this sector has not received the attention it deserves. We do not have enough people with the skills needed for important sectors such as engineering—one that is close to my heart—and health and social care. In many ways, that has held back our economy and prevented people from fulfilling their potential.
We must continue on our road to recovery as a nation from the coronavirus pandemic and transition it to endemic, as we witnessed today with the Prime Minister’s statement to the House. We also need to adapt our economy and society to meet our commitment to net zero by 2050 and maintain our global leadership on climate change following COP26, with all the opportunities that there are in those new and emerging sectors for the economy.
I am glad to say that our economy is in a strong position to respond to these challenges, with the highest growth rate in the G7. On jobs, we have a record 1.2 million vacancies to fill; that is 59%—almost 60%—higher than pre-pandemic levels. Unemployment is falling and is now just 4.1%, and youth unemployment, especially, is at a record low.
As Education Secretary, and in my previous roles on the vaccine roll-out and as a Business Minister, I have met countless employers who tell me about the progress that their businesses could make if they could only hire people with the right skills. I have also met young people and adults whose lives have been transformed because they had the chance to upskill or learn a new trade. That is why I am so focused on—some will say obsessed with—delivering an ambitious skills agenda to transform the prospects of people up and down our great country.
Higher skills lead to higher productivity, which in turn leads to higher wages, ensuring that we remain globally competitive and creating the economic growth—that dynamic economy—needed to pay for our world-class public services. As part of that, we are quadrupling places on skills bootcamps, with intensive courses from coding to construction. Recent data shows that more than 54% of the 2,210 adults who completed skills bootcamps went on to secure a new role or a promotion. Apprenticeships have bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, with more than 130,200 apprenticeship starts between August and October last year. We are delivering the roll-out of T-levels, with a plan for up to 100,000 T-level entrants by the end of the spending review period, supported by our £3.8 billion investment in skills over this Parliament.
The Bill and our wider skills reforms are our opportunity to tackle the challenges and unlock the full potential of our people and the productivity of our economy. We have heard how the Bill will deliver essential reform to further education and skills in our country. Today, we are taking a significant step towards that goal.
For learners, the Bill will provide much-needed flexibility. I have seen for myself the flexi-job apprenticeships at the brilliant Pinewood Studios, which is making the films of the future. We are enabling people to study or retrain at any stage of their life with the reassurance that the skills they gain hold genuine currency with employers in their area. As many right hon. and hon. Members have said today, we want to see greater parity between further and higher education, no longer pushing students towards a one-size-fits-all, three-year, full-time degree.
For employers, the Bill will solidify and anchor their critical position at the heart of the skills system and give them a vital role in shaping local skills provision in partnership with providers. That will ensure that post-16 education and training is directly aligned to the skills that employers actually need to grow, now and in future, and will help employers to get the skilled workforce that they need to compete internationally.
For the FE sector, the Bill will increase confidence in the standard of qualifications, thanks to a package of measures that will help to drive up quality standards across the technical education system. In taking forward the Bill, we recognise the huge importance of the FE sector to our economy and society and its role in upskilling our workforce and creating access to opportunities, no matter someone’s background.
Alongside our wider skills reforms, the Bill will deliver on our plans to level up across the country. People will be able to get the quality education and training that they need for work at any stage of their lives in all communities across the country, ending the perception that the only way to get on in life is by moving to London or another big city. From 2025, our lifetime loan entitlement will give people access to loan funding to gain qualifications at levels 4 to 6, whether they are an 18-year-old leaver from Bradford, a 40-year-old career changer from Plymouth or a parent in Newcastle looking to return to paid work after a career break.
We want our reforms to work for everyone. Several colleagues spoke about learners with special educational needs and disabilities, who make up a significant proportion of our student population; looking ahead, they will be supported by the publication of our SEND review. Pupils in schools, when thinking about their future choices, will have access to high-quality careers advice to help them to decide the best route for them—I heard the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) about his new clause 3. FE teachers will be supported through high-quality initial teacher training that helps them to deliver excellent skills provision. That is what the Bill delivers.
I thank hon. Members across the House for their contributions over the past few months. I believe that the Bill will leave this place in a much improved state, with amendments that have enabled us to fine-tune the measures in it and make it much stronger. The debate on technical qualifications has been particularly passionate and robust. I hope Members will be reassured that measures in the Bill will improve the quality of such qualifications for all learners, whatever their background or career ambitions. We have listened to concerns about qualifications reform. That is why, on Second Reading, I announced an extra year before the implementation of our reform timetable to allow more time for all involved to prepare for the changes.
The Minister for apprenticeships and skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), has led the Bill through its passage with great dedication, and has spoken passionately at each of its stages. My predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), had the vision to bring forward this transformational Bill; he could never have done it without my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan) by his side, and I know that skills and further education remain an area of great personal commitment for her and for him. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chair of the Education Committee, for his support for the Bill. He has raised many important issues, tonight and every night, including skills and training for prisoners. I hope that he is reassured by my words today, and by our clear commitment to making apprenticeships available to prisoners.
My thanks also go to the Whips; to my Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston); and, of course, to my officials, who have worked so hard and have been so dedicated to the delivery of the Bill. As for the Opposition, the hon. Members for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) and for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) have engaged constructively at every stage of the Bill, and I am grateful to them both for their work in challenging us to ensure that it was the very best it could be.
I am also grateful to the Committee for its work in scrutinising the Bill, and I am indebted to my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) for chairing it. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends on the Committee: my hon. Friends the Members for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici), for Mansfield (Ben Bradley), for Warrington South (Andy Carter), for Bassetlaw (Brendan Clarke-Smith), for Loughborough (Jane Hunt), for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) and for Guildford (Angela Richardson), all of whom brought considerable experience and expertise in further education, which benefited the Bill enormously.
I am, of course, hugely grateful to noble Lords for their contributions in the other place. The issues that they raised have helped us to improve the Bill, but I hope they will understand why it was not the right place for all their amendments. Finally, I thank the Clerks and officials for their diligent work in supporting the Bill’s passage through Parliament. It is an honour to lead the great Department that is delivering this transformational Bill. I look forward to the benefits that it will bring for learners, employers and the economy, and I commend it to the House.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. I note that two Back Benchers wish to speak, and I am sure that the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman will bear that in mind. We do have to finish at 10 pm.
Mr Perkins
I will certainly ensure that there is time for the voices of other Members to be heard, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Let me first thank the Secretary of State for what he has just said, and for being here for the Bill’s Third Reading. He appears to be wearing an ostentatiously large “Truss for Leader” badge. I do not know whether that is a scoop or not, but he is certainly very welcome. [Hon. Members: “It stands for ‘T-levels’.”] In that case, I apologise. I misrepresented the right hon. Gentleman, and I am happy to set the record straight. We have heard today that 5,000 people are taking T-levels this year; I have no idea whether there are more or fewer in the “Truss for Leader” camp, but at least I have been able to clarify the meaning of the Secretary of State’s badge.
I repeat the right hon. Gentleman’s thanks to everyone who served on the Public Bill Committee. We heard some excellent contributions from Members on both sides of the Committee, and we have heard some powerful contributions today. That should give all of us confidence that there are many people in this place who recognise how critical the further education and skills agenda is. There is a shared passion, throughout this place, for ensuring that we offer better opportunities to a whole generation of younger people. We recognise the importance of the sector, and the fantastic contribution played by so many professionals in it, as well as their commitment to ensuring that that new generation have the opportunities that they deserve. I think there is agreement on, at least, the importance of that agenda.
I have to take issue with what the Secretary of State said about the Bill leaving this House stronger than it was when it arrived from another place. Amendments were tabled there by people with tremendous experience, including a whole raft of former Education Secretaries and a number of other people with real commitment to the sector, and we felt that those amendments would have greatly strengthened the Bill. That view was shared by the Association of Colleges and many other contributors to the debate. It is a matter of tremendous regret that those amendments were removed by the Government and that the very sensible amendments that were proposed tonight were either voted against or not put to a vote. That is a regrettable step. The Secretary of State speaks about his obsession and passion for getting this right. We have heard from his colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), that in many of the areas that we were pushing, the Government agreed with the principle of what we were saying but felt it unnecessary for our proposals to be put in the Bill.
Throughout my 12 years in this place, we have had a raft of reforms from the Government, and have often heard the same sort of rhetoric. I mentioned at some length in my speech that employers are being put in the driving seat. That has been the stated aim of every reform from this Government over 11 years. We have heard about schools knowing their pupils best, and about schools being the best placed to ensure that careers guidance and work experience are delivered, yet throughout those 11 years we have seen the failings of that approach, which is why we believe that getting some of these things into the Bill and into statute is a matter of real value. I will not repeat the contributions that I made in Committee and in this debate, but I would reinforce to Members in the other place that we Labour Members believe that there was a lot of merit in their amendments, and we will continue to push for the values that were outlined in them, even though we were unable to win the votes tonight.
I thank the Bill Committee, and all those in the Public Bill Office for the substantial support they gave us on the huge number of amendments that we tabled. I also thank Lindsey Kell in my office for the huge amount of work that she has done in supporting me on this Bill. Unlike those on the Treasury Benches, we do not have an army of civil servants, but we have been very well advised and supported. I thank all those organisations in the sector that have engaged with us and supported our amendments with evidence. They have been incredibly helpful in enabling the Opposition to do our job of holding the Government to account, suggesting a better direction of travel, and outlining how a Labour Government would approach these matters differently. I recognise that other hon. Members would like to contribute, so I simply thank all those involved in getting the Bill to this stage. I look forward to continuing these debates in the future.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I would recommend about three minutes each for the remaining speakers.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
One of the pillars of this Government’s agenda is, rightly, levelling up. The recently published levelling up White Paper lays the blueprint for it; it sets out a plan to improve lives and expand opportunities across the whole country, particularly in mission 6, which involves skills. Skills are particularly important for the east midlands, as we have unfortunately seen a trend of people entering low-paid jobs and remaining in them. That is highlighted by the White Paper, which has identified that the east midlands has the second highest proportion—20.1%—of low-paid jobs in the country. We have already taken steps to try to break this cycle in Loughborough; we used advanced town deal funding to establish a careers and enterprise hub that is delivering apprenticeships, traineeships, the lifetime skills guarantee, life skills, work coaches and youth workers from Jobcentre Plus, who will support people of all ages in upskilling and reskilling. This comes alongside the Government-funded T-level centre at Loughborough College—thank you very much—and the new £13 million institute of technology at Loughborough University, Derby College and Derby University. Again, thank you very much.
Taken together, these measures will not only help people to get ahead in life but will bridge the skills gap. The Bill puts employers at the very heart of the skills system to ensure that local businesses have access to a pool of local talent with the right skills. It enables employers and education providers to collaborate to ensure skills provision meets local need, and creates a new duty on further education providers to strengthen accountability and performance in this area. Loughborough already has that embedded in our education DNA, and it is a key driving force of business development in the constituency.
During the recess, I visited local businesses, which told me of their skills shortages. The Bill will not only enable us to identify immediate needs and trends, but will offer an opportunity for businesses to highlight their future plans for growth and the pipeline for recruitment, so that careers, skills and training can be matched to opportunities and will lead directly to jobs.
The Bill will provide a clear pathway into skilled employment for everyone—not just those with a university degree, as has historically been the case—and I am delighted to speak in support of it this evening.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
I am grateful for the chance to sneak in during the last few minutes of this debate. It is always right that Mansfield should have the last word on such subjects, so I will take full advantage.
I warmly welcome this Bill, and it was a privilege to sit on the Committee with the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), and to feel his passion and understanding of the subject, which is hugely important, as my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) just said, for the levelling-up agenda.
I was pleased to see skills and education investment at the heart of last week’s White Paper, because we need a long-term change in communities such as mine in Mansfield to make sure that people have better life chances. We are already seeing the benefits of that agenda. My hon. Friend pointed to examples in Loughborough, and I can point to further examples in Mansfield and North Notts.
Last year, the towns fund funded what we call the knowledge exchange of business innovation and growth. That will support local businesses in north Notts so that they can do things differently, automate, look to the future, grow and employ more people. There was also funding for robotics and automation in neighbouring Ashfield and similar funding for aviation and engineering in Newark. North Nottinghamshire has benefited greatly from £140 million-odd of investment through the towns fund, and a lot of it is going to skills and education, for which I am grateful.
