Polytechnics

Baroness Evans of Bowes Park Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased to answer this Question for Short Debate and am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lucas for initiating it and to all those who have contributed. The debate has been extremely interesting and is very timely. First, it follows the excellent report by the Social Mobility Committee that was led by the noble Baroness, Lady Corston. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, was also a member of that committee, which made a strong case that improved technical education could be a powerful tool to create opportunities for the most disadvantaged young people in our country—a point made again during today’s discussion by the noble Lord, Lord Haskel. Secondly, the Government have made clear their view that our technical education system needs to improve significantly to meet the challenges we face in ensuring that we have a highly skilled and competitive workforce. Again, all noble Lords speaking today have highlighted this issue.

There is real excellence but the system is confusing, sometimes lacking in quality and too often divorced from the workplace. We accept the analysis of the OECD that our tertiary education system does not produce enough people with technical and professional qualifications specifically designed to meet labour market needs. Fewer than 10% of our tertiary-level students are studying non-degree technical courses, which is well below international norms. But while we continue to face challenges, steady progress is being made through the system.

At school level, as my noble friends Lord Baker and Lady Redfern and the noble Lords, Lord Haskel and Lord Stevenson, all pointed out, UTCs are starting to make a difference. The 59 UTCs open or in development will create opportunities for more than 35,000 young people to integrate academic study with real, practical learning within a high-quality technical and professional curriculum. This offers young people a choice and we are committed to ensuring that there is a UTC within the reach of every city.

Our new careers and enterprise company is also supporting greater engagement between employers, schools and colleges. We want to ensure that all young people have access to the broadest careers advice, so that they are aware of all the opportunities open to them—academic, vocational or directly into employment —and that, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, says, no route is considered second class.

In the last Parliament, we supported more than 2 million apprenticeship starts, while at the same time creating clearer and more rigorous standards for what an apprenticeship should be. We removed thousands of vocational qualifications from the scope of funding and recognition in league tables because they did not offer adequate progression for learners. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and my noble friend Lord Baker, also talked about the importance of encouraging level 3 and above skills training. To that end, we have introduced apprenticeships at those levels, and higher apprenticeships are being delivered, with nearly 20,000 starts in the 2014-15 academic year. We are working with employers and universities to further develop degree apprenticeships, which will allow individuals to study for a degree while progressing in their careers.

From September, we are introducing loans for learners studying high-level technical programmes in further education. The Government accept that there is further to go, which is why, last October, the Minister for Skills invited the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, to review the state of technical education in this country. The noble Lord’s interest and expertise in this subject is well known, and he has put together an expert panel to reflect the views of employers, universities and FE colleges. The panel has consulted widely.

Although I am afraid I cannot provide details today and let the cat out of the bag, I can say that the review is of the quality one would expect from a panel chaired by the noble Lord. It has not been shy about being clear about what the problems in the system are and has specific, clear proposals for change. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that one of the focuses of his work is how we bring coherence to leadership in technical education going forward. We will publish the report alongside the Government’s response in due course.

We need a technical education system in which businesses and colleges work closely together with political support from all sides. When we publish our plans for vocational education reform, we will do so in the spirit of consensus. We want to seek the widest possible support for this. As we have heard today, I think everyone agrees on the challenges and on the need to make sure we get this right and that the worlds of business and education come together.

The core theme of today’s debate is the institutions for advanced technical education. Broadly, this Government take the view that at present we do not have the right pattern of institutions to teach high-level technical education programmes at the level we all want to see. We have a very diverse university system, which is a source of strength despite the rankings that one noble Lord referred to today. We have universities and courses with strong vocational offers—whether in the ancient vocational disciplines of law and medicine or in more contemporary fields—but the focus of universities is inevitably on providing full undergraduate academic degrees and postgraduate qualifications.

As we have heard, further education colleges have long had twin purposes: to provide advanced education for the workplace and to provide second chances to adults who had not mastered the most basic skills. Both matter, but the system has become too weighted towards the second—important though that undoubtedly is—and away from the first. We need to rebalance the system so that we have the right level of technical provision. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, it is not about going back to the past but about learning from the strengths of what we had in order to build on that going forward. That is why we are supporting two new types of institution.

First, there are national colleges, which a number of noble Lords mentioned. These will be specialist providers of education in key technical disciplines, which will help ensure the UK has the skills to support the delivery of major infrastructure projects. We have already announced support for national colleges in the areas of high-speed rail, digital skills, nuclear, the creative and cultural industries, and onshore oil and gas. The first national college students will start their programme in September, and by 2020 we expect the colleges to be delivering to around 21,000 learners.

We are also supporting the new institutes of technology to provide high-level technical education across a range of disciplines at local level. To create these, we will invest in the best FE colleges to equip them to provide the quality and volume of education that are needed to produce a highly skilled and productive technical workforce. We will work with local government and businesses through the current area review of colleges to identify the best local option for an institute of technology. These institutes will have an important role, linking up other providers, including FE and sixth-form colleges, the national colleges and UTCs, as part of a system of professional and technical routes from education into employment. This new approach to technical education draws on the strengths of the past, to which noble Lords alluded, including the polytechnics, but with modern, focused organisations that will be able to deliver the high-quality technical skills that we in this country need to compete effectively in future.