School Exclusion: Timpson Review

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, without sounding complacent, I think it is important to give some perspective to the current exclusion rate. It is about the same as it was 10 years ago; it improved but it has got worse in the last three years. I do not want to paint a picture of there being a crisis. I accept that we are concerned, and we are doing something about it, but it would be wrong to suggest that there is a crisis. Regarding attendance, we have made quite a lot of improvement. The persistent absence rates have dropped quite a lot. Looking again at a 10-year ranking, in 2006-07, 24.9% of secondary schools had persistent absence of more than 10%; that is now down to just under 14% of secondary schools, and that is while raising the bar to make it a harder judgment. So attendance is improving. I do not have the specific information on Charlie Taylor’s work; I am happy to write to the noble Baroness. The Tom Bennett review will be in a similar vein, showing schools best practice and how to manage children in these situations.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the report. I think Edward Timpson is highly regarded across all sides of the House, and this is a thorough piece of work on which we should build. Having said that, I am disappointed in the Government’s response. It seems very woolly, with rather a lot of waffle. The recommendations tend to be about rewriting guidance and setting up a committee. Looking quickly through them, I honestly cannot see much that is new. There is not one big—or even small—idea that I would see as fresh thinking in response to a good report.

In particular—I ask the Minister to have a look—behaviour partnerships were abolished in 2010 by Michael Gove as part of his bonfire of the quangos. As the Minister is setting them up again, perhaps he could look at the good practice followed under the last years of the Labour Government. If my memory serves me right—it may not—I think the Labour Government also had a proposal whereby the examination performance of excluded children stayed for two years with the school from which they had been excluded. That must have been got rid of at some point by the Conservatives or the coalition. Can the Minister reassure us that he will learn from that and will not reinvent the wheel?

My main point is that I am not sure whether or not we are talking about fixed-term exclusions. When we talk about 85% of schools not excluding, that does not include the many schools who have fixed-term exclusions; these run at 500 times more than permanent exclusions at some 2,000 per day. Will the Minister tell us whether what he has said applies to fixed-term exclusions? I am interested in two figures. First, how many children who are eventually permanently excluded have already gone through a series of fixed-term exclusions? I bet it is almost every single one of them. Secondly, does he have the figures on exclusion by type of school—that is, maintained schools and academies?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, asks about the difference between permanent and fixed-term exclusions. She is right; I have been quoting the figures for permanent exclusions, because that is the final sanction that exists for a school.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

I asked how many of the children given fixed-term exclusions were then permanently excluded.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I accept that there is a ladder of escalation, which starts with sanctions that gradually move up in their impact. I disagree slightly with the noble Baroness on the strength of the recommendations in the Timpson report. For me, the stand-out recommendation is number 14:

“DfE should make schools responsible for the children they exclude and accountable for their educational outcomes”.


This has the potential to be a very powerful change, but Timpson has cautioned us to be careful in how we implement it, because of the adverse behaviours that it might create.

Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I share the right reverend Prelate’s concerns about rural schools. We have particular funding pots within the overall formula—sparsity funding, for example—which give a typical small rural primary school an additional £135,000 a year and a small secondary school £175,000. We are committed to the various ongoing training programmes. Only this morning, I was addressing a group of some 80 people involved in professional development training and encouraging them in what they were doing. I absolutely support what the right reverend Prelate has said.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I broadly welcome the announcement. There is a lot in it that offers hope for the future. The challenge will be in implementing it. I think it is overclaimed. I do not think it is the biggest change since teaching became an all-degree profession. Indeed, there are not many individual proposals that have not done the rounds before, so it is worth learning from them. The advanced skills teacher has been redesigned under a different title.

I have two questions. I very much welcome the protected time that will be offered for new teachers. I listened to what the Minister said about the amount of money that will be put into the system. Can he confirm that it will be ring-fenced when it gets to school level? Otherwise, in times of diminishing budgets, it will not get spent on the purpose for which it was intended. Secondly, how is he going to overcome the problem of making excellent schools that are not academies part of the school-led improvement system if he is going to give a lot more power to multi-academy trusts?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I will have to write to the noble Baroness to confirm whether the money will be ring-fenced at school level. Certainly, our preference is to give autonomy to schools, but I will check on it and come back to her. Support is aimed beyond academies at all state schools. Only just over 50% of pupils are in academies today, so it is not our intention to see those still in the local authority system left behind.

Free Schools: Educational Standards

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for bringing the debate to the House. It is good to have an education debate; we do not get as many of them these days as we used to.

I want to put on record the noble Lord’s commitment to the policy. I know that he believes in it and has put a lot of his own resources, effort and ability into trying to make it work. I will say that up front because in the next six and a half minutes, I will not support totally what he said. I also join him in thanking the schools he mentioned that have been successful in the free schools movement. We should welcome every good new school that we can get into the system. We cannot be against more good schools. That is the starting point. However, beyond that, I did not recognise the picture of this policy drawn by the noble Lord.

The title of the debate gives away the problem we have with the Government’s approach to free schools. It invites us to celebrate free schools’ contribution to raising standards. We owe it to the nation to do more than that. We owe it to our nation and its children to be more open-minded, not blind to the weaknesses and faults as well. The problem with free schools is that the Government have been too committed to them from the start and have lost any ability to be neutral or objective about their progress. While I acknowledge the success that there has been, I want to raise the other things that have happened in the free school movement.

Let us be clear what we are talking about when it comes to free schools. They do not exist in statute; they are essentially academies—no more, no less; there is no more legislation. They were set up to bring in new providers and parent-led schools, to increase competition and to promote innovation. Over the years of their existence, not one of them has delivered on the ambitions of their proposers at the start of the free school journey.

Increasingly, new providers are existing MATs. In the past three years of the policy, more than 80% of free schools have been just expansions of existing multi-academy trust schools. That has been at the expense of parent-led schools. The number of parents opening schools has dropped drastically during the past three years. As for competition, free schools will become the default model for the schools system in England. If you open a new school, it will have to be a free school. It is going to be a monopoly; it is a default system; it is not somebody trying to change the system but what every new school will be.

Belonging to an organisation that sponsored free schools, my experience of them is that what we have now is the most tightly controlled, most measured, most weighed, most monitored, most structured and most supported set of schools in the whole schools system. If anyone here has sat around a table discussing the progress of a free school, they will know that you have educational advisers from the DfE, people from the regional schools commission, people from the funding agency and, in the background, people from the New Schools Network. There are more paid bureaucrats around that table than in any other educational situation. I do not mind that. If that is the way to bring about success, let us go for it—but let us not pretend that these schools are free; let us not pretend that they are being allowed to get on with it.

As the noble Lord, Lord Nash, has just said, perhaps the Government should have been even more prescriptive. Gone is the autonomy, gone is the “stand-alone”, gone is the “get on with it”, gone is the “get bureaucracy out of it” and gone is the idea that the centre does not know best; what we have is that the centre apparently does know best and will do what it takes to make sure that those schools thrive. That is fair enough if that is what you are promoting—but for heaven’s sake change the title. These are not free schools, and they are no badge for anyone who believes that schools should be autonomous.

