Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. Indeed, I express strong support for all the amendments that have managed to get themselves tabled in spite of the language of this Bill, which at this point are just calling for report. It seems quite extraordinary that, at a time when we have a Government who recognise the centrality of skills and have committed to a system-wide approach—as in today’s White Paper, for example—we are being asked to pass legislation that puts everything inside the department, reported to a DfE official, so that under this Bill there is not even a report for other government departments, never mind for the public at large and for Parliament. I cannot believe that this makes sense in terms of the Government’s expressed ambitions for Skills England: that it should be system-wide; that it should do something that goes beyond the remit of individual agencies and quangos; and that it should take in the whole scene effectively. I would very much prefer to see it as a statutory body, but I hope that, between now and Report, the Minister will at the very least take away this widely expressed request for us to have regular public reporting of what is going on, which everybody can use, so that we have documents in the public domain allowing us to see what is happening and how the Secretary of State’s new responsibilities are being carried out.

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)]

My Lords, I add my support for Amendment 36 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Like other amendments, it calls for—among other sensible things—a report, in this case on levels of investment in skills by employers.

If you have believed the CBI over the past few days, you would think that the investment climate for business had taken a turn for the worse in recent weeks, with what it is calling the “triple whammy” of increased employers’ national insurance contributions, the higher national minimum wage and various changes in labour market rules. The CBI feels that there is a palpable sense in the business community that the UK is becoming a more difficult environment for investment. Of course, skills are very much part of that picture. There is a clear risk that our levels of investment in skills, which are already running at half the levels of our peer group in the OECD, will suffer further if this climate of paralysis in the UK with respect to business investment is allowed to continue.

On the uncertainty that noble Lords have alluded to with respect to big government policy, notably the development of the growth and skills levy and the future of the LLE, these things may become compounding factors that risk current low levels of investment in skills dipping even further. Clearly, we cannot afford that as a country, so I believe it is vital that the Government take steps as rapidly as possible to lift the policy uncertainty that will potentially blight levels of investment in skills over the current year and accept the amendment, which will provide a healthy baseline against which we can measure progress in this respect in the months to come.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, in rising to speak very briefly in this debate, I apologise for the fact that I was not at Second Reading. Most of the points that I sought to make have already been made. Therefore, I do not need to repeat them, save that I am sure that there is an absolute commitment in this Room that what we need is high-quality skills training and education and that no one would demur from that. The differences—or possibly the similarities—across the aisle are that we want to make sure that it is done effectively and as speedily as possible while ensuring it is done properly.

I am very sympathetic to the view expressed by my noble friend Lord Knight about the consideration that might be given to a statutory body. Some noble Lords who know my history may know that I have not always been a great fan of everything being held in the hands of the department or the Secretary of State—obviously, it depends on the Secretary of State. In this case, we can afford, if we to make a move, to think about making the appropriate move. From the discussions that I have had, it seems that the appropriate move from where we are would be to a statutory body, for all the reasons that a number of speakers have outlined. That may well confer a greater sense not just of stability but of consistency, which is where we need to be if we are to carry with us young people, their teachers, their parents and employers, who are all extremely concerned, and to ensure that we have excellent skills provision and skills acquisition in this country.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I too apologise that I was unable to be at Second Reading, although I have read all the contributions made by noble Lords, including those here, at the time. I add my general support to pretty much everything that has been said, including on Amendments 21 and 33. I have considerable sympathy with the proposal to get rid of Schedule 1, and specifically with those noble Lords who have said that we really need a statutory body. Just putting everything inside the Department for Education in an extremely unclear way is really unsatisfactory.

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[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to talk a bit about Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has added her name. As the outgoing chair of IfATE, I have listened carefully to some of the words expressed both today and at Second Reading. There are a small number of things that I would urge everyone to consider here; I say that to the Minister in particular.

Today, we have not yet discussed what really sits at the heart of the skills system with IfATE. We talk about the technical side of it, but we need to talk more about the employer voice. Yesterday, one of our board members, Robin Miller, who is one of the most famous music producers in the country and has been there from day one of IfATE—I have not—said something really interesting to me. He said that it took five years to get employers on side and to believe that IfATE could do really good things. Nothing is perfect. No arm’s-length body is ever perfect. Everyone can have their criticisms. I wish Skills England well for the future—I really want it to build on the momentum that has been built up in the skills system, as fragmented as it is—but I urge us to do more than just holding webinars with employers. Employers sit at the heart of the system; I can say that having myself been a very large employer in this country.

