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

Baroness McGregor-Smith Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

Amendment 4 to Clause 4 and Amendment 11 to Clause 5 are both in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. They would remove entirely the Secretary of State’s new power to prepare an apprenticeship assessment plan without convening a group of persons. This would be my preferred route, as a stronger alternative to my own amendments, unless the Minister can define the specific and limited circumstances in which this power would be used, as required by Amendment 6.

[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to talk a bit about Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has added her name. As the outgoing chair of IfATE, I have listened carefully to some of the words expressed both today and at Second Reading. There are a small number of things that I would urge everyone to consider here; I say that to the Minister in particular.

Today, we have not yet discussed what really sits at the heart of the skills system with IfATE. We talk about the technical side of it, but we need to talk more about the employer voice. Yesterday, one of our board members, Robin Miller, who is one of the most famous music producers in the country and has been there from day one of IfATE—I have not—said something really interesting to me. He said that it took five years to get employers on side and to believe that IfATE could do really good things. Nothing is perfect. No arm’s-length body is ever perfect. Everyone can have their criticisms. I wish Skills England well for the future—I really want it to build on the momentum that has been built up in the skills system, as fragmented as it is—but I urge us to do more than just holding webinars with employers. Employers sit at the heart of the system; I can say that having myself been a very large employer in this country.

We need to understand how momentum will be built around the critical skills that this country is going to need in future. While this transfer is going on and all this is happening, behind the system sit employers with skills gaps to fill. They need urgently to make sure that everything they are doing in terms of the new apprenticeships, new qualifications and new, high-level technical qualifications that they need is done quickly and brilliantly. I genuinely do not understand how putting it into an executive agency that is part of a bigger department will necessarily do that; I would love to believe that it will, but we are going to need more evidence of how that will be done. I am, and many other people are, here to support that but, frankly, the quicker we can do it, the better.

Speed, momentum and delivery are what really worry me. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, asked whether Skills England might be swamped by the very technical things that it may have to do now. Yes—that will be the case. Does Skills England really want to sit there with the Secretary of State and be the awarding body, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said? I do not necessarily think so. We need to look closely at how these functions will move and what will be done so that employers understand.

Even more importantly, let us talk about the learners. Let us talk about the young people doing T-levels today. Yesterday, we spoke to one of them for half an hour about what she was doing in her journey. At the age of 16, her journey is fantastic. She is doing a T-level. She is heading towards an apprenticeship degree. She wants to be a chartered surveyor, as one example of many young people’s aspirations in this country. However, she said that too few people understand T-levels, career pathways and so on. There is so much work to be done. I simply urge us all not to forget during the passage of this Bill that the employer voice and the learner voice need to be heard more highly.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the two amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, to which I have added my name. More broadly, I want to speak to the general thrust of the group. I think that our joint amendment was not specific enough. It is not so much that we need criteria; we need to know that employers will be there and who else will be there. It is not just that we would like some criteria published.

It is important that some of this is publicly and legislatively specified because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, alluded to a little, things start very well, people know exactly what they are doing and then they slide. It might seem inconceivable to anybody involved in setting up Skills England that apprenticeship standards would, in the future, be written without really consulting employers. All I can say is, “I wish”.

I have been looking back at the history of skills policy and implementation in this country, as I do periodically when I decide to write something, and it has reminded me how easy it is for harassed and busy civil servants to just get things through and for powers given to a department, which do not require them to go out beyond the department, to be used by it. It is not that anybody means badly, but that is sort of how it goes. That is why, on repeated occasions, we have ended up with disastrous skills policies and approaches, in essence, for which there is equal-opportunity guilt across the parties. They became just a small group—harassed, busy, pulling very few people in—not putting down the infrastructure to ensure that what you get reaches out into whole economy. We need to do that.

I was staggered when I was working as an expert adviser in government to discover, for example, that most people in the apprenticeship division in the DfE had been in their jobs for only a couple of years. There were some wonderful people, but there was no real collective memory of why things had gone wrong before. That is why you have to make it clear in legislation that, as Skills England goes forward and as, particularly in this context, its apprenticeship functions go forward, it has to involve everybody, even though it takes longer, it is awkward and sometimes it does not work out well.