The schools are not without failures—every type of school structure will have them. Eighty-six projects did not start and we spent millions of pounds on them. Forty-two projects that started have closed—we have wasted money—and 15 schools that started have been re-brokered. If this is what we have to spend to find out what works in education, I could defend that, but what I find indefensible is somebody standing up in a debate about free schools and not acknowledging that failure. We need to learn from that failure; we need to know why the Government are spending 19% above value rates for properties in London; we need to know why £8 million was spent on a site for a UTC that never opened; we need to know why more than 50 free schools have closed and kids have had to be sent outside. Again, there is no open analysis or realistic evaluation of the progress that has been made. I shall not go through the costs, but if any local authority had spent so much money to so little effect, as central government has done on some aspects of its free schools, the commissioners would have been through the door. There is no arguing against that.

The problem is that the Government have been blinded to the weaknesses of free schools. They set them up not as a pilot to see what worked, or as an open approach where they asked, “What can we learn to put to the rest of the system?”; they set them up determined that this should be the dominant structure within the English schools system, and the evidence is not there. Where it has been good, it has presented an ideal situation for some schools—a small number of schools —to be incredibly imaginative, and every system needs a place for incubators where innovation can work. I think free schools have offered that to some extent, but they have not proven themselves as a model that should be rolled out so that every school is a free school.

Quite simply, for far too long politicians throughout all parties and generations have looked at school structure as a way of guaranteeing success for every child and every school, and it does not work. It did not work with comprehensives, it did not work with academies, it does not work with free schools and it will not work with any one structure. What works is good leaders, strong teachers, good support and effective governance, and there is nothing about free schools that guarantees more of that. If we are intent on delivering high standards for every child, let us look honestly and openly at what in all parts of our system brings the best leadership, the strongest teaching, the most effective governance and the most support from parents. If we get that right, we will do it. Some of that has been exhibited in some free schools, but it has also been exhibited in a lot of academies, comprehensive schools and local authority maintained schools. That is the problem. Free schools are an interesting experiment but they are not a blueprint for the future of our school system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I rather agree with my noble friend that the Opposition seem to have gone on a journey. When free schools were originally mooted under my noble friend’s tenure we were told that no one was capable of creating one other than the Government. We have put paid to that myth.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

How can the Minister say that when he inherited an academy programme introduced by the Labour Government, which had the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and other people sponsoring schools, not local authorities? It is an inaccurate description of what went on.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

There were 200 out of some 22,000 schools. My noble friend Lord Harris was not a parent. We certainly built on the early foundations that Labour created in the academies programme, but there was not a great deal of evidence in those early 200 of parental involvement in their creation. Specifically, the programme went on after very experienced, dedicated people such as my noble friends Lord Nash and Lord Harris, became involved. They were well beyond parental age at the point.

Schools: Funding

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

That this House takes note of the impact on schools of Her Majesty’s Government’s approach to school funding.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the register of interests as chair of the Birmingham Education Partnership. I suspect that there will be differences of opinion during the debate. I hope there will be and that is as it should be, but I acknowledge and accept that every person in this House, no matter their view on school funding, values education, understands its importance, and would have the highest ambitions for our children and nation. Indeed, that is what makes this such an important topic to debate. We all know of its importance and we all know what happens when we get it wrong.

I also do not think that funding by itself will solve all our problems. I know it depends on how the money is spent, good leadership and good-quality teaching, but without money those things cannot happen. I am not one to say, “Give schools money and everything will be right”, but when I talk to teachers, visit schools and read what is happening I see that there is a crisis out there. Teachers are saying that it is the biggest problem they face. It makes a difference to what and how we can teach children, the pressures on teachers in a very demanding job, and, in the end, the prosperity of our country and the strength of our families and communities.

What is most worrying about this topic is that that sense of crisis and the reality of what is happening in schools is not reflected in what we hear from Ministers. It seems we have a Government who are not yet at the stage of acknowledging that there is a problem. If we achieve nothing else in the debate, if I could hear the Minister say, “I acknowledge that there is a problem and I am going to try to do something about it”, it would be well worth having.

I do not now trust what the Government say about statistics on school funding. On five separate occasions, the UK Statistics Authority has pulled Ministers up for misusing statistics. Let us look to organisations that are neutral and can give us impartial advice about what is happening. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the National Audit Office say that, after a period of sustained increased funding from the previous Labour Government, they now find that this generation of teachers is the first for 15 years to have to run schools and teach at a time of diminishing budgets. Over 2016 we saw a real-terms drop in funding per pupil in schools of 8%. If you have been a teacher for the last 15 to 20 years you will have seen a 50% increase between 2001 and 2010 under the previous Labour Government, funding held steady and protected by the coalition Government, and an 8% real-terms cut since this Tory Government came in in 2015. Within those groups, some children and some sectors have suffered far more than others. The sector for 16 to 18 year- olds in particular has had a raw deal: down by 8% for them in further education, but in school sixth forms the amount of the cut is 20% in the last few years. That is what people are having to deal with in schools and the impact on the learning of those children can only be imagined.

I also want to draw attention to what is happening in special educational needs. I know from my experience that the money in the high-needs funding block is going nowhere to meet the demands placed on it. The LGA is doing a report at the moment the initial findings of which show a shortfall of £536 million in this financial year. Put that alongside the area where the Government claim they are doing good work—capital funding—and we can see that that is a problem as well. The Government say that they are tackling the problem of shortfall of places and building more schools, but they are actually shifting the money from the maintenance of school buildings for all schools, putting it into pet projects such as free schools and academies, and saying that that is creating the extra places. We have seen the budget for maintenance of schools fall from £4.7 billion to £2.4 billion. But it is worse than that: what has happened with the capital money is that of all the free schools that have opened, 54 have closed. That includes 12 UTCs and some studio schools as well. So even where they have invested money in the creation of new places and building new schools, we find that they have squandered that money. There has been poor stewardship of the money spent. Even the recent annual academy accounts show a £2 million operating debt as well.

This is not a blip or a little problem in schools that has to be dealt with along with everything else that is happening. It is a crisis, both in revenue funding and in capital funding, and there is no hope on the horizon that things will get better. It draws the energy out of what is going on in our schools. It saps the enthusiasm of our school leaders and our teachers. What saps the enthusiasm most is when the teachers hear the Government telling them that there is no problem. All that does is to create mistrust and resentment between politics—our business—and teaching and education, the jobs that we are supposed to be supporting.

This should not be a debate about figures, in truth—about, across the House, whose statistics we can believe. It should not be about trading £1 billion for another £1 billion. It should look at the consequences in schools of that cut in funding. That is what I want to look at. One thing we have to remember is that 80% of money spent on schools is spent on staffing. If you have to find cuts to your budget, it is very tough to do anything but cut the money you spend on teachers, support staff and clerical staff: that is where we have seen the biggest cuts. When the department inquired of teachers what they were doing to manage the cuts in expenditure, they said that they were replacing experienced, highly paid teachers with younger, less experienced teachers. They said that they were putting more teachers on temporary contracts rather than permanent ones, senior staff are teaching more, non-senior staff are losing more of their non-contact time and teaching larger classes, and there is less teaching of non-EBacc subjects. All that not only drains teachers’ energy, it means that the learning experiences that our children get are not as good as they should be.