We need to understand how momentum will be built around the critical skills that this country is going to need in future. While this transfer is going on and all this is happening, behind the system sit employers with skills gaps to fill. They need urgently to make sure that everything they are doing in terms of the new apprenticeships, new qualifications and new, high-level technical qualifications that they need is done quickly and brilliantly. I genuinely do not understand how putting it into an executive agency that is part of a bigger department will necessarily do that; I would love to believe that it will, but we are going to need more evidence of how that will be done. I am, and many other people are, here to support that but, frankly, the quicker we can do it, the better.

Speed, momentum and delivery are what really worry me. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, asked whether Skills England might be swamped by the very technical things that it may have to do now. Yes—that will be the case. Does Skills England really want to sit there with the Secretary of State and be the awarding body, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said? I do not necessarily think so. We need to look closely at how these functions will move and what will be done so that employers understand.

Even more importantly, let us talk about the learners. Let us talk about the young people doing T-levels today. Yesterday, we spoke to one of them for half an hour about what she was doing in her journey. At the age of 16, her journey is fantastic. She is doing a T-level. She is heading towards an apprenticeship degree. She wants to be a chartered surveyor, as one example of many young people’s aspirations in this country. However, she said that too few people understand T-levels, career pathways and so on. There is so much work to be done. I simply urge us all not to forget during the passage of this Bill that the employer voice and the learner voice need to be heard more highly.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the two amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, to which I have added my name. More broadly, I want to speak to the general thrust of the group. I think that our joint amendment was not specific enough. It is not so much that we need criteria; we need to know that employers will be there and who else will be there. It is not just that we would like some criteria published.

It is important that some of this is publicly and legislatively specified because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, alluded to a little, things start very well, people know exactly what they are doing and then they slide. It might seem inconceivable to anybody involved in setting up Skills England that apprenticeship standards would, in the future, be written without really consulting employers. All I can say is, “I wish”.

I have been looking back at the history of skills policy and implementation in this country, as I do periodically when I decide to write something, and it has reminded me how easy it is for harassed and busy civil servants to just get things through and for powers given to a department, which do not require them to go out beyond the department, to be used by it. It is not that anybody means badly, but that is sort of how it goes. That is why, on repeated occasions, we have ended up with disastrous skills policies and approaches, in essence, for which there is equal-opportunity guilt across the parties. They became just a small group—harassed, busy, pulling very few people in—not putting down the infrastructure to ensure that what you get reaches out into whole economy. We need to do that.

I was staggered when I was working as an expert adviser in government to discover, for example, that most people in the apprenticeship division in the DfE had been in their jobs for only a couple of years. There were some wonderful people, but there was no real collective memory of why things had gone wrong before. That is why you have to make it clear in legislation that, as Skills England goes forward and as, particularly in this context, its apprenticeship functions go forward, it has to involve everybody, even though it takes longer, it is awkward and sometimes it does not work out well.

IfATE has not been perfect. I think more than 700 standards is mad, actually, and when I was involved in the Sainsbury review, I expressly asked that there should be fewer of them. It is not that what we have is perfect, but we have to be aware of the lessons that come from previous mistakes. It is very risky to put everything inside the department without anything that, in effect, says, “You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to talk to employers and the key organisations”. Yes, it takes longer, it is awkward and you do not always think they are very good, but it has to be there. The general feeling coming out of these amendments is that we need Skills England to be better than what we have at the moment and not be set up such that the institutional structures invite a repeat of the things that went wrong in previous decades.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, on the importance of consulting employers and that 700 standards might be a little “mad”. I reinforce the sense that it is important to consult not just large employers as, for small and medium-sized employers, that granularity is really challenging.

I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in his place, because he and I did a little work with EngineeringUK looking at apprenticeship take-up. We heard quite strongly from the SME community that it needs more sectoral standards, with more modularity for the specificity that you see in the 700. There is an opportunity attached to more modularity which could address the problem of English and maths requirements within apprenticeships, as it would then be more possible to think about sector-specific English and maths at level 2 and 3, as appropriate, so that the relevance of the learning to the English and maths content could be made much clearer and much easier for those learners. In that context, I support what the noble Baroness and most noble Lords have said. I listened very closely to the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and my noble friend Lord Blunkett.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, like others, I welcome the fact that my noble friend Lord Blunkett has both attended and made his usual well-informed and passionate contribution in this debate. It appears that very little in the way of ill health or accident will prevent him from making his contribution. We all hope that he recovers as soon as possible. He rightly made an argument about the centrality of skills for everything that the Government are trying to achieve. He is exactly right about the role of skills in delivering all the missions that this Government have set out: growth, opportunity for individuals, rebuilding the NHS, delivering a green superpower, providing opportunities for young people as part of the contribution to keeping our streets safer, and building new homes. I completely agree with him about that and I hope that his words will help our efforts with the Treasury in the way he identified to ensure that that is recognised there as well.