I read in a briefing earlier this week that further education and technical skills contribute £26 billion to the economy. I have no idea how that was worked out, but it sounds like a very big number. Its importance should therefore be clear to all of us. Education is not just about getting a university degree and swanning off to work in whatever sector. I hear so often from employers that they take on first-class graduates with excellent qualifications on paper who simply are not equipped for the workplace. Other routes have to be built with employers, so that workers suit sectors such as engineering, where practical work experience and technical skills are so important. People cannot learn it all in a classroom, and this Bill helps us to deliver for the long term, with the kind of change that will build opportunities for people in constituencies like mine.
I welcome the lifetime skills guarantee and the finance that comes with it. In a post-covid era, more and more adults are finding that the sectors in which they work and the things for which they are qualified simply are not viable anymore. If we are to rebuild, grow and allow such people to get back into rewarding work in sectors that are growing—there are plenty of them—we must support them to retrain with the finance they need, and it needs to be flexible.
If I could make one plug, it would, as always, be for West Notts College and Nottingham Trent University—I could bang on about them forever. Edward Peck, the vice-chancellor of NTU, has fantastic ideas about how we could pilot the lifelong learning loan, and how we could ensure it is flexible by allowing people to study units at individual organisations and transfer them around the country over their adult life, so that they continue to build their qualification and take it with them. It is important that it works flexibly, and I would love to have that conversation with any of my wonderful hon. and right hon. Friends on the Front Bench. The skills Minister is coming to talk to me and NTU tomorrow, for which I am grateful.
Partnerships with employers and universities are key to providing long-term opportunities for people in my constituency, young and old, who will benefit from the Bill long into the future. That is why I am delighted to support it today.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed, with amendments.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This afternoon, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence made an important and statesmanlike statement on Ukraine. This evening, Mr Putin has recognised the two separatist regions in Ukraine as independent states, with dangerous parallels to Germany’s recognition of the Sudetenland in 1938. In these circumstances, do you accept that it would be appropriate to have a further statement, as soon as possible, on the new Ukrainian situation? The Defence Secretary himself stated today that he would update us as necessary, and this may well be the reason for making such a statement tomorrow or as soon as possible.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. As he said, the Secretary of State did undertake to keep the House updated, and I am sure he will do so. The hon. Gentleman will also be aware that the House will be debating the sanctions regulations tomorrow. I also know that those on the Treasury Bench will have heard the point that he has made.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Thursday 24th March 2022
(2 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL-Bill 117-I Manuscript amendments for Consideration of Commons Amendments (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (23 Mar 2022)
13:22 - Division on Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 3 - Ayes: 133 / Noes: 138 - Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 3 disagreed.
13:49 - Division on the Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 15 - Ayes: 138 / Noes: 125 - Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 15 agreed.
14:02 - Division on Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 16 - Ayes: 96 / Noes: 126 - Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 16 disagreed.
14:52 - Division on Amendment to the Motion on Amendments 17 and 18 - Ayes: 83 / Noes: 144 - Amendment to the Motion on Amendments 17 and 18 disagreed.
15:06 - Division on the Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 21. - Ayes: 62 / Noes: 132 - Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 21 disagreed.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 1 and 2.
“(6A) Where a specified area covers any of the area of a relevant authority, the Secretary of State may approve and publish a local skills improvement plan for the specified area only if satisfied that in the development of the plan due consideration was given to the views of the relevant authority.
For this purpose “relevant authority” means—
(a) a mayoral combined authority within the meaning of Part 6 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 (see section 107A(8) of that Act), or
(b) the Greater London Authority.”
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I beg to move that this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 1 and 2 en bloc. I will speak also to Amendments 3 to 6, 15 and 16 and associated Motions.
I am delighted to be back in the Chamber to discuss the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. It is the Government’s belief—which I know is shared by your Lordships—that the skills sector has been forgotten for too long. This Bill represents a landmark moment for skills, bringing greater parity between further and higher education. Noble Lords will have seen the letter from my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education outlining the Lords amendments tabled, the key issues raised throughout the Bill’s passage and our position on each. I ask noble Lords to consider their positions alongside the concessionary amendments and policy changes that the Government have already announced since the Bill was in this House. These include delaying the removal of funding for technical educational qualifications that overlap with T-levels by a year and putting the role of mayoral combined authorities in the development of LSIPs into the Bill.
Furthermore, we tabled a number of amendments on Report in the Lords in response to issues raised by your Lordships in this House, including the criminalisation of cheating services and the requirement for LSIPs to consider skills needed for jobs relating to climate change and other environmental targets. I am delighted also to announce that we have tabled a further concession relating to the number of encounters for years 8 to 13 students with a range of providers of technical education, which I will come to in the third grouping.
First, I address Commons Amendments 1 to 6 and the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Watson: Amendments 3A, 4A and 4B. We have been clear that local skills improvement plans should be developed by designated employer representative bodies working closely with employers, relevant providers, mayoral combined authorities, the Greater London Authority, local authorities and other local stakeholders.
The Bill already places duties on relevant providers to co-operate with employer representative bodies to ensure that their valuable knowledge and experience directly inform the development of the plans. This includes independent training providers, which are referred to in Amendment 4B, that provide English-funded post-16 technical education or training. Let me reassure the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that the views of independent training providers will be taken into consideration in the development of the plan.
The Government also recognise the importance of mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority and their work as commissioners and convenors in their areas with devolved adult education functions. That is why, in the Commons, the Government brought forward Amendments 1 and 2, which place a duty on the Secretary of State to approve and publish a local skills improvement plan only if satisfied that, during the development of the plan, due consideration has been given to the views of the mayoral combined authority or Greater London Authority where it covers the specified area.
Further details will be set out in statutory guidance, informed by ongoing engagement with key stakeholders and evidence from the trailblazer pilots. Guidance can be updated regularly to reflect evolving needs and priorities, as well as best practice. We will ensure that the views of key stakeholders including mayoral combined authorities, the Local Government Association and the Association of Colleges are considered in the development of the statutory guidance.
Furthermore, relevant providers and key local stakeholders are already playing an important role in the local skills improvement plan trailblazers running this spring, which are spurring new collaborative working. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, will not insist on his amendments.
I now turn to Commons Amendment 15, Amendments 15A and 15B from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my noble friend Lord Baker’s Amendment 16A. Many of your Lordships have spoken passionately about our reforms to post-16 qualifications, both now and when the Bill was last in this House. We listened carefully to these issues and have made some significant changes as a result.
At Second Reading in the other place, the Secretary of State announced that we are allowing an extra year before public funding is withdrawn from qualifications that overlap with T-levels, and before reformed qualifications are introduced that will sit alongside T-levels and A-levels.
Our reform programme is rightly ambitious, but we understand that it would be wrong to push too hard and risk compromising quality. The additional year strikes the crucial balance between giving providers, awarding organisations, students and other stakeholders enough time to prepare and moving ahead with our important reforms. That is why we cannot accept a three-year delay, as the amendments to this Motion propose.
These changes are part of our reforms to our technical education system that will be over a decade in the making from their inception, building on the recommendations in the Sainsbury review, published in 2016, which itself built on the findings of the Wolf review of 2011.
T-levels are a critical step change in the quality of the technical offer. They have been co-designed with more than 250 leading employers and are based on the best international examples of technical education. We have already put in place significant investment and support to help providers and employers prepare for T-levels. By 2023, all T-levels will be available to thousands of young people across the country. The change to our reform timetable means that all schools and colleges will be able to teach T-levels for at least a year before overlapping qualifications have their funding removed.
Last November, the Secretary of State also announced the removal of the English and maths exit requirement from T-levels. This is about making the landscape fairer, so that talented students with more diverse strengths are not prevented from accessing and successfully completing a T-level. The change brings T-levels in line with other level 3 study programmes, such as A-levels, which do not have such a requirement.
In addition, Amendment 15B would also require consultation and consent from employer representative bodies before the withdrawal of funding approval from qualifications. As your Lordships will be aware, we have twice consulted on our intention to withdraw funding from qualifications that overlap with T-levels. T-levels were designed by employers to give young people the skills they need to progress into skilled employment or to go on to further study, including higher education.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her introductory remarks. I begin by speaking to Amendments 3A and 4A in my name. We fully support the principle of employers playing a central role in driving the development of identified local skills needs. We also recognise the more specialised role of FE colleges in delivering higher-level technical skills, although that should take place within the context of a holistic and more objective overview of the whole education, skills and employment support system.
If local skills improvement plans are to be successful, they must draw on the expertise and knowledge of all important players. That must certainly include mayoral combined authorities where they exist, and local authorities where they do not, in shaping the development of LSIPs, reflecting their unique understanding of their communities and job markets. We believe they merit a formal role and that that role should be clearly set out in the Bill.
We also believe it is appropriate to acknowledge the role played by contributors to the skills delivery equation, which is often overlooked; namely, independent training providers. ITPs are distinct from other types of FE providers, in that they are not run or directly influenced by the public sector, yet they form an intrinsic part of the country’s skills landscape. It appears that the breadth of provision that ITPs offer, and the impact they have, is not as understood as it could be among DfE officials and perhaps the public at large.
In Committee, I highlighted that there was no provision or requirement within the Bill for the Secretary of State or the designated employers’ representative body to engage with mayoral combined authorities or local authorities, or indeed any other stakeholder, in relation to the development of LSIPs. The same argument was advanced by the Opposition in another place and, credit where it is due, as the noble Baroness has outlined, the Government have listened. Commons Amendment 2 provides for such input, albeit it on a limited scale. It refers to “due consideration” being given to the views of the relevant authority. At least it is clear what, in the Government’s eyes, the relevant authority means, although noble Lords could still be here at this time tomorrow were we to attempt to define what “due consideration” might mean.
The definition of relevant authority has been kept very narrow: just mayoral combined authorities, of which I think there are currently nine, and the Greater London Authority. Why are local authorities not included in places in the country where there is no mayoral authority? What is to happen there? I suspect the Minister will say that, for the past two years, the adult education budget has been devolved to mayoral authorities and the GLA, which of course is the case, but LSIPs are not just about the contribution of adult education funding to the skills agenda; it surely goes much wider than that.
Here we come up against a right-hand/left-hand dilemma as far as the Government are concerned. The nine mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority are to be given arm’s-length input to the development of LSIPs but other local authorities are to be given none at all, as things stand, and yet, in the levelling-up White Paper, launched last month amid great fanfare, the Government say:
“We want to usher in a devolution revolution … we will support local leaders to make a difference in their communities by … bringing local leaders into the heart of government decision-making with a new role for mayors and strong local leaders in the shaping of local growth strategy.”
I think those of us on these Benches would be happy to sign up to that, but what is it to be for government? Are democratically elected local leaders being brought into the heart of government decision-making or are they being marginalised, with merely “due consideration” being given to their views? There is certainly a disconnect; the Government cannot have it both ways.
I would say that, as they have got it right in the levelling-up White Paper, it would be consistent—perhaps not an adjective often applied to this Government—to give the same importance to mayoral combined authorities and local authorities in the development of LSIPs. Reflecting the status and expertise of FE colleges and independent training providers would enhance such a role for the mayoral combined authorities and would benefit the local skills strategy of their area. This is all the more important as the levelling-up White Paper gives the green light for fully devolved budgets at county level in the near future.
Perhaps in passing, might the Minister clarify the situation with Cornwall? It is not a mayoral authority, but I understand it has devolved responsibilities for skills and adult education.
It will become increasingly important for LSIPs to involve local and regional government, as well as providers and other community representatives. These amendments give the opportunity to get ahead of the curve and, in that respect, I hope the Minister will understand that argument and accept it.
The way in which the amendments have been grouped means that I also have to speak to Amendment 15A in the name of my noble friend Lord Blunkett. I would have preferred to have spoken separately. Before I begin on that subject, I need to point out further evidence of a lack of consistency in the Government’s position on technical skills and training.
In yesterday’s Spring Statement, the Chancellor said that
“we lag behind international peers on adult technical skills.”
He then gave some figures:
“a third lower than the OECD average, and UK employers spend just half the European average on training their employees.”
Perhaps we should ask: who has been in government for the past 12 years? The Chancellor went on to say:
“We will consider whether the current tax system, including … the apprenticeship levy, is doing enough to incentivise businesses to invest in the right kinds of training.”—[Official Report, Commons, 23/3/22; col. 341.]