I looked at what the Government are doing on teacher workload. They have a toolkit for this, a toolkit for that and a bit of advice for the other, but all those good attempts to reduce teacher workload count for nothing if we place more work on teachers because of the funding crisis. It is no good giving them a toolkit to improve communication or a bit of advice as to how to save time on marking if, day by day and week by week, we give them less contact time, more children to teach and more pressures because of less money.

I acknowledge one thing that the Government are doing which we did not take on: to try to change the funding formula. Good luck with that, because it is a job that probably needs doing. But to try to do it with one hand, during a time of making school budgets fall with the other hand, probably makes that nigh on impossible without asking some schools to suffer a great deal. Money matters. All the political parties that we represent have “We pledge more funding” in their manifestos. I have never heard of a competition between the political parties as to how they can raise school standards with less money. That is not a debate we have, so money matters. We pledged money, as did the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. Look at London Challenge and the pupil premium: that shows what can be done if you marry together extra funding of a sizeable amount, target it well and ensure that you work with teachers and school leaders to deliver the best for children. All that is a long, long way from the funding for the “little extras” that came out in the Chancellor’s Budget—but that is the sole response we have had to what is happening at the moment.

I want to remind people about the context in which we are asking schools to work. There is not a generation of schoolteachers of whom more has been asked than the generation in our schools now. Very often, it is we who ask them to do these extra jobs and they pick up the consequences of our policies and decisions in schools. This is the first generation which has been asked to succeed with every child, when previous generations were not. It is schools that pick up the pieces from increasing poverty, broken families and fractured communities. It is schools that have to work out how to bring up the next generation in a world which is globalising rapidly, and how teaching and learning changes with the digital revolution that faces us. Whatever the answers are to all those questions—I do not claim to know them—there needs to be investment in the schools and their teachers, in the fabric of their buildings and the equipment they use. There needs to be thought and investment in time and in space.

Quite frankly, if politics is about choice then the Government are making the wrong choices as far as school funding is concerned. It is never the right choice not to invest in the future, whatever the circumstances. It is never the right choice for business, commerce and industry because their success depends in part on schools getting it right now. It is never the best choice for individuals, families or communities because we know that education can be the key to giving them strength, enabling them to raise their heads and then to not only fulfil their individual potential but be stronger contributors to the world in which they live. We have now seen almost a decade of falling budgets. If your Lordships think about it, that will have been most of some children’s time in school. It is not fair or right that their schooling years should be during a time of diminishing budgets.

What I want to know, and what I think the nation wants to know, from this debate is simply: what are the Government going to do about it? We need to know that they understand the problem and acknowledge the consequences of their decisions and actions. We need to know that they will be champions in government of the teaching profession and all who care within education to try to turn this around. I would like to be reassured about the level of fight taking place as the next spending review approaches, so that there will not be another decade of this happening and children suffering.

I have always thought that education is a joint business, and I think that view would be shared across the House. We all have something to put in because we all get something out. It is up to families and parents, as it is to every citizen and business. There is not a soul without a role to play as a citizen in our country. However, politicians and politics have a role that no one else has. One of their roles is to make sure that our education system is funded well enough to do the things which we ask it to do for individuals, and ensure our country’s prosperity as we go into the future. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who contributed to the debate. I do not think that I have ever been in a debate where there has been universal opposition to the position taken by the Government. Not one Member on either side of the House spoke wholeheartedly in favour of the Government’s approach to schools funding. That if nothing else should make the Government and Ministers think again. Every noble Lord who contributed to this debate has contributed to previous education debates. They have real experience in the real world and they have brought their expertise to our debate today—on SEN, rural schools, smaller schools, teacher shortage and supply, creativity in the broader curriculum, and the knowledge they have as a chair of governors who knows their school well.

I spend some time on that because they, like me, must feel very disappointed that the concerns they brought up on behalf of teachers, pupils, parents and wider society seem to have cut no ice with the Minister. I know that his is a tough job and that he has to defend the Government’s position. But my objective at the start of this debate was to secure some acknowledgement that things are going wrong. I have not heard that, and it is disappointing.

I will not answer all the points, because the Minister spoke for a long time and mentioned a lot of small points. I will take up just two or three. Please do not quote the five to 16 funding. If you are a head in a secondary 11 to 18 school and you have a 20% cut in sixth-form funding, it does you no good to be told by the Minister that the five to 16 funding is not bad. It is that difference between the reality in schools and the rhetoric of Ministers that adds to the pressure on school funding and the crisis it has given us.

Schools do not exist in isolation. Cuts in local authority work, cuts to educational psychology, the increase in poverty, and the lack of money in early years all add to the pressures on schools. I did not hear from the Minister that he understood that—and that concerns me. However, I do think that the Minister is right to offer best practice to the Government. It is easy to laugh at a little idea that a Government Minister puts to schools. I will not do that, because it is right. If we can learn from good tips and hints, there is nothing wrong with that; we should continue to allow one school to learn from another.

However, this debate was not about that. It was not about marginal extras. It was about the fundamental level of funding that goes into our schools—and that was not addressed. The only solution to our funding crisis in schools that the Minister is not prepared to countenance is giving them more money—and that is a problem.

I welcome the debate, and of course I welcome the way in which the Minister listened carefully and the thoroughness with which he tried to answer every issue raised by Members. I am grateful for the extra time he gave us in responding to the debate. It shows his care and concern for the job that he has. I do not doubt for a minute his determination to deliver what he said: high standards for every pupil. I just wish he would work with the rest of us who share his passion so that together we can try to get more funding for schools. If we do not do that, he will find in retrospect that his time in office was more of a disappointment than it might have been.

Motion agreed.

Schools that Work for Everyone Consultation

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey]

And if that does not happen?

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I was just going to finish my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on his question about capital. To put the £50 million sum in perspective, we are spending over £1 billion a year on basic-need increases across the country. I am not saying it is a trivial sum but I do not want people to think that we are literally raiding the pot for ordinary schools. Against that also, the capital allocation for schools in this spending round is £23.5 billion.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, that was a pretty poor Statement and a poor response to the original consultation paper. In the original paper, the Minister talked about selective schools having to help with non-selective education if they were to justify their position. In that consultation paper, he outlined the possibility of a number of sanctions that would take place if grammar schools did not do their bit to help non-selective schools in the area. In the Statement that he has just made, there is no mention of sanctions. If selective schools that are expanding do not play their part in raising standards across their area, will he impose sanctions, as was his intention in the original consultation paper?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, there is no intention to impose sanctions at this stage, but the very fact that we have made a short-term announcement on the allocation of capital is sending a message to the grammar school sector that if it does not play by the unwritten rules of increasing its access, it will not be able to carry on with any future expansion. I think this follows the approach that we have taken with universities, with the very big programme of universities spending nearly £200 million a year on widening access, and similar principles apply in this situation.

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I also welcome the Bill that has been put forward by my noble friend Lord Soley, and congratulate him on the work that he has done. I also want at the start of the debate want to recognise the work done by Graham Badman some time ago. I suspect that if Graham Badman’s report, which was about to be put into effect in 2010, had been allowed to come into force, we would have already addressed these issues. I know my noble friend Lord Soley said he tried to speak to Graham Badman and build on the work that he has done.

