Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Lucas

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, my hope is that this amendment has been rendered unnecessary by the Government’s plan for school profiles, so I will speak to the principles of it rather than the details. For parents, admissions information is of great importance. If they are looking around for a school for their child, they need an understanding of which schools they have a chance of getting them into. The admission rules and outcomes from those rules are vital information for parents.

Local authorities used to publish a booklet every year setting out exactly that—what the rules were and what the outcomes had been—but the more that academy schools have grown, the less that has become the practice. I ran off the booklet for East Sussex—where I live—senior schools. Out of the 20 or so schools available at secondary level, full admissions information is available only for four of them. The others just say, “Contact school”. Although there is supposed to be a system whereby schools provide local authorities with the information they can put in their schools booklets, this is no longer happening.

East Sussex is by no means an outlier. This is common. The system for providing parents with easily accessible schools admissions information has broken down. If, as part of the forthcoming school profiles, we are to have proper school information available on the government website and if, as with the other excellent information that they provide on that website, it will be available in electronic form in bulk, then we have solved this problem. I hope that is the answer. If not, we must do something to get back to the position we all thought we were in. I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have not had much input into the Bill, which colleagues with much greater knowledge of the issues than me have covered so ably, but I have tabled two amendments in this group, Amendments 452A and 452B. Refugee and asylum-seeking children and those on resettlement schemes may be among the most disadvantaged in our society. They may be accompanied, but the adult or adults with them may be as traumatised as the children. I should like any child in the asylum process or with refugee status, irrespective of whether they fall under the category of unaccompanied asylum-seeking child, to be treated as worthy of special treatment. This is unlikely to open the floodgates, but it would help some very needy children who otherwise would fall outside the criteria. I hope the Minister will be able to look kindly on these modest amendments.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I acknowledge that a great deal of the thinking behind Amendment 17 comes from the Edge Foundation. Skills England is a big change and a big opportunity. The Government’s ambitions to unify the skills landscape and respond to the skills need, which is very large and well acknowledged, will require impetus, which Skills England seems to have, but also connection—connection which allows competing interests, particularly between departments, to be resolved and common pathways to be evolved.

It does not seem to me that we can run a skills system by diktat. There is nothing about any department, except the Treasury, that allows it to impose diktat on others. My amendment suggests to the Government that they look at the success of the chief scientific adviser structure. Obviously, there would be the chief skills adviser in the DfE, but skills advisers should be in each department, as with the chief scientific adviser network. It is about evolving a combined understanding and having someone in each department for whom skills is their principal occupation, who has status in that department and who is intimately connected into the Department for Education’s network.

Every department has skills needs and its own understanding and ideas about them. Fragmentation impedes employer and provider engagement. Anyway, modern life needs cross-cutting skills and a lot of jobs require skills whose roots are in several departments, and these things need to work together. The Government’s missions are very much dependent on effective collaboration on skills.

Looking at the individual departments, we see that even within the DfE skills cross schools, FE and, notably, higher education. There is plenty of need for communication just within the one department. Having a chief skills adviser would help.

In other departments, one wishes that the Treasury would import some people who understand the real world a bit better, but it is also responsible for the evolution of skills in the financial and accounting space. Those are the kind of skills that spread into a lot of other careers.

The Foreign Office handles languages, history, geography and diplomacy. Diplomacy is not something that social media seem to cultivate; the Foreign Office must care where that skill is coming from.

The Home Office covers police and security but, above all, migration—bringing in the skills we have not generated here. I remember plenty of conflict with the Home Office in my 30 years here on whether particular skills would be allowed into this country and the speed at which that should be done.

The Department for Business and Trade obviously covers management and skills for business, but a huge skills effort is actively under way there under the heading of the industrial strategy. The people and skills division is trying to solve underinvestment in skills by industry and to improve management and tech use skills. A huge agenda is being actively pursued there, not as a subsidiary of the DfE but as a subsidiary of the industrial strategy.

The Department of Health and Social Care is a huge user of skills and a very big user of microcredentials. Really small bits of learning have evolved to be accepted by the particular employers at which they are aimed. When you have a bigger employer such as the Department of Health, that is really quite easy. So these skills qualifications are evolving in large numbers and at great speed not only in Health but in a lot of other departments.

DESNZ needs the green workforce, the MHCLG has construction and especially housing, DSIT uses the sciences, DCMS has creative skills, and the Cabinet Office needs skills for the Civil Service. If productivity is slipping back in the Civil Service, there is clearly a need for big skills investment. The MoJ needs legal skills and the Department for Work and Pensions is concerned with access to skills. What qualifications are available for people who are bottom of the heap when it comes to employment? The MoD has a huge range and depth of training, the DfT has skills from lorry driving to logistics, and Defra uses environmental skills.

Local government, through the LSIP network, has a real interest in how the skills agenda is delivered. The word I hear is that LSIPs have been a real success, as they are effective and flexible. It takes a couple of years for the DfE to evolve a qualification but LSIPs can do it in weeks, because they are so focused on the actual local employer need and work closely with a provider. The Minister for Women and Equalities brief is now in the DfE but it used to wander around Whitehall. It has a very strong interest in the skills agenda.

Every department in Whitehall is intimately linked to the skills agenda and needs to be bound to a common sense of progress. It is not possible to do that by pushing; it has to be by linking. A structure like that of the chief scientific advisers would help, and the DfE has experience of this. It has its own chief scientific adviser and a council of scientific advisers to go with it. This is a resource that the DfE is used to having.

By having a chief skills adviser network to feed into and get feedback from, the Government and the DfE will know and understand the skills challenges of all departments so that they can synthesise and co-ordinate. Individual departments would have immediate access to the DfE resource, so that they can plan and integrate. That would be a good way forward for a skills structure.

I would be very grateful if the Minister replied to the questions I asked at the end of my previous intervention. I have seen too many sets of relationships die when institutions change. Some of the sector skills councils had really good relationships with business and they were just trashed. Most relationships with local enterprise partnerships just ended; they went nowhere, because local authorities were not capable of maintaining them in the same way. I want to be sure that what IfATE has built will continue under the new arrangements. As I said, I would also be interested in how the Careers & Enterprise Company fits into this structure. I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I added my name to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on the importance of a chief skills adviser. As I have said before, skills always need advocates within government because it has a predominantly university-educated membership. This role could be key to ensuring that skills changes will be enacted by someone who can take a view over the country of which skills are in short supply in which areas and need local support. The network of skills advisers in all departments that the noble Lord proposes would be a great way forward, and I support the amendment.