In the skills Bill in another place, the Opposition pressed an amendment calling for a review of the apprenticeship levy, with particular regard to those at level 3 and below. The Government voted against that amendment, so there again it is a left-hand/right-hand dilemma. What are the Government doing?
I want to signify our support for Amendment 15A in the name of my noble friend Lord Blunkett. I have said on many occasions that I welcome the introduction of T-levels and genuinely want to see them establish parity of esteem with A-levels as a path into post-school education or employment. However, we do not accept that BTECs and other applied general qualifications need to be sacrificed to ensure the success of T-levels because we do not believe that they are mutually exclusive. Let it be understood that T-levels are as yet unproven. The first of them will reach completion only this summer. Until they are fully embedded and acceptable to students, parents—they are important in this regard—employers and universities, it is important that other options are available to young people for whom neither T-levels nor A-levels are appropriate.
In his letter to Peers last week, the Secretary of State claimed of this Bill that its measures will change people’s lives across the country. He is right, although, in too many cases, it will not do so in a positive way; he seems unable to grasp that for some reason. Defunding most BTECs would seriously affect the future life chances of many young people. These qualifications are well established and are often a springboard for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into well-paid, skilled employment or university. Studying a BTEC empowers a young person to shape their own pathway, whether it is going to university or pursuing a technical qualification. Restricting a young person’s choice at 16 seems to make no sense. Withdrawing BTECs without an alternative pathway that still meets the needs of people, employers and the labour market is not responsible policy-making.
Last month, Ofqual launched a consultation on the reform of level 3 qualifications. Perhaps the Minister can tell noble Lords where that will fit with the proposals in the Bill. As engines of social mobility—and, indeed, of social justice—BTECs play a significant role in the skills agenda. I know that the Minister gets out and about a lot. She must have heard the overwhelming opposition from FE colleges, universities, independent training providers and many employers to these proposals relating to BTECs. That is because BTECs are qualifications that are understood and respected by employers. They have a long-standing track record; they are respected by learners and understood by institutions. These are real strengths that should not be cast aside lightly.
Almost unbelievably, the DfE’s own equalities impact assessment stated that scrapping BTECs would disproportionately impact those from SEND backgrounds, Asian ethnic groups and disadvantaged families. Yet the department decided to ignore that warning and press ahead regardless. This could mean years of progress in increasing the numbers of students entering higher education from the lowest-participation neighbourhoods being lost by the defunding of BTECs.
I have heard it said that those refusing to abandon BTECs in favour of T-levels are looking backwards rather than forwards. Well, BTECs date only to 1984. A-levels were introduced in 1951. Is advocating the continuation of A-levels backward-looking? Of course it is not. That is why we reject the false dichotomy between BTECs and T-levels. A block in the development of T-levels is the requirement of employers to provide 45 days of workplace training. In the current climate, that is difficult but, ultimately, that issue will be overcome. For now, the need is to defend, not defund, BTECs.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I have a historic declaration of interest; I refer to it today to ensure entire transparency.
I will speak to Amendment 15A and respond to the Minister. I have no doubt whatever of this Bill’s significance and the importance of getting it right. I also have no doubt about the significance of the vote that I will ask the House to divide on today. I am not in any way opposed to the general thrust of the legislation, nor to the introduction of T-levels; I have made this clear over and again.
I have not had the opportunity to speak to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who spends time in Downing Street, but I did have a productive and constructive meeting with Lord Sainsbury just a few weeks ago. The only thing that divides he and I—I refer to both because the noble Baroness did—is the belief that you have to have a scorched earth policy to make T-levels work. I do not believe that for a minute. I believe that T-levels will succeed on their own merits and in their own right, meeting a specific, focused, technical need—and a wider vocational need, in some cases—where employers and those involved in shaping these qualifications get it right for the future. Picking up on my noble friend Lord Watson’s point, so much of what we have done in education over many years—I include my time in government—has involved catching up on the past and putting in place measures that reflect a bygone era. I do not want us to be in danger of doing that with T-levels—in other words, catching up on a German or Finnish model that is already changing—I want T-levels to succeed in their own right and on their own merits because they are relevant to and appropriate for the future.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. It is right, and I echo completely his comments about T-levels. I am just as committed to T-levels as he is. They are an important and interesting innovation, and to show it, of the UTCs for which I am responsible, in the first year two have experimented with T-levels. They have been teaching them for the last 18 months and will know the results by August of this year. Last August, more UTCs implemented T-levels, so we are learning a great deal about them, though not enough.
The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, would mean more time to consider whether they are living up to what we all hope that they will live up to. That is what it is all about. That is why, when we last debated this Bill, we asked that they should be delayed for four years. The Government listened—I recognise what the Minister and the Secretary of State said, which was, “No, we will delay defunding until 2024.” They were going to start gentle defunding this year with a little bit more next year. I do not know whether that will be cancelled, but the main defunding will be in 2024.
This means that we will only have two years of T-level results to judge. We will have the results in August 2022 of how many students—only a few hundred have taken them—got a distinction, a credit, a pass or a failure. In August 2023, there will be a few more hundred. That is very small evidence of whether they are working. T-levels will only succeed if two lots of people want them to succeed. The first is the students, and whether they recognise that this is a way in which they can get to university, improve their technical knowledge successfully and get a good job after that. The second is whether industry is satisfied that the level of education is what they expect their young employees to have.
Our experience of T-levels is that we had 10 starting the digital T-level 18 months ago at the Dartford UTC. Three dropped out because it was too demanding for them and too academic. We have discovered that students who only get 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 in GCSE will not be able to cope with T-levels, because 80% of a T-level is academic and only 20% is practical. The ones who can cope with T-levels will be those who in GSCE get 9, 8 and 7. Some who get 6 can cope; some cannot. Unquestionably, T-levels are trying to produce an officer class of highly skilled workers in technology.
However, you need more than an officer class. You need a large number of qualified technicians. It is rather like in the Army, where it is no good just having an officer class. You must have the level below them, the regimental sergeant-majors, the sergeant-majors, the lance-corporals and the corporals. These are the people who make the Army successful or not. BTECs have managed to train a lot of qualified technicians who do not particularly want to join the officer class, which is very interesting. You see this in levels 4 and 5—the two qualifications above level 3. Lots of people are now being encouraged to do these, people whom I would describe as “qualified technicians”. To give an example, if you live in London and have a plumbing problem, you have to ring up Pimlico Plumbers. A plumber will come very quickly and charge £80 an hour, which is £640 for a whole day. If someone has a qualification of 4 or 5 and is earning £640 in a day, they are not going to spend two years going on to level 6, the foundation degree. They are the qualified technicians which BTECs provide extensively throughout industry.
Perhaps the Minister can explain one of the problems. BTECs will be disqualified if they overlap, but what does overlap mean? There is no definition of “overlap”. It is very subjective. It is what you think may or may not overlap. To give an example, I have had a letter from an industrialist, whom I have never met, Benjamin Silverstone, a fellow at Warwick University and an expert in battery technology. He says:
“My concern is that a kid says, ‘I want to do my engineering T-level because in two years that job is going to be there’, but that T-level doesn’t fit them for it because there isn’t anything in there about battery technologies, electrification or power electronics.”
This is just one businessman, whom I have never met, but he is saying that T-levels look far too academic.
Therefore, I ask the Ministers seriously to compare the curriculum of T-levels with the curriculum of BTECs. We are doing that with digital at the Dartford UTC and finding out how they differ, and there are differences. We would say that in some areas they do not overlap, but that is a very subjective argument, and the Government may just say, “They do overlap”, so this is not a very satisfactory system. I hope that the Government will listen again on the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and think again on how he is adding that one year back, meaning that they could have another year to decide more clearly which BTECs should be defunded.
My Amendment 16A is altogether quite an interesting argument. In the draft Bill, the Government said that BTECs will survive as single subjects in the future, but no student will be allowed to take two BTECs. This is an entirely original and unique thing to say in the history of education since the great Act of 1870. At no stage have any Government or Minister said that a student cannot take two qualifications that are funded and available. This has never happened before in our history, so why is it being done now? The Government have never justified this, and it is extraordinary.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 15A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is a tireless champion for education, including technical education. He has personal credentials in that field. It is also a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker. These Benches entirely agree with his amendment, too.
I had submitted an amendment, which covered the same ground as that from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, but I withdrew it to ensure we combined strength on this one to try to convince the Government of the extreme damage they are doing to young people’s prospects by their blinkered approach to T-levels. They have, after all, only just been invented. They have no track record and we have no way of knowing if they will really work. Okay, they have been developed by employers, but so has every work-based qualification in existence. BTECs were developed by employers, too; it is nothing new. Of course, employers are experts on employment, but qualifications need input from teachers at colleges and assessors at awarding bodies if they are to make sense.
Why do the Government not have a corporate memory? I was working for City & Guilds back when national vocational qualifications were introduced. Does anybody still remember NVQs? They were going to be the answer to the academic/vocational divide. They were going to break things down and ensure parity of esteem. Wow—they were great. There were six levels of attainment and employers were in the driving seat.
That was fine, but the retail sector decided that it did not need any outside help. All assessments were to be for real; there was to be no simulation. But two essential competences were dealing with fire and dealing with angry customers. The sector proudly printed umpteen boxes of the exciting new qualifications, until it was pointed out that, for anybody to pass them, many retail outlets would need to be burned down and many contented customers would need to have their feet stamped on to be angry enough to meet the requirements. Sadly, the boxes were pulped, as the sector acknowledged that teachers and assessors simulating assessments could be okay for some competences.
I was concerned to see this Government refusing to learn from the past and trying to develop T-levels without the expertise of teachers or assessors. Luckily, they have now been allowed in, but why is there only one awarding body per qualification? If choice and competition are good for GCSE and A-levels, why not for T-levels? It makes no sense to discontinue qualifications that are understood and respected by candidates, by parents—who are a particularly hard nut to crack—by employers and by further and higher education. They have been instrumental in ensuring that less academic, or in some cases more academic, students had choices in pursuing practical studies with enough academic content to satisfy universities’ entrance requirements, and which were capable of being studied alongside A-levels.
The Minister says that they will be withdrawn only if they overlap with T-levels but, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, they are very different animals. An engineering BTEC and an engineering T-level may suit quite different students. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, previously mentioned that, in the trial of his university technical colleges to which he has alluded today, only the brighter students took to T-levels, but there are many other students with different skill sets for whom the BTEC has been an ideal mix of knowledge and skills that has fitted them up for successful employment. Why on earth would the Government stop that?
In five years, we may know for sure whether T-levels are really the bee’s knees but, while they are still in their infancy, it would be folly in the extreme to put all the eggs in the T-level basket and possibly ruin young people’s chances of meaningful study or employment. I appeal to the Government to do nothing hasty and to keep BTECs funded as far into the future as possible. If not, they risk doing irreparable harm to young people’s prospects of meaningful employment and to addressing the country’s skills shortages.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I declare an interest because, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, I am currently working as a skills adviser at No. 10. I was therefore quite involved in the skills White Paper, which led to much of the legislation today.
I very much appreciate the interest the House has taken in this Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and many other noble Lords, I have been bashing away at skills and vocational education for many years. It is wonderful to see that it is now a subject of such importance to so many of you.
I will say something about the local skills improvement plans and Motions 4, 4A and 4B. There is a danger that we are losing sight of what these were meant to be, can and should do, and what the White Paper set out to do. They were meant to be a simple way to create a stable mechanism to make sure that local employers’ voices and insights would be brought together and made available to providers. Colleges do not have to follow these plans in detail; they just have to take note of them. I am concerned that, with the best of motives, we are in danger of creating a vast, complex and bureaucratic process that will not do what it was meant to do, which was to take employers into account but also to reverse the 20-year trend of colleges and providers generally spending all their time worrying about ticking boxes for Whitehall and whether they have met regulations and requirements, but far too little time looking out to their local communities.
I put it on record that I am also bemused by why six pages of dense text are needed to put this simple idea into legislation. I am genuinely concerned that, in trying to enforce something that says, “You must take account of schools, and of this and that”, instead of creating a simple mechanism for employers to be part of the thinking about what is provided in a locality, we will create a new series of tick boxes.
