Special Needs Schools

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I too strongly welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on her eloquent speech. I will focus on the general situation facing specialist colleges in a rather broader sense—including but not confined to those that we think of as special needs—which cater to small, specialist groups of students of various different kinds. I want to urge the Minister to ensure that this population and this type of institution receive more targeted and coherent attention and support at national level than has been the case.

Of course, much of this debate will focus on the large and important group of children and young people with learning difficulties for whom the mainstream curriculum is unsuitable or who struggle to cope with formal settings. We know that there is a real crisis here, especially in catering to those with complex multiple needs.

However, there is also an important and diverse group of students for whom the issue is not that they struggle and will probably always struggle with the mainstream curriculum or the classroom environment, but rather that they belong to a rather small group with special, distinctive requirements, which is widely spread across the country, so in any given area there will be only a few of them. This means that we need specialist institutions with wide and national catchment areas.

We actually do quite well at school level, albeit largely because of a legacy of charitable and privately established institutions. Central government has then done a pretty good job of recognising and incorporating these into the national schools system. I grew up near one of the most famous, the Mary Hare School for the deaf, which sends pupils on to a range of extremely demanding academic courses at university level. We have music schools, such as the Menuhin School and Chetham’s School, where more than 90% of students get financial assistance, including through the DfE’s music and dance scheme.

Where things are not going so well is at college level. Education does not end with school—less and less so. We need to recognise areas of specialisation that cannot be offered in each and every locality or even region, but which are none the less vital. We cannot just rely here on our inheritance of a few well-established institutions, such as the Royal National College for the Blind or, indeed, the wonderful sounding college that the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, helped to establish. We need to think more coherently and creatively about what sort of specialist colleges we need for this older age group and how they should be funded and run.

Noble Lords may know the sad story of the specialist national colleges. This was actually a very good idea, trying to create national institutions with specific areas of expertise. But, although lots of money was put into capital, there was no coherent thinking about how they would recruit and be funded. I remember visiting one early on and being horrified that it was expected to operate, recruit and fund itself as though it was just another local FE college with a particular, small catchment area. Not surprisingly, most of the national colleges have now closed.

We do not make clear provision for scarce and valued crafts and trades with small workforces. Training in some, such as musical instrument making or clockmaking, have clung on by being turned into fully fledged residential honours degrees in a couple of institutions, but the lack of national planning is evident. College-based courses have closed. In other countries, we would have apprenticeships, with specialist colleges providing the off-the-job training, and there is no mechanism somehow, in our central government, for thinking about and providing these.

Another group which suffers from being small and low-profile is our rural population. Agricultural and land-based colleges, which have to offer residential accommodation, are often struggling. There was supposed to be a proper review of these colleges a few years back. If it happened, it certainly never saw the light of day outside DfE. Specialist adult colleges survive in London; outside, there is just Northern clinging on by its fingertips. We have a construction skills crisis and only one of our specialist construction colleges is left standing. All this has relevance because it points up that, at college level, there is no real mechanism for thinking about specialist groups, of which one of the most important is young people with learning difficulties and physical challenges. But they are not the only ones and their colleges are not catered for, because we have no proper national mechanism for thinking about such specialist provision. I urge the Minister to ensure that, within her department, more focused attention is paid to looking at what national provision is needed for post-school college opportunities.

I also want to raise a very specific issue, because I think it speaks to the current absence of dedicated attention. Many specialised colleges are not standard public sector institutions, and many rightly offer qualifications ranging right through to levels 4, 5 and 6, which is higher education. At present, there seems to be real confusion over how the new VAT requirements for private school fees will apply to higher-level qualifications in institutions that also offer lower-level ones. This issue has been raised with me and other noble Lords, with respect to the dance and drama awards, but the lack of clarity speaks to this general point I am trying to make.

Our higher education sector also has a multiplicity of institutions and, as far as I know, there has been no discussion of introducing VAT on fees in higher education, which would, of course, feed through to student loans. My sense is that the lack of clarity on what is happening in specialist institutions—which would have a knock-on effect—comes from the fact that nobody is in a position to demand and get clear guidance. Can the Minister ensure that the Government clarify this particular challenge?

I also have a much more ambitious request. For what we normally think of as the special needs population, but also for the other small, spread-out, critical, specialist and often needy groups, we need to think far more coherently about specialist college provision across the country as a whole.

