Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Wilcox of Newport Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who has made such a valuable contribution throughout this Committee. The Government’s skills-related goals, as embodied in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and the Bill, are rightly ambitious and will be correspondingly expensive to deliver. The aims of a skills strategy are necessarily long-term, and achieving them will depend on a complex web of specific policies and organisations, as has been clear from the debates we have had in Committee. Ensuring that adequate funding is in place to support all the activities involved across schools, FE colleges, universities, independent training providers, employers, local authorities, combined authorities and, of course, learners themselves, and to ensure a fair balance between them all, will be an immense challenge for government.

Amendment 90B in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, proposes commissioning a panel of experts to review and make recommendations on long-term funding for skills and post-16 education, building, of course, on the foundations set by the Augar review as well as the Skills for Jobs White Paper. This can be only helpful, if not essential, input for the Government, along with the various consultations they are planning, in addressing this challenge and getting the answers right. I too look forward to the Minister’s response and to hearing how the Government plan to tackle the important need for a joined-up, long-term, fully funded skills and training strategy.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, we welcome this probing amendment, introduced by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and supported by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and my noble friend Lady Morris. It is an opportunity to discuss the Government’s plans to introduce a longer-term funding settlement for further education, because the White Paper recognised that further education funding has been wholly insufficient.

Alongside increased funding, there is a need for, as alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, simpler, longer-term funding settlements that allow colleges to deliver on long-term strategic priorities. Their funding compares extremely unfavourably with university and school funding. Annual public funding per university student averaged £6,600, compared with £1,050 for adults in further education. Recent research from IPPR has found that if further education funding had kept up with demographic pressures and inflation over the last decade, we would be investing an extra £2.1 billion per year in adult skills and £2.7 billion per year in 16 to 19 further education. The result of this underfunding is that colleges have had to narrow their curriculum and reduce the broader support they offer to students—including careers advice and mental health services—and 16 to 19 funding for catch-up has also been woefully insufficient.

To deliver on the skills agenda, it is imperative that the Bill is backed up by long-term, multiyear, simplified funding. It will require redressing the long-standing underinvestment of the college sector in the upcoming comprehensive spending review with serious long-term funding—otherwise it will simply not be deliverable. But this must not come at the expense of HE funding. We want FE and HE to collaborate rather than compete for resources, because destabilising university funding, cutting courses or capping numbers will deny students the brilliant education and experience that our world-class institutions in the UK have to offer. Denying young people opportunities must not be the legacy of this Government’s approach.

Ensuring parity of esteem between different post-16 routes is enormously important, but it is best achieved by investing in FE and not by taking funds away from HE and levelling down. Having an ability to access further and higher education, with investment that matches that ambition, is the only way that the country can meet its skill needs and provide pathways into good careers today, as well as jobs for the future.

[Baroness Penn (Con) [V]]

I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for tabling his amendment. Based on the substance of the debate we just had, I am not sure that there is much disagreement between the Government and noble Lords.

The Government are committed to transforming further education so that everyone can access high-value provision relevant to labour market needs and job opportunities. As noble Lords noted, we published the Skills for Jobs White Paper in January, setting out the future policy direction in this area.

Over the past two years, we have invested significantly in post-16 education. In the 2019 spending round, we increased 16 to 19 year-old further education funding by £400 million, followed by a further £291 million at the spending review 2020, so the direction of travel for policy has been matched by the direction of travel for funding.

In addition, we are investing £325 million of the £2.5 billion national skills fund this year to support adult skills and retraining. We are continuing our investment in the £1.3 billion adult education budget and the £2.5 billion apprenticeships budget. We are also continuing our £1.5 billion multiyear capital investment in the FE capital transformation fund. This funding is helping to deliver on the commitments made in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and the lifetime skills guarantee. Noble Lords have rightly made the point about longer-term funding. However, funding beyond 2021-22 will be considered as part of the wider spending review later this year.