I raise a question particularly on independent training providers, because I simply do not see how this will work. Independent training providers range from huge national providers, which are dominant in apprenticeship sectors, to tiny commercial companies of literally two people in a room above a chip shop. I tried to get my head around how you would take their views into account, when many of them are commercial concerns in determined competition with each other. I really wonder whether this will achieve what people want it to.
As I said, I take this opportunity to say, first, how very much I think the Bill and the support expressed for its purposes show how this country has moved on and really understood the importance of this, but also that local skills improvement plans are meant to be simple. They are meant to be not tick-box or expensive bureaucratic exercises but a way to ensure that employers are part of a process. They are something of which to take account, not an attempt to introduce central planning into what colleges decide to put on.
Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who has fought so hard for the skills agenda. I associate myself with much of that fight and I very much welcome a great deal of what is in the Bill. However, I will say a few words in favour of Amendments 15A and 15B. All the key points on these amendments have already been made very eloquently by my noble friends Lord Blunkett and Lord Watson, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I strongly support the arguments they put forward and I will underline three points.
First, it is true that too many qualifications can be confusing. I have no doubt about that, so I understand what the Government are trying to do here. Nevertheless, I think they have got it wrong. There is no confusion about BTECs. They have been going for nearly 40 years. They are long established and well tried and tested. They play a really important role in the range of qualifications at level 3. It is particularly important that they combine the development of skills with academic learning. They are the only qualification focused entirely on that.
For all the positive aspects of T-levels, they do not do this. They are mainly designed to help those enrolled on them to become successful in specific occupations. Again, I do not want in any way to criticise their introduction—that is an important role—but BTECs allow those who are successful in completing them to go into higher education and in particular to take applied vocational degrees, of which there are many, or into the workplace, or, in some cases, into both, because there are quite a lot of part-time students at BTEC level. Therefore, they should not be ditched to try to bolster T-levels. It is not necessary to do that. I know the Minister has indicated that there are certain niche areas where they will survive, but they should survive as a whole. Moreover, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, we need some time to see how T-levels bed down, who they are successful for, who is attracted to them and whether they are really working for employers.
That is my first point. My second is that the Government seem to have ignored the results and outcomes of their own consultations. Some 86% of respondents to its level 3 consultation disagreed with the proposal to remove funding from qualifications deemed to overlap with A-levels and T-levels. As has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, there is a big issue about what is meant by “overlapping”. The fact their content might be the same does not mean that the approach to teaching and learning is the same. In fact, they are profoundly different. Neither of the two reviews the Government have cited, one undertaken by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, favoured the Government’s approach. In her review, the noble Baroness recognised the value of BTECs, and the Sainsbury review did not cover BTECs at all because they were not part of its remit.
My third point is that abandoning BTECs is likely to severely damage social mobility. It will block a route to university or skilled employment for large numbers of disadvantaged young people. This is reinforced by the evidence of the Social Market Foundation that 44% of white working-class students who entered universities studied at least one BTEC. I am familiar with this from my past role as a vice-chancellor. Many of these students do extraordinarily well when they get to university, often better than those who come in with rather poor A-level qualifications. As I think the noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned, 37% of black students went to university with only BTEC qualifications. Surely we should not block the route of these young ethnic-minority students into our higher education system by taking away a qualification deemed valuable for them.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, I very much agree with the important points noble Lords, especially the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my noble friend Lord Baker, have made. I particularly agreed with my noble friend’s point about this concept of overlapping with T-levels. BTECs and T-levels are rather different. I do not understand exactly what “overlapping” means any more than he does.
It is really important, if we recognise that BTECs have a distinct identity, that many of them continue to be funded. If the Minister can give any further guidance about which BTECs might be defunded and on what basis that would be of enormous value. The two examples she gave of areas where BTECs might be kept, such as performing arts, did not inspire enormous confidence. The more she can share with the House about what exactly this will mean for BTECs will help us in this debate. It will also be incredibly important for FE colleges and other providers.
I will make one final point about the rollout of T-levels. As has been said, many of us support T-levels and we want to see them happen. However, I do not believe that the rollout of T-levels in practice can possibly be delivered in the timescale envisaged. I very much welcomed the Secretary of State’s announcement of a delay of one year. If I might make an analogy, it reminds me a bit of the story of Crossrail. This is admittedly a rather London-centric example, but rather like Crossrail we will find that there will be further announcements of further delays, but unlike with Crossrail the Government also have a bold plan to close the Central line. The announcement of a strict timetable for closing the Central line, because the Government are so confident that Crossrail will be delivered on time, would be very high risk.
Regardless of the exact outcome of the vote today or further possible exchanges with the other place, I think that the timescale set out by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, is itself quite optimistic. I will not be at all surprised if, regardless of what appears in legislation, eventually the appearance of T-levels and the disappearance of BTECs takes considerably longer than currently envisaged.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has just said about the timescales. I had the privilege of chairing your Lordships’ Select Committee on Youth Unemployment, which reported in November. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, for giving us her time and the benefit of her expertise to advise the committee, which was much appreciated.
We reported in November and have just had the reply from Her Majesty’s Government. What we concluded from the evidence given to us was substantial. I shall read to the House our recommendation 40 on this issue:
“The Government must reconsider its decision to defund tried and tested level 3 qualifications like BTECs, Extended Diplomas and AGQs”—
that is, applied general qualifications.
“We support the amendment to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill requiring a four-year moratorium on defunding these qualifications and urge the Government to reconsider this policy in its entirety.”
That was the unanimous conclusion of the committee.
The Government’s reply came to us a few days ago, and the word “overlap” appears in it again. They say they will
“remove funding from qualifications that overlap with T Levels … at a pace that allows growth of T Levels and time for providers, awarding organisations, employers, students, and parents to prepare.”
They conclude that one year is enough. I conclude that it requires four years and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has just said, it may be more than that. In introducing these amendments, the Minister talked about two consultations that have taken place on the issue but, as I recall, she did not say, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has reminded us, that 86% of respondents thought the Government’s timetable was too complicated.
I will just give the House some statistics that the committee received. We said in our report:
“230,000 students received level 3 BTEC results in August 2021. They are a common route into HE and are particularly taken up by students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those with special educational needs and disabilities … Almost half of black British students accepted into university have at least one BTEC.”
The evidence is conclusive, and the contributions today from around your Lordships’ House have demonstrated that the Government need to think again on this issue. For that reason, in supporting Amendment 15A and indeed Amendment 16A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, I will say on behalf of these Benches that if the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, decides to press this matter to a Division, we shall support him.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)
My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register as chair of Access Creative College, an independent training provider of further education for the creative industries. Access welcomes many of the measures in the Bill, as do I. However, I have real concerns that we are inadvertently blighting the applied general qualifications, including BTECs, that it provides.
I listened carefully to the Minister’s remarks responding to Amendment 15A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I may have misheard but I thought I heard her say that A-levels and T-levels were the best routes for learners. I really worry that that kind of language, which creates a hierarchy between qualifications, will lead us to diminish the applied general qualifications and the place they have in our system. I worry that we are denigrating them, which will make it harder for providers confidently to offer them and for learners to undertake them, not knowing whether they will hold their value over time in the eyes of employers and the Government. We need to be careful to ensure that when we talk of parity of esteem we include applied general qualifications in that, so that it is parity of esteem not just between A-levels and T-levels but between A-levels, T-levels and applied general qualifications, including reformed BTECs if they are to be further reformed.
It is really important that the Government try to set out a long-term vision for applied general qualifications. We have to recognise that we have moved quite a long way from the previous government position of there being nothing in between A-levels and T-levels. The Government are now acknowledging that there are going to be a large number of qualifications of the applied general variety, but we need to ensure stability and certainty over their funding and their place in the system, otherwise providers are simply not going to get going and offer them, and learners are not going to be confident about taking them.
In that respect, it would be extremely helpful, for example, if the Government set out when they intend to end the moratorium that has been in place since September 2020 on the creation of new applied general qualifications. To my mind, it does not make any sense to have a moratorium if the Government, in their new policy position, now see value in qualifications in this space between T-levels and A-levels. What purpose does a moratorium serve? To my mind, it crimps and constrains innovation. It prevents providers adapting to the needs of employers and learners and stops them innovating. That is a real issue, and the Government would do well to set out a timeline for ending this moratorium.
I am all for T-levels, and Access Creative College, which I mentioned, is embracing such T-levels as exist that are relevant to its areas of expertise, including the digital T-level—but let us not develop them at the expense of BTECs and other applied qualifications, which meet the needs of their learners extremely well. Let us not create a burning platform for T-levels that does great damage to their needs.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, as the Minister who gave the authorisation to Crossrail, I can say that it was never the intention that the Central line would close; there would be pandemonium in London if it did. The whole purpose of Crossrail was to supplement and improve the Central line, not to replace it, and indeed it goes out further west and east.
That goes to the heart of what the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, has just said, and indeed there seems to be a consensus in the debate that we want a range of qualifications that meet employers’ and students’ needs and do so because they have a strong currency. That strong currency should of course be decided by the students and employers, not imposed by the Government—at least not until the point where it is so clear that the currency is there that it becomes a kind of tidying-up exercise rather than the straightforward force majeure abolition exercise that it looks like at the moment.
I was struck by the fact that when the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf—whom we hold in extremely high regard—spoke about the local skills plans, she did not speak at all about T-levels and did not reply to my noble friend Lord Blunkett. There was a deafening silence on that issue, and I am not sure whether silence was supposed to mean consent; I suspect it might have. I am sure the House will listen with close attention, since she is the Government’s adviser, if she wants to intervene again to say whether she disagrees.
The point being made here is that there may be a longer-term case for these qualifications continuing together, just as there is a long-term case for Crossrail and the Central line continuing together. At the very least we should not abolish the right of students to have access to BTECs until we can be reasonably confident that the replacement qualifications have a strong currency, not a weak one. I am surprised that it should be us on this side having to say this, because it is an enormously Conservative argument: you do not abolish what is there at the moment until you are clear that what is going to replace it is stronger.
This point was brought out particularly strongly in the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who has chaired a Select Committee looking at some of the underlying issues that these qualifications seek to address. He gave the figure to the House that last year 230,000 students finished BTECs. In preparing for this debate, I read the T Level Action Plan of September 2021, which says that as of last year 5,450 students started on 10 T-levels. Let us recap those figures: 230,000 students finished BTECs last year, while in the rollout of T-levels at the moment 5,450 students have started. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said that the plans at the moment for opening T-levels are highly ambitious. Extrapolating from that model for the Central line and Crossrail, we would be opening Crossrail in about the middle of this century—not next year with a one-year delay.
My noble friend Lord Blunkett’s amendment seems extremely reasonable. He is calling for a two-year delay and a review at the end of that to see whether the currency is strong enough. That would seem a very sensible step. Not only is it moderate in its own terms, given the timescales; it could be vital for the life chances of hundreds of thousands of students for whom BTECs are, at the moment, their currency into employment. We should not take that currency away until we are clear that there is an alternative at least as good.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, coming from up north I do not really understand about the Central line and Crossrail. What I do remember was the Liverpool overhead railway, commonly known as the dockers’ umbrella. It was scrapped before the new transport system had proved its worth and chaos resulted.
I preface my remarks by thanking the Minister. I do not think I have come across a Minister so prepared to listen and engage—I am sucking up here—and to consider changes. That is the way it should work in the House of Lords and I pay tribute to her. I also want to pay tribute to the Government because we have talked about the importance of further education and vocational education for a long time but, frankly, successive Governments have done nothing about it. They have done little bits at the edges and margins but not actually done real, radical change. We now see something which is going to be really important to not only the skills agenda but young people particularly.
My comments from our Benches are not being made from a stance of party dogma. They are being made from a stance that it is important to get this right, as the noble Lords, Lord Baker, Lord Blunkett and Lord Adonis, have said. We want the Government to be successful. We want them to be able to triumph in this legislation, so the areas we are finally down to are just small changes which would make sure this really happens. I want to talk about two important areas, in the order that we have discussed them.
First, on the local skills improvement plans, yes, it is now important to have a plan in each locality and for all the partners to be joined up to it. Those plans will vary from area to area—of course they will. I have never quite understood why we should exclude the further education providers or local combined authorities, or whatever they are. They have not only budgets; they have influence and expertise. I take the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, made about us not wanting it to be bureaucratic but we want to make it successful so, as I have just said, it is important that those stakeholders are there.