Education Sector: Equality of Opportunity

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an important point about early identification of children with special educational needs or some form of disability—he is absolutely right. In the early stages, that needs well-qualified teachers, with the support of inclusive practice and expertise developed throughout the school, to recognise that. This Government are determined to improve that provision in mainstream schools.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, earlier this year, schoolteachers got a fully funded 5.5% pay increase, but no such award was made to college staff, even though most pupil-premium students in the 16-plus age group are in colleges. How do the Government propose to address the impact of this unequal treatment on colleges, including the haemorrhaging of skilled staff?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness will understand that in FE there is no pay review body in the same way as in schools. The Government were pleased to be able to fund the 5.5% pay increase for schoolteachers. The noble Baroness is right that, although we recognise the enormous contribution of FE staff, we were not able to match the pay for FE teachers on that occasion. This week, we have for the first time extended the retention incentive to teachers in the first years of their careers in FE. Applications for that opened on Monday, and lots of FE teachers have already applied for that. In our discussions on the spending review, we are thinking about and arguing hard for the support that further education needs and deserves, as the noble Baroness rightly said.

Higher Education Funding

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on securing this debate and declare an interest as a professor at King’s College London, a trustee of the Council for the Defence of British Universities and a member of the Augar review of post-18 education and funding in England.

We are all very aware of the declining value of student fees, but I also emphasise to noble Lords the precipitous decline in direct government top-up funding for high-cost subjects. A university gets little more for a home student in chemistry or bioengineering than for one studying business or law, with horribly distortionary effects. We highlighted this in the Augar review with, I have to say, minimal effect. We have some special problems in this country, but this is a global issue, and that is what I shall say a little about now.

Countries everywhere have expanded student numbers, often at speed. They recognise citizens’ aspirations and the importance of graduate skills, but the background is sluggish growth. University is still a route to most of the best jobs, but the average return for a degree inevitably falls and government budgets are under increasing strain. The simplest response to this is always to reduce per-student funding. At the moment, England has higher levels of support per home student than any other part of these islands. Scotland has student number controls and has recently reduced the number of places it funds, and still spends markedly less per student than England. Northern Ireland has lower fees and lower funding. The Republic of Ireland is committed to demand-led enrolment without student fees, although it levies a so-called contribution. Its enrolments have risen, but its spending per student has gone down substantially. The European University Association confirms that this is the modal pattern: enrolment up, total government spending often up, spending per student down. In the USA many states are cutting funding for their public systems, and if you talk to Australian or Canadian vice-chancellors it feels like you are still at home. The challenges, the worries, the difficulties and the solutions that are not quite as attractive as they seemed are all the same.

So, with no easy answers on finance to be borrowed from elsewhere in the world, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that we really need to turn our thinking around a bit. We should start to think not just about how to top up funding but about what it is that we want to fund, and therefore how much and how we want to fund the different parts. What does it take to deliver what we recognise as high quality in engineering or law? When we look across the world at everybody cutting funding, cutting per-student funding, increasing class sizes, abolishing most personalised feedback in many of our institutions, what does this do? What happens? What do our students learn? How far are we charging students and taxpayers for what economists call “signalling”—which in this case is having letters after your name—rather than a transformative experience?

I do not think we know nearly enough about this and I do not think we know nearly enough about what makes different institutions more or less efficient in how they use their funding. With the current model running into the sand, not just in England but everywhere, we should be thinking much harder about what we want university education to be and what universities should be doing in a mass system where we want to respond to the desires and aspirations of the entire citizenry, and then we should think about what the different components cost and how we might best pay for them.

King’s Speech

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the Ministers on their appointments. I agree strongly with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, in her maiden speech, that skills are central to economic growth. Skills are also central to opportunity, not just for young people but, critically, for adults. People should find it easy throughout their lives to learn and to update their skills. We are pretty good already at identifying skill needs and shortages, but if we do not improve opportunities and access then nothing good will happen to supply.

I emphasise to the Minister and the House the enormous importance of further education colleges, which did not figure in the King’s Speech—although I grant that he had only so much time. Their funding has suffered very badly recently, falling further and further behind schools on a per-head basis. This means that they are increasingly unable to provide the training we need for core shortage areas such as engineering and construction—we cannot build without builders. More generally, we are failing to realise colleges’ potential as a core part of any tertiary and higher education system geared to growth and opportunity.

