Polytechnics

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for raising this issue. The word “polytechnic”, or the concept, has come out in a number of our debates on education and skills over the past few years, so it is good that we now have an opportunity to debate it as an issue in its own right. I started at a different end from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in that I started in my thinking at the university end—partly because of the origins of the word “polytechnic”—but arrived at very much the same conclusions and very much support the thrust of what he said.

Because of that word “polytechnic”, it is worth stating that this is not about going back or reinventing something that was so wonderful that we should never have got rid of it. It is not about pretending that, when we had polytechnics—which is more than a quarter of a century ago now—skills and vocational education was brilliant and all the problems have resulted since. It was not like that. I want to put on record the advantages gained through the demise of polytechnics. I shall name just two or three. The fact that they could not award their own degrees was not right. The fact that they have now become expert in broadening access is wonderful. It has also enabled us to have more institutions of higher education in more geographical places around the country than might otherwise have been the case. That change, the abolition of the polytechnics and the end of that binary divide, was right and I welcomed it.

However, I am absolutely certain that we lost something, and it is those things that we lost that are worth grabbing out to see whether we can propel them forward a quarter of a century and find some use for. As the noble Lord mentioned, the move in 1992 was very much part of the expansion of higher education in its own right, and we have seen more full-time, three-year undergraduate courses and fewer courses at levels 4 and 5, which was the ambition of Lord Dearing when he set out his plans. We lost out there, we lost out on the notion of the sandwich course, which was very much part of the old polytechnics, and we lost out on the emphasis on learning through doing. A lot of the former polytechnics have, as new post-1992 universities, expanded what I might call classroom-bound courses because, for a polytechnic that became a university and wanted to expand, it was cheaper to put on a law, history or business course than it was to do vocational or skills courses, which are more expensive due to the nature of the equipment. That in some way accounts for the wrong skills mix that we inherit now. I want to hang on to what the polytechnics brought, even if it was a quarter of a century ago, as I still think there is a role for that in the sort of education system that we should be developing.

That would not be so bad if it was not on top of what we all know is a still deeply dysfunctional vocational and skills education programme in this country. Neither party has managed to get it right, although both have made valiant efforts. I like a lot of what the Government are doing at the moment, but none of us can ever pretend that it is not the weakest part of our education system. I do not want to list those weaknesses, but we are still blessed, or cursed, with a qualification system that no one understands, that changes rapidly and that is not the key to what it should be.

On top of that, in recent years we have had changes in the secondary school system that have emphasised a very much more academic curriculum, with the English baccalaureate, and downplayed the notion of vocational skills and learning through doing. Where we are now, I am not at all happy that we have got the building blocks in place in order to take us forward. That shows in quality, in the international comparisons of what we have at skill levels 3, 4 and 5, and in the preponderance of level 2s that we have in apprenticeships compared with level 3s. We are not doing as well as we should, and for all the efforts of people, we do not have the right building blocks in place.

It is worth mentioning that, when you compare that to the other route through the education system, the A-level route, it is almost not fair. It is not fair for the young people who want to take that route, it is not fair for the employers who need the skills that come out of that route and it is not fair for the country because it means that our productivity is low and our economy is not as strong as it should be. We know that we have coherence through the A-level route: it is a very easily understood qualification that does not change much over time, it leads to university and it has that rite of passage.

When polytechnics were abolished, I was head of sixth form at an inner-city comprehensive school in Coventry and I have two memories—one good and one bad—of the polytechnics. To be honest, the polytechnics were insurance applications for people who thought that they might not get into university. That was not right, and it is good that that is gone. However, the thing I remember with affection was the route through that they provided for some of my students who went through the BTEC, HNC and HND route straight to the polytechnic. That is the only time in all my memory of being involved in education when there was a cohesive, coherent route for those studying vocational qualifications from school, often through further education and then into higher education. I miss that. We have lost that, and we have never been able to recreate it.

My question in this debate is whether, in our wish to do better at vocational and skills education, polytechnics could play a role in that. For me, that is the simple question in this debate. I think they could, and for a number of reasons. We will have national colleges, we have institutes of technology and we have post-1992 universities that still have strong links with industry—Sunderland has excellent links with Nissan and Nottingham Trent still does sandwich courses on business. I know that we have those examples of good practice, but we do not have any coherence, cohesion or leadership at that level of this form of education. Quite simply, a new brand of polytechnics would provide that leadership. It would not just be good practice here and there but would provide a network of institutions to which we could look to lead the sort of change that we need to bring about. The trick will be in how much status we give these new polytechnics, and that is up to us almost as much as it is up to them.

We have two good examples—one in the early academies and the other in the Baker Dearing Educational Trust’s work with the university technical colleges—which prove that, if you take what seems to be something intractably problematic, put in the best skills and the most attention, give it resources and status and make it stand proud, you change the way in which others perceive it. That is what happened with the early academies and inner-city education: people all of a sudden wanted to go there to both study and work. In UTCs at their best, that is what happened with vocational education and skills education.

If we do that with a new range of polytechnics, we could build that centre of excellence and give it an important leadership role in the education system and the economy. One of the jobs I would give the polytechnics would be to lead on links with employers. I would want them to lead on experimenting with different patterns of higher education—not full-time, three-year degrees, but two years, one year, a sandwich course, a term off, a term back at work, people in work coming to learn or whatever it is. We are far too unimaginative with the higher education pattern and we could ask them to lead on that. I would like them to lead on making practical learning—learning through doing— something that is highly valued. I would want an accountability mechanism that rewarded them for doing those things and did not make them chase the research funding which they have to chase at the moment through the higher education system.

I finish by coming to the same conclusion as did the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that further education colleges will be key in this. They are different from what they were in the days of the old polytechnics. They offer degrees; they have bridging courses; they do years 1 and 2 of a degree course. Some sort of new sector that puts polytechnics and universities which want to play that role together with the colleges could be a good bridge between school and the world of work, and it could play an immensely valuable role in something which, for all our efforts, we have never yet got quite right.