Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell and Lord Marks of Hale, on their maiden speeches, and of course my noble friend Lord Aberdare on his very comprehensive introduction.

At the outset, I say that I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, said about EBacc and Progress 8. They both need to go. They are holding the arts back in our schools and beyond. A future Government should make that pledge before they come to power.

The mover of this Motion, my noble friend Lord Aberdare, had to point out to me that “education” is not mentioned in it, even if it seems nevertheless logical that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, will answer for Education. Such is the modern-day conventional assumption that what we call skills and education go together hand in hand, but that does not have to be true, depending of course on how one defines both words. “Skill”, like “innovation”, has become a watchword, even a buzzword, to the extent that it is perhaps too easy to stop seeing what the word means and instead pay lip service to something we have not thought carefully enough about, and perhaps to promote certain narrower meanings above other meanings. For instance, my research tells me—I bow of course to the expert linguists and historians among us—that “skill” comes from the Old Norse “skilja”, which seems to have had quite a number of past meanings, including, believe it or not, to break up, to separate, to discern, to distinguish, to understand, to find out and to decide. Even further back in time, this word was used to denote knowledge or even divine wisdom, which begs questions about the separation of knowledge and practice that we have heard about today in this debate. There are meanings here that are wider than a skill being simply the supposedly or conventionally right way of doing something, or learning something that becomes automatic because it is practised. The original etymology seems to contain other things like analysis, breaking things up and perhaps putting them back together again—deconstruction in other words—critical thought, and even perhaps contemplation, which our more modern, narrower understanding of “skill” does not seem so much to contain.

This older understanding is important because, over a number of decades, education itself has changed significantly within the UK. The particular modern usage fits our current, very specifically framed, educational system. Of course, as we have already heard, there are many different kinds of skills, including life skills, craft skills, and green skills. But the idea of skills that are necessary for specific jobs, including the job of study itself, nevertheless holds a kind of primacy within this world of skills. Education itself, particularly higher education, has become monetised and therefore transactional in a way that was not true 30 years ago, but is now very true since the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and the accompanying expectations that an increasing number of students now have. Among those expectations I point out three: first, that students can get a piece of paper telling them that they have an extremely good degree that validates their course of study; secondly, they can get a well-paid job at the end of their course, which is part of the expected transaction; and thirdly, they have learned the skills that will equip them for that job. That is true even of those who follow the academic route, because of the change in culture of higher education.

Therefore, when the Government talk the rhetoric of “low-value” courses and send out the message that the arts and humanities are less important by cutting the top-up grants to those university courses, they are also saying that the skills learned for those courses or during that time of study are less important because the skills, like that important piece of paper which gives you your grade or the examination that determines that grade, must be something that according to the modern understanding of a skill is quantifiable because it has an objective, predetermined use.

I will make just one further point. The irony is that the real world thinks differently. Companies consistently want well-rounded people, not necessarily those with very specific, narrowly defined skill sets, important though those might be. I also know from my own experience closer to home that not all colleges, such as drama colleges, are interested in the skills that enable you to get a good degree. They look for things beyond specific skill sets such as passion, enthusiasm and originality of thought, which perhaps in the “skilja” definition might also be thought of as skills.