The noble Lord, Lord Baker, was absolutely right. When he said he thought back to his time in office and what he did about home education, that made me think back to my own time in office. In truth, we did not do much either. At that time, the principle of a parent’s right to educate their child other than at school trumped everything else, but times were different. It is not about justifying whether that was right or wrong, but things have changed since the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and I were in office. In two chief respects, the context now is different.

First, as a society, we do more now to accept our joint responsibility for the well-being and protection of every child. We have always thought we do that, but so many cases in recent years have shown that we have not always done it. That is at the top of everyone’s agenda. The obligation that we owe as adults, as a society and as policymakers to every child to do what we can to protect their well-being is paramount.

Secondly, we accept more now the right of the child to have an education, which may sometimes trump the right of parents to decide that their child should be educated in a particular way.

The third factor in play here is that if you are the Minister, you can claim that there is guidance of a sort that deals with this issue. However, the guidance was published a decade ago by two Ministers who are now sitting in this House and relies on a trick that often happens in government. It says that they have the right to check that every child is well and getting a decent education, but then denies them every power that they would need to carry out that job. You can tick the box and say that there is guidance, but the bottom line is that you say to a local authority that if it suspects anything is wrong, it must do something about it, but you deny it the right to collect the information, the right to go into the home, the right to ask questions, the right to speak to the child.

Times have changed and it is quite clear that there is a problem to be solved. People will say we do not know the extent of the problem, because we have not taken the powers to collect the information. I thought about the groups that could be included in this, and part of the problem is that, understandably and rightly, the most vocal group is that of parents who do the job well and who for whatever reason have decided that the type of education they want their child to have is better delivered outside the formal school structure. Often the children are very gifted or have great special educational needs, but the way the parent wants to structure that child’s learning is one that the system of education has not been able to deliver for them, or they have been dissatisfied with the provision of education they have had. They are the articulate group and the ones who complain whenever we try to address this issue. I do not want their rights threatened—they are doing a good job, although it is not what I would choose for my child, and I absolutely respect their right to do that. But their voice should not take away from our obligation to protect children who are not in that group.

Another group being educated other than at school are those who are deliberately hidden from society and are mistreated and abused as a result. They are not supported to flourish and thrive in society and are maybe, as my noble friend Lord Soley said, radicalised, or brought up and educated in a way that does not give them the skills, the attitude or the social skills to thrive as citizens.

One growing group that absolutely appals me are those parents who feel obliged to educate their child at home because they have been excluded from school and are advised by the school that the best thing would be to educate them other than at school. This is not a deliberate choice on the parents’ part, but a set of circumstances brought about by a school that wishes to exclude the child, which leads to the child being educated at home. So there is a linkage, and I suspect the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, might say something about this, between unregulated schools and children being educated at home, which I had not clocked until the previous HMCI spoke more about it last year.

The principle in the Bill that we need to know more about these children—who and where they are and why they are not in school—has to be right, and I very much support the aspect of the Bill that would do that. If we want to collect those figures, we must have a way of doing so. If we want to safeguard the well-being of the child, we have to know about them and talk to them. We have to know who is educating them and where they are being educated. We have to check what is happening to them. But those provisions in the Bill have to be right.

Where the Bill is also right but far more contentious, and I was pleased that my noble friend Lord Soley indicated that in his opening comments, is on where we say to society, “Thou shan’t make judgments about the quality of education being delivered”. I think we should make some judgments but I do not pretend it will be easy. This is the most difficult part of the Bill. In the interests of every child and of safeguarding a child’s right to education—a child’s right to education is a United Nations provision—I think there are things that we as citizens can agree on: a child should be literate and numerate and have access to physical activity, the arts, culture, science and all those wondrous things. In truth, though, while the state is very good at inspecting within a very regulated framework, it is less good at exercising judgment and discretion where people are not absolutely following that framework and regulation but are nevertheless doing a decent job. Most of us have talked to teachers and head teachers who have complained about the present inspection framework, and I can well imagine how nervous some parents are that they are going to have that conversation with some sort of regulator.

I say to my noble friend Lord Soley, the proposer of the Bill, that he was absolutely right to acknowledge that that is an issue, but it is not one that we should not take on. It is just one where we have to be sensitive, and I hope that in considering the implementation of the Bill we will talk to those parents who are doing a good job of educating their children and do not want to have to change too much. We should make sure we can accommodate their needs. To ask a state regulation system to accommodate innovation and quirkiness almost does not go together as a request, but somehow we have to get this right.

I welcome the Bill. I congratulate my noble friend on bringing it to the House; he has a long record of taking an interest in this issue. Primarily, it will set us on course to deliver more effectively our obligation to protect every child and ensure that every child has access to a good education. We should tread warily, however, and fear that we may damage some good provision, but these problems are no greater than those we face in implementing any legislation or bringing in a policy that we know at its heart is good. I hope the Bill will get a Second Reading and I look forward to the debates that might ensue.

Schools Update

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

We have not considered that because we do not plan to do it. Were we to lean heavily on the independent sector, it would probably result in a much greater burden on the state sector, because there is no doubt that the country saves a huge amount of money on state education by the number of people who go to private schools. We have, however, made it absolutely clear that although the independent sector does a great deal to support state schools in terms of both bursaryships and school partnerships up and down the country—I was recently in York, where there is a strong school partnership—we think that some independent schools can do more. We are in active discussions with the Independent Schools Council and the other independent school organisations. They are very willing to help and we will be working with them so that they can help the state sector much more. There is a lot that they can do to help the state sector—particularly in teaching, the use of sports facilities and sports personnel and preparing pupils for applications to university.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, part of the problem is that it is such an unclear Statement. There are so many questions, but we are not getting particularly clear answers in response, so I return to two issues that have already been raised to seek further clarification. The wording of the Statement,

“deploying efficiency experts to give direct support to”

schools, reads to me like real people going to schools to give advice. In his response to my noble friend on the Front Bench, the Minister implied that it is an online tool. Can he clarify exactly what is meant by those words? If they are real people, how much will that initiative cost? I also return to the part of the Statement which talked about 30 of the 140 new schools coming through the local authority route. It would help me to know whether local authorities will be able to say that they do not want to spend their money in that way.

[Lord Nash]

We have done a great deal of work in the department on efficiency in schools. There is no doubt, despite what people say, that some schools have grown their budget a bit like Topsy. I see that the noble Baroness is nodding. Interestingly, our most successful education providers are also our most efficient financially, because, as any organisation has to when it faces financial pressures, they go back to a bottom-up approach to budgeting. Schools that do that spend their resources where they are needed and think about where they want to spend them rather than, as has happened in a number of schools, through consistent increases in funding over many years, where their budgets have grown like Topsy. There are significant efficiency savings. Many schools have grasped that, but there is no doubt that some have not, and we now have a number of experts—we currently work with about 20—who are well versed in this. We will be making them available to schools that need them.

We have no intention of forcing free schools down the throats of local authorities. It is a collaborative approach. We have been working collaboratively with local authorities on free schools and see much greater scope to do so in future.