The debate on this set of amendments has been interesting. I will talk about the relatively narrow nature of Clause 4 in a moment, but noble Lords have understandably also taken the opportunity to argue for the significance of a broad range of inputs into the activity of Skills England. I agree with the overarching argument about the importance of the involvement of a wide-ranging set of stakeholders. That is how Skills England has already set off in its work. It has already begun to engage with a wide range of employer representative bodies, individual employers and education and training providers. As I said, it will work closely across government and, in working on the industrial strategy, it will work in partnership with business, devolved Governments, regions and other stakeholders in developing the industrial strategy sector plans.

As my noble friend Lord Blunkett emphasised, there needs to be a sectoral approach to the way we develop skills across the economy. That has been an early focus for Skills England. It will work with employer representative bodies and directly with employers. It will work with education and training providers and with mayoral combined authorities. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State and I had a good meeting just last week with mayoral combined authorities on skills, and Skills England has been meeting regularly with them. On the point raised by my noble friend Lady Blower, one of the important elements of Skills England has been the engagement of unions, in a way that was not the case previously in the development of the skills landscape. I hope that I can give noble Lords some assurance that that is already the approach that Skills England is taking.

Narrowing the discussion down more specifically to the nature of the intention behind Clause 4, I make it clear that this is to provide the Secretary of State with greater flexibility in the minority of circumstances where preparing occupational standards using a group would be disproportionate or unnecessary for the limited scale or nature of the change or where the system needs to move particularly quickly to respond to employer demand. With over 700 standards currently in place, this clause ensures that the system for preparing and reviewing standards is fit for the future.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

Can the Minister give an example of what might spark that off? I am finding it hard to imagine a situation in which it might occur.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I will be delighted to, and I was coming to that.

Before I do that, I note the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and repeat from Second Reading my gratitude for her contribution to the development of IfATE. I recognise her point about what is necessary to get employer engagement in some of the detailed work that IfATE has been engaged in and that will be transferred under this legislation to Skills England. She is absolutely right about that; it needs consistent work. But it also needs, as employers have told us, appropriate flexibility and agility to enable those standards to be developed in a way that reflects changing developments and does not put too onerous a responsibility on employers in terms of their engagement.

Let us be clear that the default position will remain that a self-forming group of persons will prepare a standard. It is probably worth noting that this definition of “a group of persons” also legislatively guided IfATE in its engagement on occupational standards and apprenticeship assessment schemes. Our proposals do not weaken legislatively the engagement of employers. When a group does not convene itself to prepare a standard for an occupation which the Secretary of State is satisfied requires a standard, the Secretary of State may convene a group to prepare one. In both circumstances, we would expect that such a group would normally, but not exclusively, include employers that are representative of that occupation. Only when the Secretary of State is satisfied that it is more appropriate for them to prepare a standard than for a group of persons will the Secretary of State then do so.

To come to the noble Baroness’s point, scenarios in which it may be appropriate for the Secretary of State to use this power to prepare a standard are those where using a group would be disproportionately onerous for employers or other stakeholders; unnecessary because only minor adjustments or revisions were required; or where it could create undue delays. This might include—I say for illustrative purposes—updating standards to align with changes to mandatory qualifications within the standard; creating or updating standards to align with industry-recognised qualifications or statutory requirements; or creating or updating standards more efficiently where employers do not have the capacity. We envisage that the Secretary of State may also use the power to create and update standards for emerging or rapidly developing occupations, such as those in the digital sector. The clause also enables the Secretary of State to ensure that standards are developed or updated quickly to respond to acute skills needs or urgent regulatory changes required in an emergency, such as the updates to the level 3 community fire safety adviser following the Grenfell disaster.

Finally, employers themselves tell us that current processes for preparing standards can feel slow, bureaucratic and time-consuming. This is not a criticism of IfATE; it is a criticism of a requirement currently in legislation that we want to use this opportunity to make more flexible. It is a barrier to their engagement. We want to focus their input where it has the most impact.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I rise just to give my much wiser noble friend a break. The assessment plan for any qualification is of the essence. If you get that wrong, you might as well not bother doing it. When you have a group of people looking at this, you stand a better chance than you get from one centre. There are a series of clichés about Secretaries of State, and I will try not to kick and wring every one of them, but the basic one is that if the Secretary of State has spoken to somebody who just does not understand or gets it wrong, the whole thing can go wrong. If you have a group, you stand a better chance of getting a correct result. Nothing is guaranteed either way, but that is what it is about.