North America has a lot to teach us here. In the United States, community colleges make part-time advanced adult study available across the country. Meanwhile in the UK—not just England—this has gone into disastrous decline, with ongoing falls in college-based higher education courses. In Canada, colleges supply an increasing amount of short, specific and high-level vocational training, often to recent graduates. Here, bizarrely, our higher education funding policy intentionally prevented this for decades.

Arrangements for the lifelong learning entitlement, passed into English law last year with, happily, cross-party support—I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for her valiant work in this House, which was not at all confined to this area—give us an opportunity to build far more flexibility and adult participation into our skills system and get rid of our crazy barriers to upskilling. It was also always intended to bring colleges and universities much closer together, in something approaching a single system. When does the Department for Education expect to reschedule and restart its consultative roadshows with the sector on the LLE? Will the Government ensure that colleges and college-based courses are fully incorporated into their planning and development?

I recommend to the Minister’s attention the Open University’s current collaboration with colleges in education cold spots. She will be aware that the creation of the Open University was one of the finest achievements—perhaps the finest—of the first Wilson Government, but she may not be aware that its original remit covered technical and refresher courses, not just degrees. If this country is serious about skills, it must look seriously beyond full degrees and not just pay lip service to a more nuanced system.

Finally, the Government have very good reason to reform the apprenticeship levy. Anyone involved with apprenticeship policy knows that the current funding system has had major unintended and undesirable consequences. Opportunities for young people have plummeted, especially in more deprived areas. Many young people who would like an apprenticeship cannot obtain one. We have been doing some research at King’s—I declare an interest as a member of its academic staff—on the way in which lower-achieving young people transition into the workplace. We are talking not about the bottom 20%, but about the 50% or 60% who do not go straight into university. We find that, for every one who gets an apprenticeship, three have tried very hard and failed to find one. The Government’s own figures show that only 20% of apprenticeship starts are in skill-shortage occupations.

I hope that the Minister can reassure the House that the review will be thorough and incorporate the needs of SMEs, young people and the entire country, and not just the desire of levy-paying employers for more ways to spend their levy.

Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, most sincerely for securing this debate and for his wonderful speech. I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, on his inspiring maiden speech, and I look forward to hearing the maiden speech from the noble Lord, Lord Elliott. I declare an interest as a professor at King’s College London who teaches students and, one hopes, develops their skills. I have been actively engaged for many years in skills policy, including as a government adviser.

At one level, I am delighted at the great interest in this debate on all sides of the House. But, alas, as the old saying goes, “Fine words butter no parsnips”. If we do not get precise commitments on non-university skills spending and on individual access to skills training in forthcoming party manifestos, in my opinion we will continue to deliver inadequate and inefficient skills policies that fail repeatedly and systematically to solve our main skills problems. This is not because politicians and advisers, let alone Peers, are insincere—it is because not just underfunding but repeated short-term upheavals and repeated unpredictable cuts and changes in skills provision are currently hard-wired into our system.

Skills spending always ends up in the Treasury’s and indeed the DfE’s sights when deficits are looming or a bright new initiative is being marketed—so round we go again. Why skills? In common with other developed societies, absolutely rightly we guarantee all children a free education from the age of five to 18 or 19. We offer free early education to three and four year-olds. We quite rightly have legislative obligations to children with special needs and disabilities and, in England and Wales, we offer support to everyone over 18 who is accepted on to a course in a registered higher education institution.

These are clear entitlements and are clearly understood by the population—and, because they are transparent and stable, people can and do plan ahead to use them. Institutions are also able to plan and deliver. But when it comes to mid-level skills—the sorts of skills we are mostly talking about today and the ones for which our economy is currently desperate—clarity is replaced by confusion and repeated, inefficient, expensive and often destructive change. I shall give noble Lords one example. If you stay at school until you are 18 and you are moderately successful, you will be offered a free education up to and including a level 3 award. Level 3 is the skilled trades level, as well as the usual university entry level; it is the one where our skills shortages in this country are the most glaring.