Educational Attainment: Boys

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for raising this question. It is a perennial problem facing our education system. Across all parties and groups there is a wish to solve it but so far there is not a lot of evidence that any of us have succeeded. The more we can focus on it, the better. I am grateful for the opportunity today to contribute.

I used to be an optimist about this. The noble Lord mentioned that boys’ attainment fell away in the 1980s. I remember that period well: it was when I was a secondary school teacher. I think what happened is that girls’ attainment improved while boys’ attainment stood still and that is when the gap started. In a strange way, I have always taken comfort from that fact. When I was Education Minister, we saw the performance of children from ethnic groups improve so that it overtook white children, who got left behind. I had seen that as optimistic, thinking that if we could do it for girls and ethnic groups we could do it for those boys, too. Until fairly recently, I thought that was probably the approach we ought to adopt, with focused targets on boys to try and replicate what happened in raising the attainment of other underachieving groups.

I have begun to change my mind on that, partly because we have a much stronger schools system than we had. We have better school leaders and better-quality teachers, yet we have not made that difference. It has not worked. Sitting around just saying, “Focus on boys and have another load of initiatives”, with £1 million spent here and there will not work. I am much more persuaded now—it is a more complex argument and a greater challenge to achieve—that the whole of the gender difference is wound up in the income difference. I take the phrase from the Social Mobility Commission, which says:

“The income gap is larger than either the ethnicity gap or the gender gap”.


I thought we could overcome that by focusing on boys but do not believe so any longer. The way we must go now to close the gap between girls and boys is to take on that big issue of the income gap. If we do that, we will raise standards everywhere and boys will rise with that.

I do not say that there is no issue with boys. This debate is about underachievement of boys in the state system but there is also underachievement of boys in the independent sector—I am not sure why they have been squeezed out of this debate—and from wealthy backgrounds. However, when you look at the nub of the problem, the hard edge is among poor boys. Whatever we do for poor boys would help other underachieving boys as well.

We could get drowned in statistics—I entirely agree with that—but I offer this set of statistics because they support my argument. Girls who do not get free school meals, so more affluent girls above the measure of poverty, are 107% more likely to gain five good GCSEs than free-school-meal girls. Boys who do not get free school meals are 135% more likely to gain five good GCSEs. So there is an issue about boys and girls. If you look at the difference between free-school-meal boys and girls, it is only 33%. If you get even for poverty, the gender gap is 33%. If you plonk poverty back into the measure through free school meals, the gap is 107% for girls and 135% for boys. There must be a message in there that the gender gap is real but it is accentuated and made worse because, at its core, this is about poverty.

We must address the wider educational and inequality arguments and issues that face us. The most interesting set of statistics I found in the Library briefing on this—I could have sat for a week looking at all the statistics; they are fascinating and contradictory, which is one of the problems—is where gender gap by local area was looked at. We know that the largest gender gap is in St Helens, South Tyneside and Darlington. The lowest gender gaps are in Richmond upon Thames, Calderdale and North Somerset. I say no more. It is bound in with poverty. On the next page, one sees something interesting. The most deprived local authority in the country is Tower Hamlets, whose gender gap is 15%. That is too large, but it is only a percentage point away from the second-least deprived local authority in England, which is Rutland. My analysis of that is that Tower Hamlets has overall good standards. There has been good, solid school improvement. It is a high-achieving borough, even though it is an area of high deprivation.

Somewhere in that lies the answer. If you get school improvement right—we now know a lot about this, which we did not know years ago—you close those gaps. You close the poverty gap and you close the gender gap. My marker in trying to address this is that first we have to address poverty. That is not beyond the Minister’s brief, because it is not beyond anybody’s brief. If you address poverty, that will solve the gender gap. Secondly—and this is where I share my conclusion with the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield—we need to look at the barriers that are caused by being poor. This is about high expectations, social capital and, predominantly, early years education and language development. It is about having a space to study and role models. This is a big issue and I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss it. We do not have a good track record in tackling it, but I think that we now know enough about school improvement to take us further forward.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 21 in this group, which is in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and add my support to Amendments 2 and 3 to which the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has just spoken. Our amendment came out of discussions with the CBI, which has a great deal of interest and expertise in the future of apprenticeships—indeed, its engagement is vital to the success of this scheme. It expressed the concerns of its members that the new institute will need monitoring and overview, particularly in its early days.

The amendment aims to ensure that there is regular reporting back to the Secretary of State on the quality of apprenticeships and technical education, calling for,

“a response … containing any actions to be taken as a result”.

Those “any actions” are particularly important because having action plans in response will surely make the difference. There needs to be ongoing communication. There is a weight of responsibility on the institute and high expectations that it will be a real engine for change and will counter generations of undervaluing practical, work-based skills. We need to ensure that there is transparency and accountability from the Government over the quality of technical and further education, and this amendment would help to ensure that the very welcome focus on the technical and further education sector is not lost after the Bill passes into law. I look forward to a positive response from the Minister.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. They are very reasonable and it is difficult to find too many reasons for opposing them other than bureaucracy. When you weigh it up, the argument comes down very much on the side of the amendments on this occasion and not on the side of bureaucracy.

This is primarily about delivering good-quality apprenticeships for young people and adults. We all know that one of the challenges is to change the public discourse about apprenticeships and vocational training, and we are going to have to work really hard if that is to happen. When I look back at the reforms in schools over the past two decades, one of the changes that enabled us to have a more effective public discourse and empower people to ask the right questions, both for members of their own family and in general, was the availability of data. I hear good-quality conversations now from parents, teachers and young people about education, and that is because they have the information to ask the questions and have the debate.

However, I do not think it is there with apprenticeships and technical education. We do not have it yet, and we have a responsibility, if this system is to work, to build up the data and language so that the public can have a proper conversation and monitor what is going on with apprenticeships. Certainly in the medium term, this amendment would help deliver that. It would put information in the public domain every year, and in time, if not immediately, that would lead to discussion and debate. That has to be good for raising the profile of this area of education as well as holding the institute to account for what it is delivering.

I accept that entirely, but also want to emphasise a different point. Has the Minister wondered whether this does not in some way reflect the annual HMCI report, which is laid before Parliament and on which there is always a public debate? It gets on the “Today” programme, bits of information get into the newspapers and the media, and it becomes part of the national conversation that we have about schools. So having this information in the public domain is the right thing to do for accountability. But it would also help with the cultural change that we have to bring about to have a public debate about this area of education. This is not unreasonable. I can see that in years to come—say, in five years’ time—we might want to review the minutiae and the details. I do not think we ought to be committed to this for ever and a day, but I cannot see that the value of starting the practice of having an annual report, monitoring progress and building up confidence and awareness, would be outweighed by any bureaucratic burden that it might place on organisations.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just said. As the House knows, I run the Good Schools Guide. We do what we can to spread information about apprenticeships, but that is extremely difficult because the amount of information available is not good. For universities, by comparison, there is one single source of information. Now, I do not wish the Government to hire UCAS to do apprenticeships, because UCAS is an extremely difficult organisation to deal with and does not let data out to anyone, but something like it which was a single point of information would really help schoolkids and schools because ordinary teachers, let alone career teachers, do not have time to learn their way around 150 different university apprenticeships, let alone all the others. They need a coherent source of information. There is a habit among employers of letting information out only in the two weeks when they want to hire apprentices, rather than all around the year when potential apprentices want to be looking. They are not adjusted to that kind of marketing yet; they are recruiting in penny numbers rather than the tens of thousands, as universities are. There are all sorts of reasons why we need more information and support.