In addition, we have launched an extensive government consultation on reforms to the further education funding and accountability system to address many of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox. This consultation is a first step towards a funding and accountability system that will maximise the potential of further education and help us to build back better. We want to use the consultation to start a dialogue with the sector, employers and other interested parties on how government funding can be administered more simply and effectively so that colleges and other providers can focus on supporting learners to develop the skills they need.

Similarly, in the Interim Conclusion of the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, we committed to consulting on further reforms to higher education, including on future funding. We continue to consider the recommendations made in Sir Philip Augar’s report, supported by an independent panel, and will conclude that review in due course.

Furthermore, to address the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, we want all children and young people, no matter their background or special educational needs or disabilities, to reach their full potential and receive the right support. That is why we are allocating significant increases in high-needs funding—an additional £780 million in 2020-21 compared with 2019-20 funding levels, and a further £730 million in 2021-22, bringing the total support for young people with the most complex needs to over £8 billion.

In addition, the national funding formula for 16 to 19 year-olds includes extra funding for disadvantaged students. This is provided to institutions specifically for students with low prior attainment or who live in the most disadvantaged areas. Last year, the Government allocated more than £530 million in disadvantage funding to enable colleges, schools and other providers to recruit, support and retain disadvantaged 16 to 19 year-olds and to support students with special educational needs and disabilities. We also apply disadvantage uplift through the element of the adult education budget distributed by the Education and Skills Funding Agency to provide increased funding for learners living in deprived areas. The adult education budget also provides funds to providers to help adults overcome barriers to learning. This includes learner support for those with financial hardship and learning support to meet the additional needs of learners with learning difficulties.

As outlined in the Skills for Jobs White Paper, we will ensure that those with special educational needs and disabilities continue to gain direct work-related skills alongside maths and English to increase their employability. The noble Lord will know that the cross-government SEND review is identifying the reforms needed to improve support for children and young people with SEND, including those in post-16 provision, by working with system experts to design a SEND system fit for the future drawing on the best evidence available.

The breadth of measures already in train—some noble Lords may say that is a long list—contain many elements of a concerted strategy that is moving in a consistent direction on the back of a number of reports and reviews that have sought to look at this on a long-term basis, whether we go back to the Sainsbury review or the more recent Augar review. While I completely agree with the need to take a long-term and strategic approach to this issue, I am not sure that a further review supported by an independent panel at this time is the right way to knit this all together rather than the progress that we are making on delivering the important outcomes of a number of those reviews already undertaken. I therefore hope that the right reverend Prelate is able to withdraw his amendment.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)]

My apologies to the noble Baroness, Lady Janke: my list has an “L” in front of her name. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Janke.

We have heard that this amendment would provide for individual skills wallets, which may be used by a person to pay for education and training courses throughout their lifetime. The Government would make a payment of £4,000 when an individual turned 25, then two further payments of £3,000 when an individual turned 40 and 55. This amendment, as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Addington—a highly competent substitute for the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal—is based on a commitment in the 2019 Liberal Democrat manifesto. It is offered up as an alternative to the government plans; I presume it has been costed up.

Labour’s alternative is a job promise which would guarantee training, education, or employment opportunities for young people who have been out of work, education or training for six months. Today, young people are facing soaring unemployment and the toughest jobs market for a generation. The number of FE students has declined by a quarter since 2015, with the number of younger and poorer students declining fastest. Since 2015, the number of learners from the most deprived backgrounds has declined by nearly a third, climbing to almost 40% among learners under the age of 19. Yet young people in desperate need of new opportunities have been overlooked by this Government, whose 16 to 19 funding has been woefully insufficient.

The Welsh Labour Government were successfully elected in May on a manifesto that included a young person’s guarantee of training or work. As the Economy Minister told the Senedd on 29 June,

“we need to give young people hope for the future and to ensure that they are not left behind. It is more important than ever that we support young people to gain the skills and experiences that they will need to succeed, whether that’s in employment, education or starting their own business.”

I would humbly advise the UK Government that they could use this excellent strategy across England.