King’s Speech

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I too shall underline the role of further education. I declare an interest as a past chair and current fellow of the Working Men’s College and a former chair of the Department for Education stakeholders’ group for the education of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma people. May I also say, after my new noble friend Lady Smith of Malvern’s inspiring maiden speech, how good it is to see her in Parliament again, and in one of her many areas of expertise: education?

The nation has voted for change. Adult and further education are essential to change. Closing the substantial gap in our level and spread of skills would go far to achieve the improvement in productivity that we need to fund services, security and well-being. Of course we need investment in technology itself but we need, crucially, investment in people. It is no coincidence that our competitors have better productivity, together with higher status and capacity for technical education. I welcome the comprehensive strategy for post-16 education in the Labour Party manifesto, referred to in the gracious Speech.

The British neglect of technical education is long-standing. Changing it requires a new mindset: parity of esteem in engineering, for instance, valuing design and all the skills which require problem-solving, collaboration and multidisciplinary approaches far more highly, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, noted. We were good at this when our great 18th and 19th-century inventors flourished—though, interestingly, few of them had an elite education—and we remain good at high-level scientific education, invention and discovery. But where technical education kept pace with scholarship on the mainland of Europe, here it lagged, perhaps outgunned by the prestige of classical public school education and ideas about the needs of governing an empire.

In further education, so we have inherited confusion, a welter of qualifications and a failing apprenticeship system. The new comprehensive approach should rely on destination data to monitor that it is getting people into the jobs we need for a modern, high-skill economy.

The personal satisfaction of worthwhile work, cited by our Prime Minister, is also a force for social cohesion. When I was chair of the Working Men’s College, the sense of achievement among students who were retraining, repairing the gaps in their secondary education, or bringing the motivation which moved them to emigrate to the United Kingdom to inspire qualifying for work, brought home how precious personal fulfilment is. Women who had never finished school were able to provide for their families; young men whose school education had left them apathetic and unconfident found their feet in society.

But education think tanks have estimated that a missing third never get on to the skills ladder. Further education can return them to the path to worthwhile work. For that, what goes on in secondary schools is crucial; early careers guidance for all, steering towards examination subjects, the essential ensuring of basic literacy and numeracy to gain entrance to the next stage, bringing back the children who have dropped out—all these are passports to personal fulfilment and economic contribution for the missing third. Can my noble friend assure me that the path to further education will start in schools?

Finally, a shameful reason for dropout is the alienation which comes from discrimination and prejudice. The proportions of some black and minority-ethnic groups who enter and complete further education are far below the numbers of their populations. This is starkly obvious for Gypsy, Traveller and Roma people and I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for her support for efforts to tackle their disadvantage. I have been working with the Association of Colleges on a campaign to widen access to all black and minority-ethnic people. Since April, 40 colleges have pledged action, which we shall celebrate in Parliament on 9 September. Will my noble friend join with me in congratulating those colleges and the association on a project which will improve lives and help to power our economy?