Colleges bring a wealth of experience. You cannot expect them to provide the courses and skills needed unless they are truly involved. This notion of the combined authorities just ensuring that the plan is not signed off until they raise the white smoke is not good enough. They should be working alongside by influencing, empowering and suggesting, not as some huge bureaucratic body but through some simple opportunity to work side by side. Actually, the employers need to be in a position to tell the colleges where they have got it wrong and how they can improve by doing things to step up to the game. We feel strongly about that and if it goes to a vote, we will support it.
We have heard the talk about the BTECs. Again, I do not really understand it. It was interesting to see what Pearson said, which was that the introduction of T-levels need not lead to a requirement to defund other qualifications. Why? Because there is a clear distinction between T-levels and career focused BTECs, which have different structures and different purposes.
It seems to us that we have long advocated this, as far back as the Sainsbury reform of vocational qualifications; again, it is a bit like the local skills plan. It is important to get it right and we are not convinced that you can rush at this. The two qualifications have to work alongside each other. This is not an area I have any expertise in but listening again to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who has expertise in this matter, the Government would be wise to take on board his suggestions. We are saying that we clearly want to see BTECs not being defunded for at least four years, and we want to support the very important amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank all noble Lords for the contributions they have made to this important debate and particularly the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for acknowledging the importance of the Government’s work in this area. I also thank my noble friend Lady Wolf for her descriptions of how local skills improvement plans should work in practice. I attempted to write something down but she put it very well.
We are trying to balance having a clear focus on the needs of employers, for all the reasons that your Lordships are well aware of—given the feedback we have from employers that students do not come to them with all the skills and experience that they need—with drawing on the valuable local insight and intelligence to which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and others of your Lordships referred. We are trying to strike a balance between those two things.
In relation to the role of local authorities in this, particularly those which have a devolved adult education budget, the Secretary of State will have the ability through regulations to add local authorities in England to those relevant providers already subject to the duties in the legislation. These regulations will be subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution in Parliament.
Those independent training providers that deliver English post-16 education or training will also have duties on them where that training is material to a specified area. There is already a duty on them to co-operate and engage in the development of the local skills improvement plans.
Turning to the vexed issue of defunding BTECs, I am concerned about my communication skills. I am not sure how many times I have stood at the Dispatch Box—I know colleagues at the other end have done the same—trying to reassure the House that we are not defunding most BTECs, as the noble Lord, Lordusb Watson, said, deploying a scorched earth policy, which the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, suggested, or leaving them as a niche qualification, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, suggested. We see them as an absolutely core part of the offer in giving young people choice, diversity and quality, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, described. We agree absolutely and think that the suite of qualifications we will have in future will do those three things.
To my noble friend Lord Johnson’s point about blighting and—these were not my noble friend’s words—besmirching the quality of BTECs, it is absolutely the reverse. Once we get through this and we are clear which BTECs are remaining, they will have absolute endorsement from the Government that they meet the standards of quality and future employability which are so critical for our young people, particularly those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. All will be on a level playing field and have that endorsement.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
On that last point, once we get through this, as the Minister says, we can make judgments, but as things stand we are talking about 2024. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and others have said, by 2024 we will not have a clear view of how well T-levels have proceeded, so that is not the time to make the judgment. It surely has to be further down the line.
Baroness Barran (Con)
If I may, I will respond to that very valid point about the scale-up of T-levels when I come to it in just a second.
I am tempted to expand on the Crossrail/Central line analogy, but I think time does not permit.
On timing, and my noble friend Lord Willett’s question about giving a greater sense of which technical qualifications will be recommended for defunding, I am not in a position to be able to say that today. We intend to publish a provisional list of overlaps with waves 1 and 2 of T-levels shortly. We want to provide as much notice as possible about the qualifications that will have public funding approval withdrawn from 2024.
On the definition of “overlap”, which a number of noble Lords raised—
Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)
I am sorry to interrupt the Minister, but I wonder whether she can give some indication of the proportion of BTEC qualifications that the Government are intent on keeping and the proportion that are likely to be dropped because of the so-called overlap. How many of the 250,000 students currently taking BTECs will be able to continue to do so?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am afraid that I am not in a position to be able to confirm that today, but I can confirm that “scorched earth”, “niche” and “most” are not a reflection of where we are on this policy.
On the definition of “overlap”, in our policy statement in July last year we published the three tests that would be used to determine overlap: first, is the qualification in question a technical qualification; secondly, are the outcomes that must be obtained by a person taking that qualification similar to those set out in a standard covered by a T-level; and, thirdly, does the qualification aim to support entry to the same occupation as the T-level?
Turning to the number of people and the scale-up of T-levels, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, suggested that 230,000 students start a BTEC each year. In fact, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, clarified just now, there are 230,000 students taking BTECs or similar qualifications at any one time, rather than as initial starters.
My noble friend Lord Baker suggested that the number of people starting BTECs is in the hundreds. Around 5,450 students started their T-level last September, at just over 100 providers across the country. That was up from 1,300 students, who were the pioneers and are now in their second year. We now have more than 400 providers, all over the country, signed up to deliver T-levels. All the current T-levels will be available by 2023, and of course those providers include FE colleges and UTCs, which deliver significant numbers of those qualifications.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 3.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I beg leave to test the opinion of the House.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 4.
Baroness Barran
Moved by
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 5 and 6.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 7 to 14.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I now turn to the Motion on the amendments in the second group, which relate to technical government amendments, the lifelong loan entitlement, the level 3 entitlement and apprenticeships, and the Office for Students.
Commons Amendments 7 to 14 provide further clarification of the definition of relevant providers in scope of the duties relating to local skills improvement plans, and which education and training is treated as English-funded. The duties will apply only to institutions within the further education sector in England, English higher education providers and independent training providers who carry on their post-16 technical education or training in England, either partly or fully. Relevant providers will be subject to the duties relating to local skills improvement plans only if they provide English-funded post-16 technical education or training material to a specified area in England. This includes distance or online learning.
This will help to ensure that English-funded technical education and training provision material to an area in England is better aligned to labour market skills needs and leads to good jobs for learners and improved productivity. These are technical amendments that the Welsh Senedd has confirmed it is happy with. It has confirmed as such through agreeing that this measure would not be part of the legislative consent Motion required and granted in January.
I turn next to Commons Amendment 20. A key aim for the lifelong loan entitlement is to ensure that people can reskill flexibly across their lifetime in response to changing skills needs and employment patterns. We also need to consider the importance of creating a sustainable student finance system, alongside what will be necessary to ensure that eligible students have the opportunity to study, upskill and retrain.
I am pleased to confirm that in our current consultation on the LLE, which we have published since the House last discussed the Bill, we seek to understand better the barriers that learners might face in accessing the LLE. This includes whether restrictions on previous study should be amended to facilitate retraining and stimulate high-quality provision.
I was delighted to host a round table with Peers to listen to your Lordships’ advice on the consultation and where officials noted comments for submission into the consultation. This was a productive and thoughtful session which will help inform policy decisions moving forward. If any of your Lordships would like to discuss the details and scope of the lifelong loan entitlement with me, or with officials, I would be delighted to meet them. Given that the consultation is the appropriate vehicle to examine the issue of the LLE, I hope your Lordships will agree to this Commons amendment.
Commons Amendment 22 is a minor and technical amendment which clarifies that advanced learner loan funding, routed through the Student Loans Company, is in scope of Clause 22 of the Bill. This has always been the intention of Clause 22(9), and this amendment is merely a technical adjustment to the drafting. It ensures that advanced learner loan funding arrangements are captured by the funding arrangements definition in Clause 22. Without this amendment, the clause may not be adequately applied in relation to providers that receive advanced learner loan funding.
Commons Amendment 23 removes Clause 25, which sought to place the level 3 entitlement on a statutory footing and require at least two-thirds of apprenticeship funding to be spent on people who begin apprenticeships at levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25. The Government agree with the ambition to ensure that people in England have access to education at any age. That is why we launched the free courses for jobs offer in April 2021 as part of the lifetime skills guarantee. This gives all adults in England the opportunity to take their first level 3 qualification for free, regardless of their age. But it is not right to put the free courses for jobs offer into legislation, as my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke’s amendment would have done. Doing so would constrain how the Government allocate resources in future and make it more difficult to adapt the policy to changing circumstances and for adults most in need.
The Secretary of State announced last November that from April 2022 we will expand the offer to include any adult in England who earns below the national living wage annually—which will be £18,525 from April this year—or is unemployed, regardless of their prior qualification level. Funding for the free courses for jobs offer will be available throughout the three-year SR period, giving FE providers the certainty they need to invest in the delivery of this offer. Full funding is also available through the adult education budget for adults aged 19 and over to access English, maths and digital skills qualifications. There is also a legal entitlement for 19 to 23 year-olds to access their first full level 2 and level 3 qualifications for free. In areas where adult education is not devolved, the adult education budget can fully fund eligible learners studying up to level 2, where they are unemployed or earning below the national living wage.
I turn now to the apprenticeship proposal in the clause. From August to November 2021, nearly 100,000 people under the age of 25 started an apprenticeship, with under-25s accounting for 61% of all apprenticeships. Some 71% of apprenticeship starts were at level 2 and level 3. We want to bring more young people into apprenticeships. This is why the Minister for Skills wrote to all year 11, 12 and 13 pupils and their parents during National Apprenticeship Week to tell them about the great opportunities that apprenticeships provide. The Department for Education is looking at how we support young people in the application process and is working with employers to help them understand the benefits of hiring young apprentices. The department is also looking at how we can better support providers and employers to advertise to this group and is working with UCAS to capitalise on the work it does to connect young people to opportunities after school or college. We believe that measures focused on raising awareness of apprenticeships, helping young people to navigate the recruitment process and encouraging more attractive and accessible vacancies constitute a much better approach to supporting young people into apprenticeships than an amendment that could restrict opportunities. I remind your Lordships that this clause would have created significant costs and altered arrangements for public spending, which I do not believe this House should amend when the Commons has disagreed to this measure.
I will now turn to Commons Amendments 24 and 25. These new measures will give the Office for Students, the OfS, an explicit power to publish information about its compliance and enforcement activity in relation to higher education providers. It is important that the Government act now to ensure transparency of the OfS’s regulatory work, as in recent cases it has become clear that the OfS does not have the explicit powers that other regulators have to publish such information. As part of this, we believe that it is important, and in the public interest, that the OfS is able to publish such information in the form of “notices, decisions and reports”, as this amendment will enable—for example, where it is investigating providers for potential breaches of the registration conditions placed upon them by the regulator. Publication by the OfS regarding its compliance and enforcement functions will demonstrate that appropriate actions are being taken by the regulator, ensuring that the reputation of higher education in England is maintained, and bearing down on poor provision.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 15.
Lord Blunkett
At end insert “and do propose Amendment 15B instead of the words so left out of the Bill—
“(3) Subsection (2) does not apply to the withdrawal of level three courses—
(a) for the period of three academic years beginning with the first such year which starts after the day on which this Act is passed; and
(b) for the fourth such year, unless the Institute has undertaken public consultation and secured consent of the relevant employer representative bodies, as defined in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022, together with appropriate quality assurance.””
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 16.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I beg leave to test the opinion of the House.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 17 and 18 and do propose Amendments 17B and 17C to Commons Amendment 17—
“Information about technical education and training: access to English schools
(1) Section 42B of the Education Act 1997 (information about technical education: access to English schools) is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (1), for “is an opportunity” substitute “are opportunities”.
(3) After subsection (1) insert—
“(1A) In complying with subsection (1), the proprietor must give access to registered pupils on at least one occasion during each of the first, second and third key phase of their education.”
(4) After subsection (2) insert—
“(2A) The proprietor of a school in England within subsection (2) must— (a) ensure that each registered pupil meets, during each of the first and second key phases of their education, at least one provider to whom access is given (or any other number of such providers that may be specified for the purposes of that key phase by regulations under subsection (8)), and
(b) ask providers to whom access is given to provide information that includes the following—
(i) information about the provider and the approved technical education qualifications or apprenticeships that the provider offers,
(ii) information about the careers to which those technical education qualifications or apprenticeships might lead,
(iii) a description of what learning or training with the provider is like, and
(iv) responses to questions from the pupils about the provider or approved technical education qualifications and apprenticeships.
(2B) Access given under subsection (1) must be for a reasonable period of time during the standard school day.”