If you leave school without a level 3, our society turns its back on you. As a citizen, you have a right to a free education while you are 18, but not when you were 20, 25 or 30. This is a travesty—it is a travesty in terms of equal treatment of citizens and a travesty in terms of any coherent skills policy. In the Augar review, on which I was privileged to serve and contribute, we strongly recommended that every citizen should have a right to a free level 3. So have many others, including the Economic Affairs Committee of this House. The current Government, back in 2020, did not make a formal commitment to an entitlement, but they acted fast in launching a new funded program which in practice made this available, on terms that made it feasible and attractive for colleges to plan and launch new courses, which is always a high-risk decision. Why did they do so? It was not because there was a sudden blast of light one day, but because earlier there was written into the manifesto a new £3 billion skills fund to be spent over the Parliament, which Treasury could not just wave away. I am 100% sure that without that manifesto commitment nothing would have happened.

Crucially, access to this programme was simple. If you did not have a level 3 qualification, it was open to you—just as now, if you are offered a place at a university, you have a right to Student Loans Company support. Normally in our skills system, working out what you can access at this middle level, and whether you have to pay and what you have to pay, is a moving minefield. Not surprisingly, most people walk away. It is not that people do not want to train or upskill, but the system is completely non-transparent. In other words, it is designed to cut off our skills pipeline at the ankles. Of course, one programme did not transform things, but it was a major step in the right direction. I say “was”, because now the DfE is announcing new restrictions that will make most of these programmes completely unviable. Why? Well, some poor official has written the usual guff about better targeting, but it is actually because the DfE needs to find some money and it is looking for things to cut. As always, the simplest place to look is skills programmes.

This Government have, in my view, done some very good things for skills—and not only when they were listening to me—but I want to emphasise that these things happened because there was a ring-fenced pot and a very clear commitment in a manifesto. No Minister and no Front-Bench spokesman is going to make a commitment of that sort to me today, so I am not even going to ask the Minister to do so. However, if we enter the next election with only high-level uncosted aspirations and with no clear commitments to access to those mid-level skills for people who do not already have a level 3, five years from now we will be making the same speeches—and, if anything, things will be worse.

Higher Education

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on securing this important debate, at a time when the university sector is under enormous pressure. He has rightly drawn our attention to the role of universities in growth, productivity and levelling up. This reflects the increasing tendency, at all levels of education, to discuss what we do in terms of the economy.

Universities have always been about training people for jobs, long before growth was seen as a central concern of Governments. Universities are indeed central to growth, productivity and levelling up. Without them, we would not have the levels of innovation and wealth that we do, or the genuinely improved opportunities—although they are not as great as they might be—for our young people.

I will use my short time in this debate to utter some words of warning and concern about our enthusiastic embrace of universities as engines of growth. There is a real danger, not just in this country but throughout the world, that a simplified understanding of this relationship and of what it means for government policy is a genuine threat to university excellence. It leads Governments down a path which does not deliver what they hope it will and leads to some reactions that we might wish to avoid.

Especially once the wonderful years straight after the Second World War came to an end and productivity suddenly started to be problematic—rather than something that just seemed to be happening and growing right, left and centre—Governments, intellectuals, academics and politicians cast around for some way of turbocharging growth. All over the world, they came to the conclusion that education was the answer—the more people we educated for longer and the more graduates we had, the more the economy would grow. It is true, I repeat, that without a highly qualified and well-educated population you cannot have a modern and innovative economy. But what has also happened is that we have all been rather disappointed: all over the world, there has been a huge increase and expansion in graduate numbers, but somehow growth has remained anaemic and productivity is not going in the directions we want.

All over the world, as the university sector gets larger and larger, resource per student tends to go down, and there are also some really concerning results: degrees become barriers to entry and you cannot get a job that you used to be able to get without a degree unless you have one. We should be very aware of this danger because it is starting to have a real impact on the way that Governments deal with the university sector in ways that threaten its ability to deliver the innovation and the type of education that we all value.

Australia, for example, having failed with one set of very complicated differential fees, is now about to introduce another set, which will apparently be based on the future contributions to the economy of different degrees—so this is not just a British disease. It has been true here, in the United States and elsewhere that we have focused more and more on whether individuals earn a lot from a particular degree. This is being hard-baked into our regulatory and accountability regime. We should take a deep breath and ask whether this is sensible, any more than it was sensible to believe that you would guarantee an uptick in economic growth simply by increasing the number of students.

