Queen’s Speech

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Blake and the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on their maiden speeches. They bring very different experiences and skills to this Chamber but, combined, they will enrich us by contributing to our debates. I thank them and wish them well.

I have some comments about education and the skills agenda, and a few questions about schools. I declare my registered interest as chair of the Birmingham Education Partnership. I very much welcome the catch-up programme that the Government have announced so far, but I am left feeling that we have not heard it all yet. The Government do not have a good record of acting in good time as far as schools are concerned during this pandemic. Can the Minister tell us when we will be hearing further information about the catch-up programme?

I have a second query on schools. The Minister referred to a speech which the Secretary of State made recently, on the expansion of multiacademy trusts. I will not comment on that, but the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, will remember that in 2016, the feeling that the Secretary of State would require everybody to be a member of a multiacademy trust caused great disturbance in the school system—and that is what I am hearing from those in schools to whom I talk. They are unsure whether the Secretary of State was saying that schools will have to be part of multiacademy trusts. I am not arguing whether it is right or wrong, but they need to know, because otherwise their attention will be focused on that and not on getting the children back to studying.

My main questions are on the skills part of the gracious Speech. I welcome the emphasis that the Government have put on skills, and the fact that further education is at the top of the list of Bills that are part of the Speech. It does not happen often, so let us try to make the best of this opportunity. In that respect, I have questions on three areas where we can make improvements. First, who can study? Who can access the money under the lifetime guarantee? Apparently, only those without a level 3 qualification. There are millions of people in this country with a level 3 qualification who need or want to retrain, and they are not in the group that will be able to qualify.

Secondly, what is study? The Government in London have decided which courses will be funded, not the locality. I bet that some towns, villages and cities have local industries which will be excluded from that list. I am not sure why we would do that: why we would say what cannot be studied as well as what can be studied. My additional question is: why study? I am in favour of employers being a key part of our skills agenda, but the government document says that the agenda will be built around the needs of employers. I am not sure that that is right. I am not sure that employers are any better than anybody else at guessing what the skills needs of the future will be, or in working out what industries will be the industrial backbone of our country.

Skills do other things, and there are other jobs that further education colleges have. They help build communities by giving people skills that will be used locally. They help build civic strength by building up skills and experiences, and they help motivate people who will not go on a work training course but will go back to do pottery, art, singing or playing an instrument and will then move to a work training course. None of those is in that list.

There might be places in our country where who can study, what is studied and why you study are absolutely met by the requirements that the Government have set out—but that is not true for all communities everywhere. I worry that some of our left-behind communities will not have their needs met because the Government have decided that it is they who will be answering these questions.

My concerns, which I will want to raise during the passage of the Bill, are: why is there no mention of mayors? Why are we not building on the devolution agenda? Why are we not empowering these left-behind cities, towns and communities to say, “What skills do you want, who do you want to get the money for retraining, what is your priority?” The skill of politics here is getting both those things in place; the needs of the nation to drive us forward and the needs of localities, local people and local communities who have not always fitted into a national agenda and national structure, which is why they have been left behind. During the passage of the Bill, we want to explore with the Government why we cannot do more with a devolution agenda, alongside the skills agenda set out in the gracious Speech.