Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Blackstone and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[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.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Blackstone and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 27th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

First, I take the opportunity to thank the Minister in this House and the Minister for Higher Education very sincerely for listening so carefully and patiently to the arguments that I and many others put forward on these issues. I follow other noble Lords in saying that, while this has been a grind, it has also been something on which all parts of the House have found a great deal to discuss and agree. In that sense, it has been perhaps not enjoyable but certainly an educational and ultimately a positive process. I repeat that I appreciate the time that everybody in the Lords has put into this, and I very much appreciate the time put in by Ministers and the enormous work put in by the Bill team.

I am very happy to see the clause moving towards the statute book, but it seems to be slightly ill understood perhaps outside this Chamber and certainly outside this building. It might be worth my while reiterating what I think is important about it, and I would be grateful if the Minister would let me and the House know if he disagrees with anything that I am just about to say.

One of the major reasons why the Bill is so important is that it sets out what is happening in the sector, quite possibly for decades to come. That is why we have to take account of both whether it can provide innovation and new ideas and allow the sector to move and whether it can provide guarantees of quality and standards and protect students, many of whom take out large loans, and the whole country against what is always possible: that some institutions and people will not have the interests of the country and the sector at heart. Innovation is a very important part of it.

I also take this opportunity to welcome in this House the fact that the Government have recently given some money to the new model university that is being established in Herefordshire, which is enormously important because of the role it will play in helping to develop engineering skills and in working with small businesses and supply chains. It is the sort of institution that we need many more of, and I am really pleased that the Government have given their support.

It is worth remembering that one thing that has bothered us very much in thinking about how this Bill should go forward is our knowledge that it is only too easy to create a situation in which institutions arise and gain access to public funds but whose existence is very hard to justify and that can do enormous harm. It is not just this country—the United States has given us the largest and most catastrophic bankruptcies, leaving students stranded—but it is, after all, not very long ago that the Home Office moved to investigate and shut down higher education institutions in this country that were, not to put too fine a point on it, fraudulent.

This part of the Bill has always been enormously important. I am extremely happy, because it seems that this new clause will institute a quality assurance process that focuses the attention of the Office for Students on a number of critical issues when it is granting or varying awarding powers, and clarifies the importance of independent advice from outside an institution. This is always important, because an institution creates its own understandings and inevitably becomes defensive against the world. The potential strengthening and improvement of the advice that the OfS will get from outside, which will build on the QAA but will potentially be more independent and therefore both add an additional safeguard and add substantively to the process, is very welcome.

This clause also clarifies for the general public the way in which the Government envisage new institutions coming through. They clearly envisage two pathways. Many people will come through validation, a process that itself has grown up over the years with remarkably little scrutiny, but if an institution is to get degree-awarding powers from day 1, this is something of which the Secretary of State must be aware. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, pointed out in earlier debates that anything that goes wrong tends to land on the Secretary of State’s desk anyway. What seems to be important here is that we have an extra element not just of formal accountability but one that will bring into the process both a clear ability for the Secretary of State to create a new institution that has degree-awarding powers, because that is seen as something of which they are capable from day 1, and something to make the process public and one that cannot slide through unobserved.

This is an area in which we have made enormous progress. Perhaps all this would have happened anyway, but I am extremely happy to see it in the Bill. I finish by expressing my gratitude once again to everybody who has worked on the Bill and listened to our concerns and my appreciation of all the comments, information and hard work that colleagues on all Benches of the House have put into it. I welcome this amendment.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak very briefly just to endorse everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has said. On behalf of the House generally I want to thank her for all the hard work and effort that she has put into securing these changes. It is fair to say that this part of the Bill, in its original form, was the one that gave cause to a great deal of worry, and for me personally the most worry of all because in my view it threatened the reputation of higher education not only in this country but overseas. With this amendment, we are now in a much better place.

The only thing that I ask is that there be some monitoring of how it works in practice. It is very important that there should be some evaluation to make absolutely clear to the higher education sector as a whole, and to those who might want to enter it, that there will be rigorous tests of both quality and standards before any institution can have degree-awarding powers and access to grants and loans through the system of financial support that we have. Having said that, however, I am really grateful to the Government and to the Minister for bringing forward this amendment. It is a huge improvement to the Bill compared to what we had originally.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Blackstone and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 55, 62, 72, 426 and 432, tabled in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden of Frognal and Lady Brown of Cambridge, and I will be very brief. I want to say how excellent is the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Kerslake because it encapsulates all our concerns about autonomy. I also agree with the eloquent speeches made by my noble friends Lord Kerslake and Lady Deech.

Importantly, these amendments deal with the whole of higher education, not just with universities. We will probably say this on a number of occasions in the weeks ahead, but we are in a new world in which higher and tertiary education is involving more and more of our citizens. Allowing institutions to decide which courses they teach and to be in control of how they deal with their academic staff and their students is absolutely critical to their ability to maintain standards and retain the autonomy that has served us very well.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is extremely well worded and very appropriate for the legislation in front of us. I am absolutely convinced that the current Minister responsible for higher education will respect the institutional autonomy of universities, but some future Minister may not. As a former Minister responsible for higher and further education, I was rightly constrained by the 1988 Act and what Lord Jenkins managed to do with his amendment. There were sometimes times when I did not agree with what was happening, but I was unable to interfere, which would have been wholly inappropriate. That is an extremely good thing.

There is a second reason why I support the noble Lord’s amendment. I, along with Jo Ritzen, a very distinguished former Dutch Minister of Higher Education, and two other former European Education Ministers—Eduardo Grilo from Portugal and the former Hungarian Education Minister—embarked on a project led by Jo Ritzen entitled Empower European Universities. It looked at the position of universities across Europe—north, south, east and west—in particular at some of the problems some universities in eastern Europe experience, as in southern Europe. There was an incredible amount of state control over what these institutions could do. One of the outcomes of that is you get no innovation. Therefore, one of the reasons why we should promote autonomy in our higher education institutions is that we should be concerned to make sure universities do not stand still, that they take into account a changed environment and that they are innovative. By being autonomous they are far more likely to be innovative than if they are controlled by Governments, as we saw from the project we did across Europe.