IfATE has not been perfect. I think more than 700 standards is mad, actually, and when I was involved in the Sainsbury review, I expressly asked that there should be fewer of them. It is not that what we have is perfect, but we have to be aware of the lessons that come from previous mistakes. It is very risky to put everything inside the department without anything that, in effect, says, “You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to talk to employers and the key organisations”. Yes, it takes longer, it is awkward and you do not always think they are very good, but it has to be there. The general feeling coming out of these amendments is that we need Skills England to be better than what we have at the moment and not be set up such that the institutional structures invite a repeat of the things that went wrong in previous decades.

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[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I do not have very much to add, everybody will be glad to hear, except to highlight the fact that assessment is not the same as getting to the end of the standards. We have a complex set of awarding bodies and some assessment standards which require an external qualification and some which do not.

It would also be good to be confident that the department has worked through all the ramifications of this. I am conscious that I do not think I have and am going to go back and look through some of the original legislation, but I do not think the considerations are exactly the same as they are for standards. Because we have a rather strange system in this country, with a lot of formal qualifications and a lot of awarding bodies, it is very easy to get the qualifications wrong or suddenly find that you have a huge political fuss on your hands, as I am sure everyone in this Room will recognise from the current BTEC discussions.

I just flag that it is not just the same as for standards. The complexity of many endpoint assessments and standards for which there are required external qualifications means that we need to be very careful that we have not inadvertently stored up some real problems for ourselves by just moving everything wholesale and saying, “But where necessary, the Secretary of State can cut through the bramble patch”.

[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have a little sympathy for this additional request for the Secretary of State to do this if the defaults are not working. Having seen how the current system works, my only observation is: will that be quicker? If it is about speed, I am not necessarily convinced that, as the Secretary of State will be so busy, this will be one of the highest-priority things in the Department for Education, and that concerns me. With more employers and more people involved in the system, there is always a danger that this will slow down. I am not really sure in what circumstances this power will be used. I could probably see it for the odd exception, but I still cannot quite imagine what it could be. However, I have a little sympathy, as long as it is around speed in the odd exceptional circumstance.

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[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I was about to take this opportunity to ask for clarification, but it follows on from something that the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said earlier, so perhaps he will follow up on it. We have a lot of regulators in this area, and I also am a little concerned. I cannot say that I understand the clause, by the way—I have just looked at it but cannot make head or tail of it—but I will try to get some clarity into my head. I know that, at the time that IfATE was set up, there was quite a lot of discussion between it and Ofqual about who was allowed to do what; the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, may be able to elucidate this.

My concern going forward is with the LLE, because the intention was always that these were not just standard university qualifications that one could take but that there would be a mechanism for approving high-quality qualifications at the right levels, for which you could also take a loan. That is critical, and I know that the OfS has been struggling with this on the regulatory side but it does not seem to have got very far. It is critical that we have a clear pattern here and do not inadvertently create obstacles to that approval process again.

It slightly worries me that, as I read it, the Secretary of State would have to give Ofqual instructions on a qualification-by-qualification basis. That again does not sound as though it will be very fast or flexible. I just ask the Minister, if she is totally clear about this, to give us a little lesson now; and, if she is not, whether she could seek clarification, perhaps from her higher education experts as well as from her apprenticeship experts, on whether we are inadvertently making this more difficult rather than easier.

[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

Once more, I will say a few words about process and reiterate to the Minister my words on speed. Any changes to any process will slow things down; it will not improve in the short term. Creating constant momentum and change is really important, as is simplification. The more I think about having four regulators, the more worried—traumatised, almost—I begin to feel.

Whether or not we like what the current system has done and whether or not things need changing, it is important for us all to appreciate that the speed point is critical. I have yet to see things speeding up as systems move within government; they tend to slow down. So let us be very careful and cautious. I am nervous about the unintended consequences of change. Through all of this, there should be a delivery plan that talks purely about building momentum for the skills system. At the moment, we do not have that.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, in responding to this part of the debate, I am confident that I will be able to explain to noble Lords the intention of Clause 8; however, given the broader questions about the roles of a range of regulators in this field, I may well write to noble Lords to set that out, because it goes broader than Clause 8.