Individual salaries depend on a very large number of things. They depend, for example, on whether you go into an occupation like nursing, where your wage is set not by a market but by a Government. They depend on which institution you went to and on the sort of occupation you go into. They also depend—this comes to levelling up—on where you are. You will not earn as much if you study in the north-east and stay there as if you study in the south-east and stay there—although actually you might be as well off, given house prices. But as a tool for steering, regulating and changing the higher education system, the way we have doubled down on the idea that we must look at whether a degree delivers growth—and that, if it does, it will deliver salaries—is very concerning. As well as celebrating the role of universities, I hope we will pay careful attention to some of the unfortunate consequences of focusing too much on growth.

Skill Shortages in Business and Industry

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I have already talked about some of the things we are doing. It is important that people know what options and opportunities are available in their local area, and the LSIPs are critical for that. In particular, the Government have invested up to £300 million in a network of 21 institutes of technology, which are providing exactly the kind of higher technical education to which the noble Lord refers.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, the Government’s figures indicate that fewer than one apprenticeship in five is in a shortage occupation. Given those figures, is it really plausible that no changes are needed in the apprenticeship levy?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I hope I did not suggest that no changes are needed. What employers need and want is a degree of stability in the apprenticeship system. We have done a huge amount of work, and the noble Baroness has been a critical part of achieving that, in improving our apprenticeships system. I am not suggesting that there is not some tweaking required—the noble Baroness is a great expert on that. Broadly, stability for our employers is vital, so that they know how they can use the levy and that it will be here to stay.

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise profusely to the House for arriving after the Minister started speaking; business moved much more quickly than I expected.

From these Benches, I thank the Minister and the Bill team very much for all their work on the Bill. We remain concerned about how many adults will wish to take on debt in order to improve their learning, and we look forward to hearing updates from the Minister about how many people have done so. From these Benches, we feel that grants would be a much more effective way of persuading adults to learn. But, of course, we are all totally in favour of lifelong learning, and we wish the Bill well.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, as many of you will know, the number 1 recommendation of the Augar review of post-18 education and funding was for this sort of reform. As someone who was a member of that review and who has spent a considerable part of the last three and a half years on secondment to government to work on the Augar review proposals, among other things, I take this opportunity to thank everyone involved.

I have been jinxed: I have not managed to contribute to any of the fine and informative debates that have taken place on this. They have highlighted some of the challenges that lie ahead. I am enormously encouraged by the cross-party support for the principle of a funding system that genuinely takes us forward into not just the 21st century but a future where post-compulsory lifelong learning is the rule, not the exception. We now have an opportunity to build on this.

I thank everyone involved in the drafting and passing of the Bill—although we have not quite passed it yet. I particularly put on record my appreciation of the work put in by a large number of officials who have worked enormously hard on this—on teasing out the policy implications and on minimising the amount that had to be put into primary legislation. I thank them and the Minister for her support. It is a little miraculous that we have moved from a major recommendation in 2019 to putting this reform on its way to implementation in 2023. So, on behalf of the Augar review team—and, I think, all the future students of this country—I thank everyone involved in this reform.

Bill passed.

Teacher Vacancies

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I talk to a lot of schools and trusts, and I absolutely accept that there are particular areas and subjects where recruitment feels really hard at the moment. But I do not accept that this is the highest figure of leavers ever—I have the numbers in front of me. The trend over the past 10 years is pretty stable. It is only fair to look at the facts and to use the facts. I think that most parents feel that teachers go above and beyond to give their children a great education. The work that we have done to improve the curriculum over the past 10 years is a really important part of that.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, teacher shortages in specialist subjects and short-lived responses have been common for decades. Shortages are also currently chronic in many other countries, notably France, Switzerland and Australia. Can the Minister inform us whether the Department for Education is conducting an in-depth review of the long list of previous short-lived policy responses or examining how other countries are responding to comparable shortages?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not aware that we are compiling a list of short-lived responses. We are committed to introducing improvements to the system that are based on evidence, such as the payments to early-career teachers in specialist subjects and the improvements that we have made to the early-career framework, which we introduced in 2021, providing mentors for every single early-career teacher. We are committed to building on those policies, including in relation to continuing professional development being a core part of every teacher’s experience in future.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest because, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, I am currently working as a skills adviser at No. 10. I was therefore quite involved in the skills White Paper, which led to much of the legislation today.

I very much appreciate the interest the House has taken in this Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and many other noble Lords, I have been bashing away at skills and vocational education for many years. It is wonderful to see that it is now a subject of such importance to so many of you.