If you want to know where children have gone on to from school, schools will give you—at least English schools will; Scottish schools are more tiresome—a long list of university courses that their students have got on to. Nowhere can you find those data for apprenticeships. You can get data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency so you can publish information from there if you want, but there is no equivalent available for apprenticeships. That makes the whole business of upping the status of apprenticeships, and of technical education generally, much harder than it needs to be. So while I hold no brief for the exact drafting of the two Labour amendments, I am very much with the spirit of them.

On the amendment that followed from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, there is scope for upping the prestige of the Institute for Apprenticeships in this way. It gives it that much more visibility in public, that much more right to comment and that much more right to be heard. At a time when there is going to be a lot of change, a lot of difficult decisions taken and a lot of need for what is going on to be in the public eye so that things that are not quite right get caught early and commented on early rather than being relegated to the pages of a few specialist magazines, an increase in prestige, as suggested in this amendment, is an excellent idea.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I would like to ask a question that has just come to mind, mainly because I tabled a similar amendment in Committee. Amendment 17 is far better because it allows a flexibility that we did not have before, and having it in the Bill would help to raise the profile of careers education during Ofsted inspections, so I am happy to support it. No doubt the Minister will let us know what the framework already says, but I think the intent is fine.

I support 100% the point that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has been making about young people’s access to careers education. I have no problem with the way in which Amendments 8 and 9 were described, and in fact I have supported such amendments on previous occasions. However, it has struck me that although it is the right of the student to have access to the information, it is not the right of the person to go into the school. I know that sounds like a fine difference, but I wonder whether the Minister might reflect on that and give some assurance that, although a head would not have the right to deny the information and access to the school from someone who was giving that information, they would retain their right as head of the school to choose who talked to their students.

The quality of a speaker is very important. If I were a head teacher, I would not want someone who I knew was a bad speaker and did not engage the children successfully or in a professional manner to have access to my school, even if they might be talking about something whose content was very important. Indeed, one of the reasons for not doing that would be because they would put the information over badly. My years of teaching experience might be from a long time ago, but I remember some horror stories of outside visitors coming into schools who just did not have the skills to engage and talk to children and young people. I am not opposed at all to the amendments, but I do not think we have discussed the right of the head to retain control over who is speaking to his or her students. I would like that to be considered, without taking away from the intent of the amendments we have discussed.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak on Amendment 17, but I was on the Social Mobility Select Committee along with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the issue of careers guidance came up very strongly throughout our year of investigations and featured strongly in recommendation 2. Our report came out in April last year and the government response was published in July. I would like to read part of that response and then refer to a piece of evidence that we received from Sir Michael Wilshaw. The response, and I am cutting away a lot of it, says that,

“we will make the Gatsby benchmarks the focus of the statutory guidance that supports schools and colleges to implement the careers duty. This is in direct response to calls from schools to make it clear what government is expecting from them in terms of careers education”.

The tone of the response is pretty clear: the Government are saying, more or less, “Yes, we will do more”. It makes no sense, then, not to measure it, and I agree wholly with what the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said. I distinctly remember that Sir Michael Wilshaw made it very clear in his excellent evidence that Ofsted is already carrying out the assessment work on careers guidance, so not to include it in the marking scheme seems not to be using the fullness of the evidence and the data that are being gathered. Accordingly, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the whole of Amendment 17.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, as we embark on three days of Committee on the Technical and Further Education Bill, I must admit that I have been caught slightly unawares by the changed groupings that have been issued, further to those circulated yesterday. So I may have to edit as I go along on some of those to which I shall speak.

Be that as it may, the first group comprises Amendments 1, 4, 5 and 19—though not Amendment 17, as I had thought—and is mainly about the quality of outcomes. That concerns not only the input to but the outcomes of the apprenticeships that are a central part of the Bill. I say “outcomes” because outputs and outcomes are not necessarily the same thing, a point we want to stress with Amendment 1. Despite some progress in recent years, the situation for those young people who remain not in employment, education or training remains of some concern and we cannot be complacent about the job that still needs to be done to deal with many of the 16 to 24 year-olds in what is known as the NEET category.

As my noble friend Lord Hunt and I said at Second Reading, the focus for the Government’s target of 3 million apprenticeships must be high standards, not simply a concentration on meeting what was, after all, rather an arbitrary figure. Ministers must now choose either to honour their pledge to increase the quality of apprenticeship training or allow themselves to be consumed by the need to hit those targets. Last year the Public Accounts Committee emphasised the need for the Government to be unrelenting in their focus on the quality of apprenticeships and we believe that this is very much the key. While the temptation may exist to water down apprenticeship standards to hit the 3 million target, such short-termism would ultimately prove counterproductive. Unless there is an increase in quality, people will continue to look down their noses at apprenticeships and technical education when they should be viewed with the same respect as other forms of further education, such as university degrees.

Young people themselves are very keen to ensure that their apprenticeships are marked by quality. In last year’s Industry Apprentice Council survey, their main concern was quality because industry apprentices rightly see their apprenticeships as badges of honour—as, it is to be hoped, do their employers. It was satisfying to learn that nearly nine out of 10 level 2 and 3 apprentices were satisfied with their apprenticeships, but with such an increase planned it is essential that the satisfaction rate is maintained.

Given the new routes and standards for technical education and apprenticeship expansion, it is vital to track the outcomes for each group. The last two years’ apprenticeship evaluations showed small increases in the proportion that had completed their apprenticeships and were in work, but monitoring those trends is important. Related to that is monitoring progression and pay, which is not just important but very important. Apprentices have talked about a number of positive impacts in the workplace, but that does not always translate into pay or promotion benefits. Some 46% of apprentices received a pay rise after completing their apprenticeship and 50% had been promoted. Both figures represented an increase, and we certainly hope that trend will continue because it is important that young people who have worked hard to complete their apprenticeships are made to feel that it has been worth while. If they do not have that sense, perhaps because they feel that they have to some extent been exploited, demoralisation can set in, and that can dissuade the next cohort.

This issue was highlighted in last month’s report by the Low Pay Commission, which revealed that 18% of apprentices were being paid less than their legal entitlement. It is vital that these headlines do not act as a deterrent for non-graduate groups going into professions, and do not deter future young people from taking up apprenticeships. We believe that when the apprenticeship levy comes into force in April, tackling issues concerning exploitation should be a priority for the new Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

Preventing such misbehaviour will require a strong regulator with power to punish instances of non-compliance on minimum pay. I repeat: this is a legal entitlement and there should be no exceptions under any circumstances. I accept that the Government very much hold to that view and I am certain that the institute will be told that it is an important part of its operation. Without that, the potential for further long-term harm to the reputation of apprenticeships is considerable. Research undertaken last year by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants showed that apprenticeships face something of an image problem among many 16 to 18 year-olds. More than half the young people polled thought that apprenticeship routes would lead to their earning less over the course of their careers than if they studied at university. Apprenticeships are still seen as the poor relation when compared to traditional forms of higher education. If the Bill achieves anything by helping to reduce that perception, it will, in that sense alone, have been something of a success.