(5) In subsection (5)—
(a) in paragraph (c), at the end insert “and the times at which the access is to be given;”;
(b) after paragraph (c) insert—
“(d) an explanation of how the proprietor proposes to comply with the obligations imposed under subsection (2A).”
(6) In subsection (8), after “subsection (1)” insert “or (2A)”.
(7) After subsection (9) insert—
“(9A) For the purposes of this section—
(a) the first key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 13, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year;
(b) the second key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 15, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year;
(c) the third key phase of a pupil’s education is the period—
(i) beginning at the same time as the school year in which the majority of pupils in the pupil’s class attain the age of 17, and
(ii) ending with 28 February in the following school year.””
“(a) ensure that, during each of the first and second key phases of the education of each registered pupil—
(i) on at least two occasions the pupil meets at least one provider to whom access is given (or any other number of such providers that may be specified for the purposes of that key phase by regulations under subsection (8)), and
(ii) the pupil does not meet exactly the same provider or providers on each of those occasions, and”
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, the Motions in this group relate to provider access, universal credit, and SEND and further education teacher training. I will start with Commons Amendments 17 and 18, on strengthening the present provider access legislation, and Amendments 17A, B and C to the Motion in my name.
The Government have listened to and carefully considered the views expressed and concerns raised in this House and the other place. We agree that it is important that the number of mandatory provider encounters is balanced with the need for pupils to hear from a diverse range of people during each key phase of their education. That is why I am delighted to be able to propose a compromise amendment that offers young people that choice, related to students meeting providers of technical education and apprenticeships.
Our amendment would require schools to put on six provider encounters for pupils in years 8 to 13: two in each key phase, or an average of one per year over the course of a pupil’s secondary education. This should help to ensure that young people meet a greater breadth of providers and, crucially, should prevent schools simply arranging one provider meeting and turning down all other providers. The underpinning statutory guidance will include details of the full range of providers that we would expect all pupils to have the opportunity to meet during their time at secondary school. The Government intend to consult on this statutory guidance to ensure that the legislation works for schools, providers and, most importantly, young people.
I also want to take this opportunity to clarify that, although this amendment does not make specific reference to university technical colleges, the reference to “providers” in the amendment does cover UTCs. Strong UTCs are succeeding in equipping young people with vital skills, getting them into employment and supporting social mobility. It is right that, when there is a UTC in reasonable distance, it should be one of the providers that schools consider inviting to speak to their pupils.
I thank my noble friend Lord Baker for his work on this issue. In particular, I recognise the extraordinary work done by the right honourable Robert Halfon MP, chair of the Education Select Committee, and thank him for his tireless campaigning. I hope noble Lords will agree that this is a sensible compromise, with a middle ground of six provider encounters that will help to give every pupil information about what FE colleges, independent training providers, university technical colleges and other alternative providers can offer.
Amendments 17D and 17E in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, would require that provider encounters are in person and, further, that they begin in year 7 and that access is given over at least two weeks on each occasion. We agree that all young people need work experience and engagement with a range of employers to gain insights into the workplace. We also want young people to have access to personal guidance whenever they are making significant choices about the next step in their education or training. That is why we expect schools to follow the Gatsby benchmarks, which incorporate these activities as part of a high-quality careers programme for young people.
We are committed to ensuring that every provider encounter is of a high quality and meaningful for the student. We agree that it is sensible that provider encounters should be given in person where possible. However, writing this requirement into primary legislation is unnecessary. We have seen throughout the pandemic that there are times when it is not always appropriate for provision to be given in person. Technology may also have a role to play in bringing pupils a wider range of perspectives; for example, as part of the provider’s in-person presentation at school, it could incorporate a live link-up with some students at the provider or deliver a virtual tour. However, we agree that encounters should be in person where possible, and we propose making that expectation clear in the statutory guidance.
Secondly, we agree that “the earlier, the better” on careers guidance. That is why the Government support the Private Member’s Bill currently making its way through this House that sets out that career guidance begins at year 7. Pupils will get introduced to careers education in year 7 and will start learning about technical education options via the provider encounters from year 8. There is little demonstrable benefit in bringing the provider access clause forward to year 7, because pupils cannot act on this information then, whereas from year 8 onwards, there are clear choices for them to make in terms of the subsequent stages following their secondary education.
Finally, I cannot agree with the amendment that would require schools to provide access to pupils over a two-week period. This would be extremely burdensome on schools, which would struggle to accommodate that amount of time for providers in an already busy curriculum. We think the clause as it stands, saying schools should ensure a reasonable period of time during the school day, is sufficient and proportionate.
I turn to Commons Amendment 19 and Motions 19A and 19B. My noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott and I had productive conversations—
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
I just want to refer to the earlier amendment, for which I thank my noble friend very warmly. The original Baker clause had three meetings for each year group—13, 15 and 17—and the Government wanted one. It was a loophole. I had discussions with her and I thank her very much for the way in which she responded, moving to two meetings. It is a very good example of give and take. She is a member of a Ministry that likes to take but very seldom gives, but here the Government did listen to representations from this House. I thank her for agreeing to that and being sympathetic to it.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank my noble friend for his very kind words.
Returning to Amendment 19 and Motions 19A and 19B, as I was saying, my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott and I had productive conversations with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, on these matters. I shall highlight some of the points raised in these discussions, although I am aware that the letters we wrote to the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord are in the Library of the House.
First, I note that Clause 17, removed by Amendment 19, would be significantly costly to implement. Initial estimates from DWP suggest the cost of ensuring that such claimants retain entitlement to universal credit could be between £250 million and £300 million per annum. While this House has rightly asked the Commons to consider this point, it is right that we do not continue to insist on policy that would increase public spending. It may help if I remind noble Lords that the core objective of universal credit is to support claimants to enter work, earn more or prepare for work in the future. Indeed, it is an important principle that universal credit does not duplicate the support provided by the student support system.
However, I reassure your Lordships that universal credit claimants are able to take on part-time training for any level of course, as long as they can meet their work requirements and their work coach is satisfied that it will help their employment chances. Furthermore, the Government understand that there should be some circumstances in which people are allowed to continue to claim universal credit while doing full-time training. That is why universal credit claimants may undertake a full-time course of non-advanced study or training for up to eight weeks in order to support their employment and career goals. Additionally, as part of DWP Train and Progress, there is a further extension in the flexibility offered by universal credit conditionality. This extension means that, with the agreement of their work coach, adults who claim universal credit can undertake non-advanced work-related full-time training for up to 16 weeks without losing their entitlement to universal credit. The flexibility will last until at least April 2023.
Finally, exceptions for full-time study or training at any level are also made for students with additional needs that are not met through the student support system, such as those responsible for a child or claimants who have been assessed as having limited capability for work due to disability or ill health. This additional flexibility has been introduced in recognition of the benefit a course of study or training could have in enabling claimants with disabilities to improve their prospects of obtaining work. Officials at the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions will also continue to work closely together to help address and mitigate the barriers to unemployed adults taking advantage of our skills offers. For example, both departments are working to ensure that local jobcentre leads are actively involved in and help inform the design of local skills provision through skills advisory panels and the local skills improvement plans.
Moreover, the recently announced employment and skills pathfinders are a joint DWP/DfE initiative, working in collaboration with local partners, to examine how our national interventions could be improved by aligning the delivery of employment and skills at a local level. The employment and skills advisory pathfinders will share all their learnings with the LSIPs, as I mentioned, but also with the mayoral combined authorities and other local programmes, so they have an opportunity to learn from them too. More broadly, in relation to how we are learning from these programmes, the Department for Education is setting up a new unit for future skills which will work with BEIS and DWP to bring together the skills, data and information we hold across government to enable us to use central and local government, as well as providers and the general public. The unit will produce information on local skills demand, the future skills needs of business, the skills available in an area and the pathways between training and jobs. This will obviously also be relevant to those looking for work.
Turning to Commons Amendment 21 and Motion 21B in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, we all agree that it is vital for our teachers across all stages, from early years to school and further education, to be trained to identify and respond to the needs of all their learners, including those with special educational needs and disabilities. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, who has been a voice for learners with special educational needs and disabilities throughout the debates on this Bill, and more broadly in the House. However, as indicated by Commons Amendment 21, we do not believe it is helpful to prescribe requirements relating to the content of further education initial teacher training in primary legislation, and we do not agree, in response to the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, that the content of occupational standards should be cemented into legislation.
I want first to address our shared commitment to ensuring that all learners, including learners with special educational needs and disabilities, have access to a world-class education that sets them up for life and supports them to achieve positive outcomes. This starts from the earliest stages, which is why, as part of the early years recovery programme, we are establishing a training contract to increase the number of qualified SENCOs working in early years settings by up to 5,000 between September 2022 and August 2024.
In addition, we recently announced a package of over £45 million for SEND, to be delivered over the next three financial years. This includes direct support to schools and colleges to support the workforce in meeting the needs of learners with special educational needs and disabilities. The forthcoming SEND review will aim to ensure that children and young people with SEND get the educational, health and care support they need, identified early, delivered promptly and in settings that are best suited to their needs.
On the content of FE initial teacher training programmes, it is right that teaching professionals in the sector decide how teacher training should be designed and delivered. We supported a group of experts who employ teachers in the FE sector—from colleges and training providers, whose staff have real insight into the needs of their learners—to develop the new occupational standard for learning and skills teachers, which was published in September 2021.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, Motion 17D and Amendments 17E and 17F, tabled in my noble friend Lord Watson’s name, would in essence require schools to give careers advice for at least two weeks and in person after year 7 in secondary school. Technical education information provided to students must be given on two occasions per key education phase rather than on one occasion. In the next Labour Government, we will reinstate two weeks of compulsory work experience and will guarantee that every young person gets to see a careers adviser. We will refocus the curriculum, deliver new opportunities for digital skills, practical work and life skills, sport and the arts, and give every young person access to a professional careers adviser to make sure that they leave school ready for work and for life. We will give every child access to quality careers advice in their school by giving schools access to a professional careers adviser one day a week. In the meantime, however, we are where we are, and this amendment would at least put some extra provision into an area that is underresourced and in need of additional support. I beg to move.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I start again by thanking the Minister for meeting with myself and colleagues and with the Minister for the Department of Work and Pensions. I think we are all agreed that we want to ensure that every young person, whatever their circumstances, situation or abilities, is given the opportunities to study and to develop the skills that they need and that, presumably, we as a society need.
In meeting with the Ministers, I was impressed with the number of schemes for support that the Department for Work and Pensions provides. In recent years, we have seen a coming together of the Department for Education and the Work and Pensions Department in a way that we have never seen before. I was interested to see that the Department for Work and Pensions offers young people the intensive work-coach support through youth employability coaches, 160 youth hubs, training progress, expansion of sector-based work academy programmes, the restart scheme, the access to work scheme, providing personalised support to the disabled, and of course through Kickstart. However, I have to say that I have always been surprised that, although Kickstart has been a successful programme, a 16 year-old cannot join it unless they are on universal credit, and of course most 16 year olds are not.
Although I said how impressed I was at the joining up of the two departments, I was rather concerned when, in a Written Question to the Department for Work and Pensions, I asked how many young people aged 16 to 19 are currently studying for a post-16 qualification and the answer came back: “That information is not available.” I then asked:
“how many young people aged 16 to 19 who are receiving Universal Credit have successfully completed a post-16 qualification.”
Again, the answer came back: “We haven’t got that information”, which I was slightly concerned about.
Perhaps the most vulnerable—if I may use that term—with regard to education must be those students who either have learning difficulties or who are disabled. I want to highlight, as the Minister has done, the problems that disabled students face. Under the current rules, to start a claim for universal credit while in education a disabled person must already have limited capability for work status, as the Minister said. But, of course, to get that status a disabled person must have a work capability assessment, and the main way to access an assessment is by starting a claim for universal credit.
In practice, disabled people in education are in a Catch-22 situation. They need limited capability for work status to start a claim for universal credit, but they need to start a claim for universal credit to get limited capability for work status. Currently, the only way a disabled learner can get an assessment and therefore limited capability for work status while studying is by applying for a contributory new-style employment and support allowance instead of universal credit. Because claiming ESA involves an assessment, it can establish a young learner’s limited capability for work, so they can go on to claim universal credit. Is the noble Baroness following me? However, the oncoming rules will close off the ESA workaround route because they require assessments to have taken place and limited capability for work to have been established before a claimant starts studying. The new rules close off the only route young disabled learners have to universal credit.