I hope that we can get some response from the Minister on where we are going to get this expertise in to check on what is happening. That is it, in essence, because we have had Secretaries of State who know exactly what they want and will talk to a certain group that agrees with them. That is very easy to do, and we have all done it. I hope that we will get some assurance that the Secretary of State will talk to a divergence of opinion to go through these things to make sure that they work. If we do not and start to get them wrong, the price will be huge and we will have nothing useful. Being a little slower and a bit more certain is infinitely better than taking the chance of getting it horribly wrong. I hope the Minister can give us a reassuring answer.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I do not have very much to add, everybody will be glad to hear, except to highlight the fact that assessment is not the same as getting to the end of the standards. We have a complex set of awarding bodies and some assessment standards which require an external qualification and some which do not.

It would also be good to be confident that the department has worked through all the ramifications of this. I am conscious that I do not think I have and am going to go back and look through some of the original legislation, but I do not think the considerations are exactly the same as they are for standards. Because we have a rather strange system in this country, with a lot of formal qualifications and a lot of awarding bodies, it is very easy to get the qualifications wrong or suddenly find that you have a huge political fuss on your hands, as I am sure everyone in this Room will recognise from the current BTEC discussions.

I just flag that it is not just the same as for standards. The complexity of many endpoint assessments and standards for which there are required external qualifications means that we need to be very careful that we have not inadvertently stored up some real problems for ourselves by just moving everything wholesale and saying, “But where necessary, the Secretary of State can cut through the bramble patch”.

[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have a little sympathy for this additional request for the Secretary of State to do this if the defaults are not working. Having seen how the current system works, my only observation is: will that be quicker? If it is about speed, I am not necessarily convinced that, as the Secretary of State will be so busy, this will be one of the highest-priority things in the Department for Education, and that concerns me. With more employers and more people involved in the system, there is always a danger that this will slow down. I am not really sure in what circumstances this power will be used. I could probably see it for the odd exception, but I still cannot quite imagine what it could be. However, I have a little sympathy, as long as it is around speed in the odd exceptional circumstance.

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My Amendment 34, which is also supported by my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park, seeks to bring a focus to these regulatory relationships and ensure that there is transparency about how the Bill impacts on them. Given that this is, in the favourite words of the department, a “very small and very technical” Bill, we simply do not have the information we need at this stage to understand how the Government intend the role of other regulators to evolve. This amendment gives them an opportunity to set that out.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I was about to take this opportunity to ask for clarification, but it follows on from something that the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said earlier, so perhaps he will follow up on it. We have a lot of regulators in this area, and I also am a little concerned. I cannot say that I understand the clause, by the way—I have just looked at it but cannot make head or tail of it—but I will try to get some clarity into my head. I know that, at the time that IfATE was set up, there was quite a lot of discussion between it and Ofqual about who was allowed to do what; the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, may be able to elucidate this.

My concern going forward is with the LLE, because the intention was always that these were not just standard university qualifications that one could take but that there would be a mechanism for approving high-quality qualifications at the right levels, for which you could also take a loan. That is critical, and I know that the OfS has been struggling with this on the regulatory side but it does not seem to have got very far. It is critical that we have a clear pattern here and do not inadvertently create obstacles to that approval process again.

It slightly worries me that, as I read it, the Secretary of State would have to give Ofqual instructions on a qualification-by-qualification basis. That again does not sound as though it will be very fast or flexible. I just ask the Minister, if she is totally clear about this, to give us a little lesson now; and, if she is not, whether she could seek clarification, perhaps from her higher education experts as well as from her apprenticeship experts, on whether we are inadvertently making this more difficult rather than easier.

[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

Once more, I will say a few words about process and reiterate to the Minister my words on speed. Any changes to any process will slow things down; it will not improve in the short term. Creating constant momentum and change is really important, as is simplification. The more I think about having four regulators, the more worried—traumatised, almost—I begin to feel.

Whether or not we like what the current system has done and whether or not things need changing, it is important for us all to appreciate that the speed point is critical. I have yet to see things speeding up as systems move within government; they tend to slow down. So let us be very careful and cautious. I am nervous about the unintended consequences of change. Through all of this, there should be a delivery plan that talks purely about building momentum for the skills system. At the moment, we do not have that.

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.