The duties that we place on the institute by the amendment are not onerous. Surely the Secretary of State would expect nothing less than an annual report from the institute on the quality of outcomes of completed apprenticeships. My question is: why not include that provision in the Bill? It follows, particularly while the Government are in pursuit of the 3 million target, that Parliament should have the opportunity to receive and debate the report. If the Government are serious about quality trumping quantity—I have done it again and I no longer feel comfortable using that word; I should have said “quality triumphing over quantity”—we should ensure maximum transparency in that regard.

Those sentiments dovetail with our Amendment 4 on standards and are a natural fit with new Section ZA11 on page 22 of the Bill, which sets out how the institute should publish standards in relation to the 15 occupations highlighted by my noble friend Lord Sainsbury in his seminal report. It is, of course, important to differentiate between quality and standards—terms that are often wrongly used interchangeably. It will be for the institute to set and maintain standards, while Ofsted and, in respect of maths and English, Ofqual, will have the task of ensuring that quality is widely established and then maintained. It is to be hoped that all the organisations charged with oversight will not overlap too much. I say “too much” because some overlap is preferable to gaps being allowed to develop through which who knows what might fall. To a significant extent, this is a question of resources and it will be the Government’s duty to ensure that staffing levels and resources of other kinds are not held at levels that restrict the effectiveness of any of the oversight bodies, particularly the institute.

Some surprise has been expressed by organisations in the sector at what Amendment 5 is intended to achieve. Let me be clear: first and foremost, it is concerned with achieving the best quality of teaching in further education institutions. No one would gainsay that, but before one can claim quality, one must have a means of measuring it. That is not to say that no measurement is currently undertaken, nor have there been suggestions that teaching quality in further education is poor. However, the detail we have is less than is available in higher education and, as noble Lords will know, when the teaching excellence framework is introduced in universities, the level of scrutiny will increase. We believe simply that, warts and all, the use of some sort of metrics would be advantageous, and Amendment 5 is not prescriptive as to what they might be. We simply call on the Secretary of State to bring forward a scheme to be operated by the Quality Assessment Committee of the Office for Students to ensure good-quality teaching in the further education sector. We also advocate a simple pass/fail outcome, with no suggestion of the cumbersome and ultimately unhelpful gold, silver and bronze scheme suggested for higher education. This would assist in achieving consistent levels of quality, with a broader aim of allowing the sector to build a relatively focused group of qualifications that carry the recognisability and acceptance of GCSEs and A-levels. People know what they are getting with those qualifications and the ultimate aim should be for something similar to develop with technical qualifications.

Finally, Amendment 19 would require the institute to publish apprenticeship assessment plans for all standards. Recent analysis of real-time experience shows that number-crunching on the government figures published last October suggested that there are no approved awarding organisations for over 40% of learner starts on the new apprentice standards. That is surely a matter for concern, although moving from a framework to standards involves moving down a road that will not, by any means, always be smooth. But apprentices on the standards will have to face end-point assessments for the first time and those assessments have to be carried out by organisations that have been cleared for the task by government or Skills Funding Agency-registered apprentice assessment organisations. Is the Minister confident that this will happen and that it will happen evenly across the country?

There is a degree of uncertainty about how this will evolve and what role the institute will have in relation to, say, Ofqual. Because of that it is important that we have transparency on who is being cleared and who is doing the clearing. As this process strengthens and multiplies, as it needs to do to meet all the government targets, the Government will have to pay close attention to the issue of capacity; otherwise, they will find themselves in a logjam of standards approvals as early as the middle of next year. That is the point at which any Government of any political persuasion, when they have the Opposition and other stakeholders bearing down on them, might be tempted to cut corners. Clearly, we do not want to see that but, like other stakeholders, we want to see what progress is taking place in real time. That is why we have tabled these amendments. I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak this early but I support these amendments. The desire across all parties in the Committee to achieve high standards in apprenticeships is unquestioned. We know that is what needs to be done. We know that is what we have failed to do in the past. I think the jury is still out on whether or not the Bill will achieve that.

We know from experience that new structures do not always achieve the ends that we want. There is a real danger in politics that because structures are the things we can control, that is where we put our emphasis. It is the one thing we can do. We do not teach, we do not mark, we do not assess; we can give funding and we can build structures. Sometimes there is a danger that we persuade ourselves that as long as in our mind and on paper the structure looks right, all will be well and things will be delivered. The education system is littered with gaps between the intentions of the structures and the reality of what is being delivered to children and young people. If you look at any part of our education and skills system, nowhere is that more the case than in skills and apprenticeships. We do not have a strong basis on which to build. We are not building on a record of high standards.

To be honest, you have to be as old as I am to remember the day when apprenticeships were generally thought of by the public as being high-quality training that did young boys and girls good in terms of the opportunities they had for life. Anyone a bit younger than me has an impression of an apprenticeship as being second best, not wanted—perhaps okay for someone else’s child but certainly not for mine.

Throughout the Bill the testing of whether we have done enough to ensure high standards is crucial to what happens in the future. The Government have a real quandary about how to deal with it—whether to go for the 3 million target or for standards. I feel certain that at some point along the line those two really good ambitions—nothing wrong with either of them—will come into conflict with each other. It is important as we go through the Bill that we put in some measures to make sure we are monitoring the standards and outputs of these new structures that we are putting into place.

Amendments 1 and 4 do that. Why would we not want to know what is happening to people who have taken the initial apprenticeship route? Why would we not want to know what employers think of people they might recruit? Why would we not want to know what the students themselves thought of their apprenticeships? I do not doubt for a moment that the Government have plans for how to get that feedback. Indeed, I know that to be the case because they are not silly; of course they will want feedback.

My noble friend on the Front Bench made a crucial comment: this is as much about building trust with the public and the people involved in apprenticeships, both employers and users, as it is about anything else. It is not enough for the Government to collect the statistics and then amend structures or legislation on the back of them. This is not a highly charged Bill politically and there is a great deal of good will across both Houses of Parliament to make sure it succeeds. Our joint endeavour is to build confidence and trust among teachers, parents, employers and learners. Even if the Minister wants to amend it in some way, because we could have lots of arguments about the detail of the information to be collected, this is a reasonable amendment. Its aim and thrust would stand us in good stead in the Bill we are now considering and I support it.

--- Later in debate ---

It is really important that we bear in mind that our schools are hugely stretched and that at 16 to 19, and indeed at other ages, they are clearly underresourced. This is something that officials and Ministers will agree is not going to change in a hurry. Therefore, before we pass anything like this into law, we really need to think about what needs to be made very clear and where we want schools and colleges to place their attention, and not create artificial barriers to following through on the intent of making sure that every young person gets the advice they need, by diverting more attention and resource into meeting formal requirements, which, because they are in primary legislation, we will not get rid of for at least a decade, if ever.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 11, to which I have added my name. I have some concerns about Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I will mention. I do not want to go over the arguments again except to add weight of numbers to the strength of the arguments we have heard from other Members today. I do not disagree with anything that has been said, I just want to make two or three points which perhaps have not been made or have not been made frequently enough. I hope I will not speak for long.