I will say something about the local skills improvement plans and Motions 4, 4A and 4B. There is a danger that we are losing sight of what these were meant to be, can and should do, and what the White Paper set out to do. They were meant to be a simple way to create a stable mechanism to make sure that local employers’ voices and insights would be brought together and made available to providers. Colleges do not have to follow these plans in detail; they just have to take note of them. I am concerned that, with the best of motives, we are in danger of creating a vast, complex and bureaucratic process that will not do what it was meant to do, which was to take employers into account but also to reverse the 20-year trend of colleges and providers generally spending all their time worrying about ticking boxes for Whitehall and whether they have met regulations and requirements, but far too little time looking out to their local communities.

I put it on record that I am also bemused by why six pages of dense text are needed to put this simple idea into legislation. I am genuinely concerned that, in trying to enforce something that says, “You must take account of schools, and of this and that”, instead of creating a simple mechanism for employers to be part of the thinking about what is provided in a locality, we will create a new series of tick boxes.

I raise a question particularly on independent training providers, because I simply do not see how this will work. Independent training providers range from huge national providers, which are dominant in apprenticeship sectors, to tiny commercial companies of literally two people in a room above a chip shop. I tried to get my head around how you would take their views into account, when many of them are commercial concerns in determined competition with each other. I really wonder whether this will achieve what people want it to.

As I said, I take this opportunity to say, first, how very much I think the Bill and the support expressed for its purposes show how this country has moved on and really understood the importance of this, but also that local skills improvement plans are meant to be simple. They are meant to be not tick-box or expensive bureaucratic exercises but a way to ensure that employers are part of a process. They are something of which to take account, not an attempt to introduce central planning into what colleges decide to put on.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who has fought so hard for the skills agenda. I associate myself with much of that fight and I very much welcome a great deal of what is in the Bill. However, I will say a few words in favour of Amendments 15A and 15B. All the key points on these amendments have already been made very eloquently by my noble friends Lord Blunkett and Lord Watson, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I strongly support the arguments they put forward and I will underline three points.

First, it is true that too many qualifications can be confusing. I have no doubt about that, so I understand what the Government are trying to do here. Nevertheless, I think they have got it wrong. There is no confusion about BTECs. They have been going for nearly 40 years. They are long established and well tried and tested. They play a really important role in the range of qualifications at level 3. It is particularly important that they combine the development of skills with academic learning. They are the only qualification focused entirely on that.

For all the positive aspects of T-levels, they do not do this. They are mainly designed to help those enrolled on them to become successful in specific occupations. Again, I do not want in any way to criticise their introduction—that is an important role—but BTECs allow those who are successful in completing them to go into higher education and in particular to take applied vocational degrees, of which there are many, or into the workplace, or, in some cases, into both, because there are quite a lot of part-time students at BTEC level. Therefore, they should not be ditched to try to bolster T-levels. It is not necessary to do that. I know the Minister has indicated that there are certain niche areas where they will survive, but they should survive as a whole. Moreover, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, we need some time to see how T-levels bed down, who they are successful for, who is attracted to them and whether they are really working for employers.

That is my first point. My second is that the Government seem to have ignored the results and outcomes of their own consultations. Some 86% of respondents to its level 3 consultation disagreed with the proposal to remove funding from qualifications deemed to overlap with A-levels and T-levels. As has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, there is a big issue about what is meant by “overlapping”. The fact their content might be the same does not mean that the approach to teaching and learning is the same. In fact, they are profoundly different. Neither of the two reviews the Government have cited, one undertaken by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, favoured the Government’s approach. In her review, the noble Baroness recognised the value of BTECs, and the Sainsbury review did not cover BTECs at all because they were not part of its remit.

My third point is that abandoning BTECs is likely to severely damage social mobility. It will block a route to university or skilled employment for large numbers of disadvantaged young people. This is reinforced by the evidence of the Social Market Foundation that 44% of white working-class students who entered universities studied at least one BTEC. I am familiar with this from my past role as a vice-chancellor. Many of these students do extraordinarily well when they get to university, often better than those who come in with rather poor A-level qualifications. As I think the noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned, 37% of black students went to university with only BTEC qualifications. Surely we should not block the route of these young ethnic-minority students into our higher education system by taking away a qualification deemed valuable for them.