Employment

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, for instigating this important debate on the changing world of employment. In the enormous breadth of the subject, I want to focus on vocational routes to employment.

For those of us coming to the last few years of our working life span, compared to those struggling at the moment to find their first job, our prospects, career progression and expectations, both good and bad, were often clearly signposted and, frankly, there was not much opportunity to deviate from the pre-ordained route. In the late 1990s, as the senior bursar of Selwyn College, Cambridge, I saw for myself how drastically the changing needs of the employment market were affecting jobs within the college. Our loyal and devoted maintenance manager took retirement at 65. He had left school at 14, been an apprentice to a carpenter, and when he became a carpenter in his own right—no formal qualifications in those days, just serving his time and learning from his apprentice master—had joined the college’s maintenance team in his 20s. He was always the first to admit that his key skills were low. His successor, by contrast, had a higher national diploma, equivalent to a vocational degree, and, frankly, he needed it. The health and safety requirements of the post, as well as the functional skills needed to specify building contracts, monitor and deliver them to budget, deal with personnel issues relating to his staff as well as provide customer service to other staff and students in the college meant that the job had become very different.

Other speakers may want to focus on the knowledge-intensive industries, but I want to spend a little time looking at the vocational needs of employers and employees. The coalition Government have rightly focused on ensuring that apprenticeships are made more easily available, building on the work of the previous Government, and the 100,000 new apprenticeships are very welcome. However, I am sorry to say that I still hear frequent comments from further education colleges, young applicants and many others that employers are often reluctant to come forward and offer apprenticeships. I have spent much of the past 20 years in a number of roles working with key business stakeholders and with businesses, small and large, trying to understand how we can resolve the eternal conundrum whereby businesses say that they cannot recruit youngsters with the right qualifications and skills, but they will not take responsibility for training them in apprenticeships.

There are, of course, many notable exceptions. I shall highlight just one. Marshall Aerospace of Cambridge has led the way in developing apprenticeships and advanced apprenticeships with clear career progression on to higher education. It is expected that many of the 16 year-olds it takes on will, during their time with the company, earn while they learn and, as important, make a serious contribution to the company and its bottom line. Many will end up with a master’s degree or PhD and this is not just in the obvious area of aerospace engineering: it has them in IT design, business skills and a range of other areas as well. So popular are the apprenticeships that the company now runs taster days for local schools and offers advice and guidance to young people about whether this is the right route for them.

I know this from personal experience. My foster son attended such a taster day, and he was grateful that at the end of it he felt, and indeed Marshall advised him, that it was not the right route for him—very helpful for someone at 14 or 15 to have that advice. Marshall believes that it is in its best interests as a company to take this course of action where other businesses might say that it is too expensive. I say that Marshall’s results speak for themselves.

If employers say that our young people are not work-ready, we must continue to look at the core functional skills that they have mastered as they come to leave school, especially those not following the more academic route. It is absolutely vital that every young person continues to get support in functional skills, formerly known as key skills, until they have mastered them. My illustration of the maintenance manager for the 21st century shows that. However, even fast food jobs these days require IT and literacy skills. Gone are the days when a lad in a sandwich bar just needed his manual skills. Often people will e-mail in their lunch orders or, in larger chains, an order will be taken down on a computer and another staff member will download it, read it and deliver it. There are many other examples. There are very few jobs these days that need no skills.

I want to return to the issue of technicians and vocational training. The UK Skills Commission has recently published its report on technicians and progression, and I support much of its findings. It is absolutely right to say that technicians are the unsung heroes of the UK’s leading industries. If we are to provide an effective workforce to reinvigorate our major industries, including manufacturing—I agree with the comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, that we are unlikely to become a major manufacturing nation again, but I am confident that we can significantly improve manufacturing in this country—we must change our approach and our culture to encourage young people as early as possible to see engineering and other technical roles as attractive as the current fashionable but for the vast majority, frankly, unattainable status of footballers and celebrities.

The report states:

“For the first time, we have the opportunity to develop a technical pathway in schools, through further education and universities and into the professions. University Technical Colleges, specialist academies and some free schools are beginning to establish employer-led, technical 14-19 provision. This should be expanded further and fully integrated into post-compulsory education”.

My only additional comment is that I would welcome it being mainstreamed into community schools as well; it should not just be the preserve of specialist schools.

I take further issue with the report in that I think that starting at 14 is too late. Many universities currently run schemes such as the Cambridge University STIMULUS scheme where students reading maths, science and engineering go into primary schools to work alongside teachers to engender some enthusiasm for those subjects among nine, 10 and 11 year-olds. I have seen this as chair of the governors of a primary school in Cambridge where young people, who had decided that maths was probably a bit too difficult, really thought that it was something that they would want to continue with at secondary school—particularly girls. We definitely need to see more girls taking science at secondary school because otherwise, frankly, they have locked themselves out of engineering as a future route.

I also welcome the Skills Commission report on a new professionalism and registration proposal for technicians, but is it new? Traditional vocational skills are perhaps returning to the pre-1960s craft skills routes but, I hope, better documented and run with a higher functional and specialist skills route. The report also talks about a learner-driven system, but I have two caveats. First, we must ensure that young people have access to information, advice and guidance, especially those not following the academic route. I am grateful to the Government for allowing statutory advice and guidance in the Education Bill that is going through this House at the moment, which will ensure professionalism among careers staff and face-to-face advice for young people who come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and who will not be following an obvious academic route. Secondly, we must encourage small and medium-sized enterprises, which, frankly, are the key driver of our economy—13 million individuals, creating 65 per cent of new jobs in the country—to invest in training, particularly technician training. With the Government’s offer on apprenticeships, it should be available to them. We must do everything that we can to encourage them to take it up.

I want to end on an upbeat note. Anyone who attended WorldSkills, hosted by the UK this summer and brilliantly run by UK Skills, would have seen an absolutely impressive demonstration and showcase of our best talent in all 46 skill areas. Anybody going around the extensive exhibition would have noted not just those doing the demonstrations but the enthusiasm, energy and excitement of the schoolchildren attending and watching our entrants and those from 47 other countries showing what they can contribute to their professions. If UK Skills can demonstrate the absolute strength of this country in the technical and vocational area, let us use that to harness it and make sure that in the future our technicians are the sung, not the unsung, heroes of our economy.