First, I hope the Minister will be really clear about when this careers strategy is about to appear. We have been promised it for a very long time and I think I saw something by his colleague who leads in the department for this piece of legislation about it coming later in the year. Given that it is about two years since a careers strategy was promised, I am not sure why a Bill such as this, which will fail unless there is good-quality careers education, is coming so far in advance of the careers education strategy. They should go hand in hand. We would not be having this debate if we had the careers education strategy. I think a lot of these amendments have been tabled in sheer frustration. We almost panic because we know it is such a weak area of our system and we are about to pass the Bill with no effective careers education system. We need to know when the strategy will arrive and we need to understand why it has been delayed. If there is a problem, we need to know about it. I worry about that.

Secondly, I agree with the information bit but that in itself is not careers education. There are two parts to this. We need the information but then we need to make the decision. As a young person—or even an older person—just having information is not sufficient. The skill of making the right decision is far more complicated. You can let as many people into the school to give information about as wide a range of jobs as you can, but when they leave at the end of the day, it is the teacher who is there with the young person when the decision is made. That is a very important other part of this situation. Information by itself will not necessarily change the young person’s mind—it might but it might not.

There are three big influences on the child in making the decision: their parents, their friends and their teachers. The strategy must encompass and reflect that. We cannot squeeze teachers out of careers education. We can bring people with a wide range of knowledge and experience into the classroom, but teachers will have an important impact on the decisions reached because they are the pastoral carers and they spend an awful lot of time with young people. We have been critical of teachers, and rightly so, but we need a careers strategy that supports them in the job they are being asked to do. We do not want to give them the impression that we want them out of this business. They have an important role to play in supporting young people to make the right, effective and appropriate decision.

Thirdly, we are moaning about schools—I do not disagree with a word my noble friend said; he made this point brilliantly—but the incentives the Government have put into the system are causing the problems. What do we do? We moan at the teachers. We are complaining about the schools responding in an entirely predictable and understandable way to the incentives that we have put into the system—including me in my time. The answer to that is to change the incentives, but we want to leave the incentives in place and change the behaviour. That will not work. Where is the discussion about changing the incentives because that is the surest way of changing behaviour? I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that the UTCs are a force for good. They had a difficult birth and baptism but they are still a major player in the field. In a way, they encapsulate the problems of the incentives in the system. Their very existence is threatened because we have the wrong incentives, and I say that collectively of politics and Parliament. The case he has made about having access to young people is strong, but other things need to be done as well.

My only concern about Amendment 61 is that it is too easy to say, “Leave it to Ofsted. It cannot be a good school unless it has good careers education provision”. We always say that, and then every 10 years we have to prune what we ask Ofsted to inspect. We pile so much on to Ofsted. With every new initiative that is introduced we say, “Let’s get Ofsted to inspect it”. That is how the relationship between schools and Ofsted breaks down; the inspectors are always seen as the bearer of the big stick. I want to turn the amendment the other way around. We are saying that if a school does not have good careers education, it will go into “requires improvement” or “special measures” because those are the only two categories left. There are implications in that for a college that we ought to be aware of if Ofsted is to be used as the lever in this. It is a bit mean, or premature, to put a college into the “requires improvement” or “special measures” category because it has not got right a plank of policy that we have not got right either. It behoves us to get our bit right before we say to any educational provider, “If you don’t get this right”—despite the fact that we have not—“you will go into ‘requires improvement’ or ‘special measures’ and the consequences will be big”.

I say to the Minister that we would not be having this conversation if we had more information about the Government’s plans for the careers strategy. It is a big and dangerous hole at the moment and therefore I strongly support the amendments, with the caveat about Amendment 61.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the incentive I would like to see is schools being allowed to take credit for the performance of the children they let go into technical education. If a child might get only Ds in history and English but they are good for an A* in BTEC business, and the school can get credit for that, the school’s interests will align with the child. It would also be a good thing for the performance tables. We have superb data because it is easy enough to collect them, but why should a school be penalised for a kid who arrives in the year before GCSEs, having had a dreadful education beforehand? That is not fair; nor is it fair that a school which has really looked after a child and brought them on to the point where they have the get up and go to attend a UTC then gets no credit for it. If a school feels that the best interests of the child will align with the way it is going to appear in the tables, there is a real hope for making progress in this area. We should be doing this anyway to ensure equity between schools, so I hope that this is a direction we might consider going in.

I like the amendment about a technical version of UCAS, which is immensely helpful to schools. Everything is in one place and it would all look and feel the same. You know how it works and what is required and it becomes easy to provide support and advice for the children using it.

Apprenticeships are a great challenge. Companies have a horrible habit of not admitting they have apprenticeship places until about two weeks before they want people to apply. They suddenly appear, enough people apply, and they disappear again. This is not the way in which a school can work or how young people should be asked to work. We have to discipline companies to make it clear in good time that they are open to apprenticeships so that people who are interested can see what is on offer year round and put their names down. I know that it will never be a regular cycle such as UCAS, but we need to discipline the system so that it works in the interests of children, and something like UCAS would help. A UCAS system would also provide a place to find all the information. If someone is looking for an apprenticeship they might not cotton on to who the education provider is, who to go to, which Ofsted report applies, where to look to find the outcomes, and other data that will tell them whether a particular apprenticeship is worth while. Something like UCAS would draw all that together. I would not actually use UCAS. It is a horrible institution that believes in making as much money as possible from the students passing through its system and it is run in the interests of universities rather than kids. But as a concept it is great, and we really ought to see whether we can do something along those lines.

It is high time that Amendment 11 was brought in. We all know how badly schools can behave. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, says that it is a matter of incentives as well. Let us have a structure which provides the stick and the carrot—this is the stick. Let us have a system where schools know that they are expected to do things. I presume that access means physical access. It cannot just be, “Well, we’ll pass your emails on”. Clearly the access will be moderated by the school and the teacher will sit down with the kid afterwards and tell them where they need to be really careful about such and such. However, at least it is progress in the right direction.

I hope that we might look at expanding subsection (3). There are some really important intermediary organisations which perform a function in this area. To name just one—Women in Construction. It performs a specialist job and looks after a particular subset of pupils, and it is doing that in a co-ordinated way, which makes it much better than your average local FE college, let alone a building company that happens to have some apprentices. Giving access to some of these collaborative organisations is a very useful supplement to the direct education and apprenticeship providers.

Turning to the carrot element again, there are other ways of doing this, and that is what my Amendment 34A seeks to achieve. It would allow money to flow to schools and organisations and would open up in a positive way the pipeline between what is going on in the creation of technical opportunity and the kids in schools.

There is a lot beyond what appears in Amendment 1l and schools are doing much that is positive. They invite people in to talk, and make arrangements for internships and work experience placements for their children. A lot of organisations are helping, but it is an immense burden on a school at a time when we are facing something like an 8% cash reduction for schools over the next three years. It is a hell of a thing to ask a school to add to its functions without in any way adding to its budget.