Additionally, it would probably be helpful to address the Government’s assertion that the welfare system is not designed to fund maintenance support for those in education and training and that financial support for students comes from the current system of learner loans and grants. The problem is that, currently, there is extremely minimal financial support for those seeking to train and retrain in further education colleges, which might at best contribute to travel costs but which is nothing like enough to support wider living costs. As such, adults who are forced to forgo their universal credit in order to study have to be supported by family or live off savings they might otherwise have been able to obtain.
I know we discussed the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham on Report, and I am conscious of the Minister’s detailed reply, but for disabled people particularly, the situation is very precarious. I hope the Minister might agree to look at this matter with her colleagues and see how we can further support them.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, this House carried an amendment in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who cannot be in his place today, concerning universal credit conditionality—this has been referred to several times—but it was not accepted when the Bill was considered in the other place.
If the Government are to achieve their levelling-up ambitions and enable individuals to secure better-paid employment with improved prospects, then it is essential to achieve greater integration of the support provided for skills development and training by the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham wishes me to say that, on these Benches, we are most grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Stedman-Scott and Lady Barran, for their very constructive and helpful meeting with the right reverend Prelate and their subsequent letter setting out how this better integration is being actively pursued, the range of provision open to universal credit claimants seeking to retrain, and how work coaches are able to exercise appropriate discretion when applying universal credit conditionality rules.
I know that the right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Durham and the Bishop of Coventry—the latter now in his capacity as lead bishop for FE and HE—welcome the opportunity to contribute to the consultation on equivalent or lower qualifications, which will engage Peers in more detail, along with the outworking of the detail behind the lifelong learning guarantee. In the light of these assurances, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham is content not to press the matter.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, as we all struggle through this slightly unfamiliar process, the amendment I have down was inspired by the letter we got from the Secretary of State. I was told, as the noble Baroness has said, that we do not need to do it because the occupational standards will cover it. Great. But what really made me table the amendment was the body that the Government consulted: the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers.
My declaration of interest probably comes in here. I am president of the British Dyslexia Association, and my various other interests are on the register. I spoke to that association—the biggest group involved here—which also covers dyscalculia. It has had no contact with that body—and it is giving the advice. Dyslexia is the biggest of the groups involved, but it is not the only one. Dyscalculia is right up there, along with dyspraxia—that is all those beginning with “dys-” covered—and then there is ADHD, autism and the others. Those are the main, non-obvious groups that will occur in an ordinary classroom. This is what the duty was aimed at. Are those doing the teaching capable of understanding the needs of the people they are teaching? Are they giving advice and creating strategies, so that the people they are teaching actually succeed in what they are doing?
All I am talking about is making sure that the duties we have are acknowledged, and jolly good too. We are so well prepared for these duties that we have a growth in law firms making sure they are enforced throughout the education system. The law is so clear and so well provided for that for parents—tiger parents—the best way of getting through the education system is by paying lawyers to make sure they get through.
It is a mess. It is said that you cannot impose standards, but if you are part of the standards, you can update them, and this duty can be updated as well. We are dealing with about 20% to 25% of the cohort—probably more in further education. These are people who do not get the plan. They have a problem that means they will probably underachieve and not handle the classroom well. Expecting the teaching workforce to have a clear understanding of this is not too much to ask.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank all noble Lords who have spoken today, particularly on the amendments and Motions we have just debated. I will touch very briefly on the points raised.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, for her explanation of the Labour Party’s vision for curriculum extension, but, as I set out in my opening remarks, we have very real concerns in relation to this amendment about the impact that a two-week work experience slot would have on schools. We question the value of provider encounters in year 7, before those students can act on them, as I set out in my earlier remarks.
On the very eloquent explanation of the disability benefits system from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, as he knows, we are very concerned about disability unemployment. We published a national disability strategy last July that set out how the Government will help level up opportunity and improve the experience of disabled people. Critically, that includes greater inclusion in the workplace to tackle the disability gap. As the noble Lord remarked, a great deal of work and many initiatives are going on in this area. I am more than happy to accept, on my behalf and that of my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott, any further conversations the noble Lord would find useful, and I will take back his thoughts to the department.
I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds and his colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, and similarly reassure them, on behalf of my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott, that we would be delighted to continue to work with all noble Lords on these issues, which I know she takes extremely seriously.
On the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I would be glad to write to him to try to reassure him about the quality of the advice we have received and the experience of those giving us that advice. I reiterate our concerns about inflexibility in relation to a measure that is in the Bill, particularly since we introduced this standard only in September 2021. The noble Lord will understand that, much as I would like to, I cannot pre-announce anything from the SEND review, but I very much hope he will find much that interests him within it.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
I thank the Minister for her reply, and I offer in all sincerity that, if she ever wants to discuss the Labour Party’s policy on education and future strategy, I am always available. However, we continue to believe that the amendment is a necessary addition to the Bill. Therefore, I ask the House to agree with it and I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 19.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I beg to move.
Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 19
Lord Storey
At end insert “and do propose Amendment 19B instead of the words so left out of the Bill—
“Universal credit conditionality: report
Within twelve months of the passing of this Act the Secretary of State must lay a report before Parliament on the impact of universal credit conditionality on the ability of unemployed disabled people to take up further education.””
Lord Storey (LD)
Given the assurances from the Minister, I am not moving this amendment.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 20.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 21.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I beg to move.
Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 21
Lord Addington
At end insert “and do propose Amendment 21B instead of the words so left out of the Bill—
“Employer-led occupational standards for further education teaching
The employer-led occupational standards for further education teachers must include a working knowledge of how the most commonly occurring special educational needs will affect students in the normal educational and training environment within an institution.””
Lord Addington (LD)
I beg to move and wish to test the opinion of the House.
Baroness Barran
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 22 to 27.
“Office for Students: publication and protection from defamation
In the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, after section 67 insert—
“Publication
67A Power for the OfS to publish notices, decisions and reports
(1) The OfS may publish notices, decisions and reports given or made in the performance of its functions.
(2) Subsection (1) does not affect any other power of the OfS to publish such a matter.
(3) Publication under this section does not breach—
(a) an obligation of confidence owed by the OfS, or
(b) any other restriction on the publication or disclosure of information (however imposed).
(4) But nothing in this section authorises the OfS to publish information where doing so contravenes the data protection legislation.
For this purpose “the data protection legislation” has the same meaning as in the Data Protection Act 2018 (see section 3 of that Act).
(5) In deciding whether to publish a notice, decision or report under subsection (1), the OfS must, in particular, consider—
(a) the interests of—
(i) students on higher education courses provided by English higher education providers,
(ii) people thinking about undertaking, or who have undertaken, such courses, and
(iii) English higher education providers,
(b) the need for excluding from publication, so far as practicable, any information which relates to the affairs of a particular body or individual, where publication of that information would or might, in the opinion of the OfS, seriously and prejudicially affect the interests of that body or individual, and
(c) the public interest.
(6) For the purposes of this section and sections 67B and 67C—
(a) a reference to a decision includes a reference to the reasons for it, and
(b) any decision made in the course of exercising, or for the purposes of enabling the OfS to exercise, any of the OfS’s functions (including making any other decision) is made “in the performance of its functions”.
67B Publication of decision to conduct or terminate investigation
(1) This section applies where under section 67A(1) the OfS publishes a decision to conduct an investigation.
(2) If the publication identifies a higher education provider or other body or individual whose activities are being, or to be, investigated, and—
(a) the OfS terminates the investigation without making any finding, or
(b) the findings of the investigation, so far as they relate to the higher education provider, body or individual, do not result in the OfS taking any further action,
the OfS must publish a notice stating that fact.
(3) Section 67C does not apply to the publication of the decision to conduct the investigation to the extent that it includes information other than—
(a) a statement of the OfS’s decision to conduct the investigation,
(b) a summary of the matter being, or to be, investigated, and
(c) a reference to the identity of any higher education provider or other body or individual whose activities are being, or to be, investigated.
(4) See section 67A(6) for the meaning of references to decisions.
Defamation
67C Protection from defamation claims
(1) For the purposes of the law of defamation, publication by the OfS of any notice, decision or report given or made in the performance of its functions is privileged unless the publication is shown to have been made with malice.
This is subject to section 67B.
(2) See section 67A(6) for the meaning of references to decisions.””
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Thursday 7th April 2022
(2 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 142-I Motion for Consideration of Commons Disagreement and Reason - (6 Apr 2022)
Baroness Barran
That this House do not insist on its Amendment 15B, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 15C.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I am pleased to be back in the Chamber to discuss the Bill as it reaches its conclusion.
After listening to debate from noble Lords a fortnight ago—the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in particular made a speech that spoke to his own experience, which I profoundly respect—I have come to this House with an announcement and clarifications that I hope will address the main thrust of those concerns. We are taking a pragmatic approach to our reforms as they are implemented and will continue to do so. We have already made important changes after listening to the arguments made in this House.
Last November, the Secretary of State announced an additional year before funding would be withdrawn from qualifications that overlap with T-levels. We have also removed the English and maths exit requirement from T-levels, but we do not think that a further delay will benefit providers, awarding bodies, employers or students. We know that stakeholders need clarity on the timescales for implementation, and we are continuing to support them in the rollout of T-levels. The announcements I am making today should give further assurance that the Government are undertaking their reforms in a measured, evidence-led and sensible manner and that any further delay is not necessary. We want to get on with delivering the Bill and our reforms to technical education qualifications.
My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education sent a letter to noble Lords. In that letter, he set out the Government’s position that many applied general qualifications, such as BTECs and other similar qualifications, will have a continuing and important role to play alongside A-levels and T-levels. To be approved for funding in future, qualifications will need to meet new quality and necessity criteria.
I want to make it clear that students will be able to take applied general-style qualifications, including BTECs, alongside A-levels as part of a mixed programme. We are not creating a binary system. Our aim is to ensure that students can choose from a variety of high-quality options, of which A-levels, T-levels, BTECs and other applied general-style qualifications will all play their part.
We have already begun our reform process, having confirmed that around 1,800 qualifications have low or no enrolments and will therefore have funding removed from August 2022. Our next phase of reforms will be to consider qualifications that overlap with T-levels. I know that noble Lords are all interested to see the provisional list of qualifications that overlap with waves 1 and 2 T-levels. I want to be absolutely clear to your Lordships today that through this process we expect to remove public funding approval for just a small proportion of the total level 3 offer, including BTECs. This will be significantly less than half. We expect to publish the provisional list in due course. There will be an opportunity for awarding organisations to appeal a qualification’s inclusion on the list to make sure we have applied our overlap criteria fairly. Our final phase in this process will focus on the quality of the wide range of other qualifications available.
I now turn to the commitment the Government are making in the light of the previous debate on the Bill in this Chamber. We want to ensure that we have the best evidence when considering whether to continue funding qualifications. As such, I can now guarantee that employers will have the opportunity to say if they believe qualifications support entry into occupations not covered by T-levels. This will mean that we have the strongest evidence to support decisions through the overlap process. It is important that there are no gaps in provision and that we retain the qualifications we need to support progression into occupations that are not covered by T-levels.
I was pleased in the previous debate to hear the support across the House for T-levels. Just as T-levels are being introduced in phases, we are also taking a phased approach to removing funding approval from qualifications that overlap. Let me reassure your Lordships that qualifications that overlap with T-levels introduced in 2020 and 2021 will not have funding approval removed until the academic year 2024-25. Similarly, we can guarantee that no qualifications will have funding approval removed because of overlap with T-levels being introduced in 2022 and 2023 until the academic year 2025-26. In this way, we will make sure that no existing qualification has public funding approval withdrawn before the relevant T-level alternative is available. Our reforms will ensure that all students have high-quality options that support progression to employment or further study, including higher education.
As I have said previously, we have put in place significant investment in T-levels, as well as support for the sector, to help providers and employers prepare for them. We are confident of their success and will continue to carefully assess the progress of our reforms to ensure that no student or employer is left without access to the technical qualifications they need. We will also continue to publish regular updates and evidence as part of our annual T-level action plans, which can be found on GOV.UK.