The amendments in this group relate to proposals regarding quality assurance and the accreditation of apprenticeships and technical qualifications. Section 138 of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 allows Ofqual to set an accreditation requirement for individual qualifications or descriptions of qualifications. If it does that, any such qualification must be accredited before it is awarded.

Ofqual accredits a qualification submitted by an awarding organisation, first, if the awarding organisation has been recognised in respect of that qualification or type of qualification; and, secondly, if the qualification submitted meets the relevant criteria. This is a rigorous process that gives confidence in qualifications—our A-levels and GCSEs. However, since 2022, Ofqual has been prevented from making determinations on accreditation for technical qualifications. This means that, in respect of accreditation, technical qualifications are treated differently from academic qualifications and are prevented in all instances from benefiting from an important tool for ensuring quality.

Clause 8 will change that by enabling the Secretary of State to forge a route to technical qualifications being accredited. The clause provides the Secretary of State with the discretion to determine, should it be deemed appropriate, that an exception could be granted to the general prohibition on Ofqual being able to accredit both approved technical education qualifications and technical education qualifications that the Secretary of State is considering approving. This will mean that, where it is directed to do so by the Secretary of State, Ofqual could exercise its power to determine whether an accreditation requirement should apply to certain technical education qualifications, subject to appropriate consultation.

In some instances, the Secretary of State may deem it appropriate to ask Ofqual to consider whether imposing an accreditation requirement on the qualifications in question could help maintain their quality and signal to the wider system that they are broadly commensurate with other accredited qualifications in terms of rigour. For example, the Secretary of State could use this power in instances where it is important to ensure that students who opt into and successfully complete high-quality technical education qualifications are in no way disadvantaged as compared to their peers who pursue academic qualifications. They may consider, for example, whether a category of technical qualification provides a particularly important springboard for onward progression but where those who successfully complete the qualification may be competing with those who have studied other qualifications that have been accredited, such as GCSEs or A-levels.

It may also be the case that the Secretary of State therefore considers using this power where they are persuaded that a particular category of technical qualification is not subject to any broader review or has reached a certain level of maturity in delivery, and/or is being taken by a sizeable number of students. It is important that the potential for the accreditation of technical qualifications is reintroduced in the managed and considered way the clause allows. Here I come to the questions about why Ofqual does not have a complete permission and ability to consider technical qualifications.

The clause provides the Secretary of State with the discretion to determine, should it be deemed appropriate, that an exception could be granted to the general prohibition on Ofqual being able to accredit. This is because of the relative newness of many technical qualifications and is in order to consider carefully the interactions with the ongoing and vital reviews both of post-16 qualifications and of curriculum and assessment. These considerations are more significant for technical than non-technical qualifications. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that we are doing this not because we necessarily have specific examples in mind but to enable them to be considered in response to some of the reviews, where it would seem appropriate.

Amendment 34, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would impose a duty on the Secretary of State, within six months of Royal Assent, to lay before Parliament a report on the effect of this Act on the powers exercised by regulators, including the Office for Students and Ofqual. We are committed to ensuring transparency in the way that the Bill’s powers are discharged and the effects that their transfer and execution will have on regulators, other public bodies and parts of government. We intend to follow the usual methods for agreeing and making this information available publicly and to Parliament, and therefore consider the amendment to be unnecessary, notwithstanding my commitment to write to noble Lords with some more detail about the way that different regulators work.

Specifically, Skills England’s published framework document will govern the relationship between the body, the department and the rest of government. There is a further and pre-existing published framework document already governing the relationship between the Department for Education and the Office for Students, and an equivalent document is being developed between the department and Ofqual to support effective working arrangements.

IfATE currently has memorandums of understanding with Ofqual and the Office for Students, and we anticipate that equivalent documents will be developed and published in respect of Skills England in due course. These documents will set out the nature of the relationship between Skills England and the regulators it will work with, in line with their respective framework documents.

For the reasons I have outlined, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, feels able not to press her amendment.