Education: Recovery Package and Catch-up Programme

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the catch-up funding and the pupil premium funding are aimed at all disadvantaged children regardless of their racial or regional presence in the UK. On the overall funding package, an extra £2.6 billion last year and £2.2 billion this year went into the core schools budget. If the noble Lord wishes to give me the names of the institutions concerned which are struggling, we can direct them to the plethora of resources available from the department to ensure that schools can get the best deal available for their money, such as the free teacher vacancy service and the risk protection arrangement, which many schools are now using as their insurance policy.

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

My Lords, we know that all adolescents across the UK, regardless of their ethnicity, are better equipped for success and flourishing later in life when well educated, yet, prior to the pandemic, black Caribbean and white/black Caribbean students numbered double the national average for school exclusions. Recent UCAS research revealed that a third of students in schools and half of students in colleges were not told about apprenticeships. What steps are the Government taking to address disproportionate school exclusions as well as promote apprenticeships as an alternative pathway for students from ethnic minorities?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the diversity champions network is aimed specifically at making sure that black and minority-ethnic young people are aware of apprenticeship opportunities. The Government accepted the recommendations of the Timpson review in relation to exclusions and we are looking to enact them. On the temporary exclusion rate, there is some good news in that the rate for black Caribbean students has slightly decreased.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I speak today to add my support for this Bill and to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her maiden speech. The United Kingdom stands at a reset moment. It has delivered on the vote for Brexit, is forging a new trading relationship with our European allies and is charting a course towards global Britain. While the UK was among the hardest hit by Covid-19, it is now finding a way out of the global pandemic, emerging as a world leader in the design, development and distribution of effective vaccines. But if we are to make the most of this reset moment, we will need to unlock the talent, prosperity and potential of our regions, communities and people. In order to do this, there needs to be a real focus on developing the skills required not only for a 21st-century skills revolution but to create the economic powerhouse that will drive the United Kingdom forward. We will need every element of British talent.

In many ways, the UK is well positioned to do just this. We are one of the most prosperous countries in the world, with an open and vibrant economy. Our national institutions are robust and our people are among the most educated in the world. But there are also clear challenges. While levels of prosperity in the UK remain much higher than other nations and increased further during the first half of the 2010s, in more recent years this prosperity has been stagnating. One of the key drivers of this stagnation has been declining enterprise conditions, including skills shortages and barriers to doing business. England, for example, has three times more low-skilled people among those aged 16 to 19 than the best-performing countries such as Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands. In many ways, this was less visible while we had unrestricted immigration. But now that we can feel the impact of more controlled migration, we can see the need to really focus on upskilling our own people. This is a good thing, and one that we should hugely welcome.

So why is this Bill so welcome, and why has our existing approach to skills development simply been insufficient? For the past 20 years, the UK poverty rate has shimmied at around 20% of the population. In the Labour years, just about every income transfer that could be thrown at this challenge was thrown, and the level still shimmied at or around 20%. In the coalition days, just about every employment intervention was thrown at this challenge, and the level still shimmied at or around 20%. If we have learnt anything in the past 20 years, it is that we cannot solve poverty through income transfer alone, or through supporting people into low-paid work alone.

The poverty data shows that if you are on the national living wage, it takes all adults in a household working full-time to lift a family out of poverty. Even then, 10% of such households are still in poverty. These families cannot work any more hours. They need to increase the value of each hour they work. To do this requires increased skills.

The way to ensure that families who are doing everything right are out of poverty is to invest in their skill level and enable them to be able to earn more for each hour they work. This Bill is therefore hugely important as part of an anti-poverty strategy, but to actually level up requires us to develop those with the lowest levels of skills at a faster rate even than those who are already skilled. This will require opportunity, so there is one area where I would specifically like to probe a little on this matter.

The current welfare system is not really designed as a support mechanism for those on low incomes to upskill. It is designed as an anti-poverty tool and to support people as they transition into work and up their hours. So I ask my noble friend the Minister: what changes are the Government considering to universal credit conditionality to support their excellent approach to skills development?

But this Bill is important not only as an anti-poverty tool; it is also hugely important for employers. Many businesses report a deterioration of local conditions for enterprise, including skills shortages and barriers to doing business. Assessments of adult skills generally point to skills mismatches and many employers report that a lack of skilled workers is a major and increasing bottleneck for their operations, affecting their capacity to innovate. On average, 26% of vacancies are generated by skills shortages within businesses. This is as high as 36% in, say, the south-east. Across a range of sectors, there is a growing employer demand for the skills that higher technical education provides.

The White Paper highlights the need for technicians, engineers and health and social care professionals to meet the many vital challenges we face as a society. Investing in these skills at both a local and a national level is critical to improving our productivity and international competitiveness. Our skills system has been very efficient at producing graduates but has been less able to help people get the quality technical skills that employers want. A stat that we have heard quoted today is that 4% of young people achieve a qualification at higher technical level by the age of 25, compared with the 33% who get a degree or above. Just imagine if we could have a society where 33% achieve higher technical level qualifications as well as 33% getting a degree.

I am delighted to be supporting a Bill that will enable people to invest in their ability to earn more for each hour they work, that will enable employers to develop their businesses using the incredible talents of the British people and that will enable us to compete on the world stage at this critical moment of transition for us as a nation.

Schools: Disadvantaged Pupils

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge [V]]

My Lords, just over 200,000 16 year-olds are educated through the further education sector. The grant-funded institutions and the Education and Training Foundation have supported colleges, which have done a superb job in moving their provision to remote education. There is of course a 16-to-19 bursary for young people who need that support. I assure noble Lords that we recognise that further support is needed for the further education sector and that it is not viewed by this Government as the poor relation of the higher education sector.

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

According to the Times, some studies have suggested that as much as two-thirds of the attainment gap between richer and poorer children at the age of 14 can be attributed to the effect of summer holidays. It is therefore clearly of paramount importance that we get our children and teenagers back into school as soon as possible. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that, now that the two-metre rule has been reduced, curtailing the summer holidays and splitting the school day in two to ensure that all students are able to return to classes daily would be important measures to address this crisis, as the initial lockdown was to protect our most vulnerable?

[Baroness Berridge [V]]

My Lords, the Government have been clear that we do not expect schools to be open throughout the summer holidays. Many teachers have been teaching since the February half-term. However, this is the third year running of our usual holiday activity clubs, which have funding of £9 million. We have made it clear to schools that the £650 million that will be allocated across state-funded schools can be used by them for interventions to help their students catch up. We have launched a Teach First toolkit to enable them to run summer provision if they choose to spend some of those resources in that way.