I have also heard loud and clear from noble Lords the concerns about reforms for disadvantaged students. Our impact assessment recognises that students who take qualifications that are more likely to have funding withdrawn have the most to gain from the changes. That is because in future they will take qualifications that are of higher quality and meet the needs of employers, putting them in a stronger position to progress on to further study or skilled employment. But we want to go further and continue to gather evidence to ensure that our reforms across both technical and academic qualifications are working as we intend.
In particular, the unit for future skills, as announced in the levelling-up White Paper, will make sure that across government we are collecting and making available the best possible information to show whether courses are delivering the outcomes that we want—helping to give students the best possible opportunity to get high- skilled jobs in their local areas. Today’s announcement and assurances are a clear statement from the Government that employers will play a valuable role in the process to determine overlap with T-levels and that we have mechanisms in place at all stages of the qualifications review to make sure that our reforms are evidence-driven and employer-led, levelling up opportunities for young people across the country.
We have come here with an understanding, a sensible compromise, and a decision that I hope noble Lords will support, as this legislation has support across all parties. It will allow us to start transforming the skills system for the economy and people across the country. I beg to move.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister. She is renowned in this House for her courtesy and willingness to listen and on this occasion she has done so in an exemplary manner. I know other Members of your Lordships’ House will, like me, appreciate the fact that she has been prepared to have considerable discussions behind the scenes, to talk with her Secretary of State, to ensure that the all-Peers letter sent out today from him adheres to the understanding that has been reached and that her statement from the Dispatch Box is, as I would expect, complementary to and exactly in line with the letter.
I thank my noble friend Lord Watson for his incredible patience with me over the past weeks. I really appreciate that. I understand that his young son is on the Steps and he is very welcome. I would also like to say how much I personally appreciated the support of noble Lords on Amendment 15B. Throughout the passage of the Bill, from Second Reading, Committee and Report right through to the beginning of ping-pong two weeks ago, we have had all-party consideration and support for high-level, top-quality, vocational and technical provision, including the introduction of T-levels. Concerns expressed have been heard and understood. If I might say so, we have done a good job in this House in making this a better Bill. The phasing in and timetabling of the reform and change are now in a much better place. As the Secretary of State’s letter said and as the Minister reiterated from the Dispatch Box, this is led by evidence, and with agreement of further evidence, which should be gathered to ensure that these reforms are delivered in the right way.
The topping and tailing of the Secretary of State’s letter is a reiteration of the standard lines to take, but the centrepiece of the letter is real progress, as the Minister already indicated. On that basis, it is really important that we accept the consensus that has been agreed, that we understand that when you are winning you give way, and that we continue the agreed programme in a sensible dialogue. All of us will have consideration of what “overlap” really means and how it is handled. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, will have heard very clearly the discussions in this House and the statement from the Minister this afternoon. It is welcome that we are no longer going down a binary route, that we are allowing people to take A-levels as well as advanced qualifications such as BTEC, that we understand the needs of individual learners, that we appreciate that people mature in different ways and learn in different ways, and that pedagogy does not demand that one size fits all. I am appreciative of both the Government and this House for the way in which they have been so supportive. Thank you.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on tabling this amendment because it has helped to shift the Government’s thinking on T-levels. When they were originally announced in July 2021, it looked as though there was going to be a war between BTECs and T-levels. I never accepted that, because T-levels will survive as an important choice at 18 for students who want to take them. I am quite convinced of that. To show my confidence in them, of the university technical colleges for which I am responsible, two have been teaching T-levels in construction and skills for the past 18 months and another seven joined them in September last year.
Since the Bill was first debated, the attitude of the Government has moved. I read only a few minutes ago the letter from the Secretary of State, large parts of which the Minister, who has been very helpful in this matter, repeated. BTECs will still be needed in the future because over 200,000 are taken by students each year. I was very glad that the Minister said that the views of employers would be taken more into account, because three large manufacturers, JCB, Rolls-Royce and Toyota, have approached the Government and said that BTECs should run alongside T-levels until students decide whether they want to take them or not.
The real success of T-levels will be if students actually want to take the exam and see it as a way to get into university. Many of them will do that but, on the other hand, lots of students will not want to take them. We found in the two experiments that we were engaged in that students who get grades 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 in GCSEs are reluctant to handle T-levels as they are really above their capability. But they also want a technical way of getting to level 3; that is very important. AGQs, which the Minister mentioned, and BTECs do that. She did not actually mention the national diploma and the extended national diploma, but I hope they will be carefully considered by the Minister. That is how many people, particularly black and ethnic-minority students, get into a university.
I hope that this is a genuine change in the attitude of the Government towards BTECs. They are an important part of the educational process of our system. As I have said before, hundreds of thousands are taken each year. The letter from the Secretary of State is reassuring, but we will know only when we see the results of T-levels. We will have the first results of T-levels from a few hundred schools this August, more in August next year and more in August the following year before any BTECs are defunded. Then the House will have the opportunity to see whether the pledges given today by the Ministers are being fully implemented.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister and the Government for listening to our concerns. It was good to get the letter from the Secretary of State, although only this morning, which was cutting things a little fine. However, we appreciated the meeting with the Minister yesterday, which gave us a whole day to absorb what was planned. In this place, we have to listen and think rather rapidly.
Anyway, we felt very strongly, as the Minister knows, that defunding BTECs when T-levels were untried and untested could spell disaster for students wishing to learn practical, work-based skills. We constantly pointed out that BTECs are well understood and respected by employers, by academia and, perhaps as important, by parents. It is a benefit that they can be combined with A-levels, which T-levels cannot, giving additional opportunities to students in their choices.
We will continue to try to ensure that schools celebrate their BTEC and apprenticeship leavers with the same enthusiasm as their university entrants. Until the Government amend their highly academic criteria for schools, that may be a pipe dream, but there is hope that young people are increasingly looking at the high cost of university, the absence of social life during Covid—no getting drunk in the pubs, although that is mercifully coming back again—and considering that learning and earning is a better alternative than learning and being in debt.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)
My Lords, as at previous stages, I draw attention to my interests in the register.
I echo the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and others in welcoming that we are no longer planning to move straight to a binary world of A-levels and T-levels. I was glad to see that the Secretary of State, in his letter to Peers today, said that BTECs and similar qualifications will have a continuing and important role alongside T-levels and A-levels.
Can the Minister please reassure us on two further points? First, will the Government seek parity of esteem for all quality technical and academic options, so that there is no hierarchy between A-levels, T-levels, BTECs and similarly applied general qualifications? This would mean that the Government would cease to refer to T-levels as the best option and the best technical route. Secondly, can she address the continuing issue of the blight that hangs over the provision of BTECs and other applied general qualifications during this extended reform process, so that it does not deter providers from offering these important and valued technical options and discourage students from embarking on them out of concern that these qualifications will be disparaged by the Government in the process of the reforms and lose their value over time?
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, it has been a long and winding road with this Bill, stretching back over 10 months from the position that we find ourselves in today. There is very little to add to what noble Lords have said in the last 20 minutes or so, but of course that does not mean that I will not make an attempt at it.
It is very pleasing that we have reached this position because, when the Bill arrived here, it was skeletal in form and many noble Lords made the point that it would be fleshed out only through secondary legislation. I do not think that many find that an acceptable means of legislating, given the restrictions on scrutiny that it entails. But we have had some fleshing out. We have the lifetime skills guarantee—albeit from only level 3 upwards—which will be introduced in 2024. We have the lifelong loan entitlement, which we know a bit more about and which is out for consultation at the moment; it will not come into play until 2025. There are also other consultations ongoing on level 2 and level 3 qualifications, so there is still quite a lot out in the ether and what will finally emerge is for the future.
I echo the points of noble Lords, particularly my noble friend Lord Blunkett, about the discussions into which the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and officials entered with us in the last few days. They have been productive.
I was slightly disappointed to get a message this morning from someone in the higher education sector who said that they were disappointed that the fight against BTECs being defunded, had fizzled out. Being a fairly forthright Scot, I replied that this was, shall we say, not quite the case. I have also had messages about the extension to 2024 and the clarity that will be provided in the documents that the Minister referred to—the Secretary of State’s letter and the table. I am not sure whether the table has yet been distributed to noble Lords, but it will be. It sets out the defunding process. The main point, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, mentioned, is that when this started, it was said that only a small range of BTECs would survive. We have now come not quite full circle but some considerable distance, with only a small range of BTECs facing defunding and in certain circumstances, as the Minister outlined. That is very much progress, and we welcome it.
To echo the noble Lord, Lord Baker, T-levels will ultimately be a success—we want them to be and they will be; it is a question of time. In our discussions earlier in the week, the Government’s target was 100,000 T-level starts in 2024. That is quite ambitious, given that we have only 5,000 at the moment, but I wish them well. Equally, I welcome that for those young and not so young people for whom T-levels are not appropriate for whatever reason—there are many reasons why that might be the case—there are other options remaining open to them, not least the route into higher education, which has been, as many noble Lords have said, very important. I am pleased that we have got to this. As my noble friend Lord Blunkett said, the Minister has been very helpful in that regard.
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, deserves considerable credit. Through his efforts, the clause bearing his name from the 2017 Act has been beefed up and will carry much more weight and be much more effective than it has hitherto been, with the ability of providers to be brought into schools. There will be much less likelihood of head teachers saying, “No, no, we don’t need that actually. Most of our young people are going to university, we don’t really need to hear about apprenticeships or any form of technical education”. That is wrong in any situation and is now much less likely.
The question of careers education is important. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, mentioned it, and I am very proud to say that there is a young man—my son Thomas—sitting on the steps of the Throne who is about to enter senior school. By the time he reaches 16, I hope that these reforms will have bedded in and he will have many options open to him and his cohort, enabling them to make informed decisions on how their lives will pan out, whether through further education, higher education, apprenticeships or whatever. I very much hope that that will be the case.
I do not really have anything else to say, other than that the Bill is in a much better state than it was when it arrived here. Many noble Lords have played an important role in getting us here, and I have to say that the Government have been willing to listen and act. It is important that this Bill is a success. The futures of many young and not so young people depend on it, and the future economy of this country depends on it. I hope it will succeed.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, this Bill has been with us for a while and I know that noble Lords are keen to start their Easter break, I hope with their families. I thank noble Lords for their very generous words on the work that we have done in government, with officials and with many of your Lordships to get the Bill to where it is now. I hope that it will deliver on all our shared aspirations in this area.
I shall try to respond briefly to the questions from my noble friend Lord Johnson regarding parity of esteem. Without wanting to play with words, we are aiming for clarity of esteem—although I am not sure whether that exists. We want to have a range of high-quality options for young people. We want them to be absolutely clear which ones work for them, which are suitable and which offer the right path forward. Of course, that is underpinned by parity, but we need clarity as well, because that has been lacking in the past. In relation to his second point, we also need absolute clarity for providers. There is an enormous job still to be done to communicate the value of all the different options that young people will be offered.
In response to the noble Lord, Lord Watson’s correspondent, and the fight against BTECs fizzling out, I think we could agree that the fight for quality is certainly not fizzling out in any way. I am not sure there ever was a fight—but anyway.
Before closing, I thank all noble Lords here today, many of whom have contributed to debates throughout the passage of the Bill. I pay particular tribute to the Front Benches, to the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Storey, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Sherlock, Lady Wilcox and Lady Garden. I say two things to the son of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, who is sitting on the steps of the Throne. I share the aspirations of the noble Lord that our reforms are bedded in, and I hope that his son and all his classmates will have a great range of opportunities. I also remind him that what he sees in this House today is the tip of the iceberg of the work that the noble Lord and his colleagues have being doing over the last few months to get this Bill to where it is.
I also thank the many former Education Ministers and Secretaries of State in this House whose insights we have benefited from—my noble friends Lady Morgan, Lord Willetts, Lord Baker and Lord Johnson, my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I also say special thanks to my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith. She has been a great mentor and helped me to understand how this Bill will work in practice.
I also thank my noble friends Lady Penn and Lady Chisholm for their support. I thank the Bill team officials who have worked on the Bill—Kady Billington-Murphy, Ellie-May Morris, Emma Sisk, Lois Clement, Georgia Scoot-Morrissey, Charlotte Rushworth, Katrina Leonard-Johnson, Catherine James and Stephen Wan. I especially thank Jessica Clark in my private office, who has been an exemplar of calmness under pressure.
Royal Assent
Thursday 28th April 2022
(1 year, 12 months ago)
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