Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

I too support the amendment, although I think I may have got out of my depth with training providers. I should remind the Committee that I am involved with the BPP group and that we not only have a university but are training a lot of 16 to 19 year-olds. However, we are not providing all the training. If an employer comes to us and says, “Will you train our apprentices?”, then we do that. That is not the same as training apprentices to be interviewed; they have already been interviewed and are the employer’s pigeon. Indeed, I had barely heard of these training providers who are leaving people in a mess.

However, this inclines me the more to support the amendment because there is very little in the Bill about who students should complain to. Hopelessly, I asked my son, who lives in Germany and is a veteran of German apprenticeships, who German apprentices complain to. The question meant absolutely nothing to him because they do not do that. Apprenticeships work there because they have worked for 20 years, and I think you would be drummed out of the local CBI, or hung or something, if you abused your apprentice in any way. I am not thinking of physical abuse but of people being given a broom or a photocopying machine rather than proper training.

I do not know, and do not think that the Bill says, to whom the learner or student may complain if the employer is not doing its bit. I think they know to whom they can complain if the trainer is not doing its bit—they can complain to us, for a start—and we know that structure. However, we do not know the structure for what to do if an employer is looking after an apprentice very badly and not offering proper training. I do not think that this amendment totally resolves that. Input from students would be very useful but, again—and I feel as if I am banging on a bit—enforcement will matter in this area. Can the Minister tell me what that will be?

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I want to make a couple of points on these amendments. First, as I said at Second Reading, I very much welcome the desire and requirement to have learners themselves represented in the governance of the institute. I welcome also the fact that the Government have announced an apprentice panel for the institute, but I think it would be good if that was a statutory requirement in the Bill.

Secondly, it is important we ensure that the bodies creating the standards are employer-led but, at the same time, represent a cross-section of organisations. However, there is a further point to make on that. Yes, we should have SME representation, but that is easier said than done. Most SMEs find it hard to devote the time, resource and energy to being involved in these quite complicated standard development processes. I am very interested to hear the Government’s thinking on how the views of SMEs—which, after all, deliver more than half of all apprenticeships—can be represented in a way that is comparable to the others that will be represented.

I very much agree that independent training providers need to be subject to accountability and scrutiny, and that learners need to know who they can complain to. However, at the same time, I believe that independent training providers deliver a very substantial proportion of the training needed for apprenticeships, and we should be rather careful that we are not killing that golden-egg-laying goose. It is very important to have the right balance. Again as I said at Second Reading, I have a feeling that the role of independent training providers, including commercial training providers, is not very well reflected in the Bill as it stands. It is a key role and we should make sure we understand how it is going to be delivered in a way that meets suitable standards and scrutiny.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf. FE Week seems to be getting quite a few mentions. I came across a piece on training providers by Peter Cobrin, who runs the Apprenticeships England Community Interest Company, which is important to highlight. He says that training providers feel,

“vulnerable, unrepresented, unsupported, unprotected, exploited and undervalued”.

Let us not forget that there are some very good training providers, just as in higher education there are some very good private providers and colleges. However, quite frankly, some need examining carefully. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, it is important to remember that many of the people who go to these private providers take out big loans, and if that private provider collapses or reforms, they are left. That is not good enough. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said it is important that accountability catches up with them. I hope that, following her wise words, we might look more carefully at this area between now and Report.

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[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

I am responsible for 2,000 degree-level apprentices and about the same number of others. At the moment, we do what the employer wants. If the employer arrives and says: “I would like the formal training to have these outcomes”, we say, “Right”, then we discuss it and bid for it. I had been assuming that we could adjust to the new regime. If the Institute for Apprenticeships stated the outcomes that it wanted, we could teach to those outcomes because that is what we do. We would be able, in essence, to do a wraparound to suit a particular employer, which would include the vital bits that the Institute for Apprenticeships wanted. I am a little puzzled if we are to be told that we all have to teach the same thing on, say, the finance course by the bit of the Institute for Apprenticeships that is working out finance training. At the moment, let us say that KPMG tells us how it wants us to do finance training. We would do that but if someone else wanted it to be slightly different, our competitive advantage over the years has been built on adjusting to do a different sort of finance training.

I am not quite sure where I am going with this, but are we providers still to be allowed variation in any way if an employer asks us to do it slightly differently, provided we include a certain number of outcomes and standards, as set out by the institute? To take an example from my experience, with our graduate law course we made our name by introducing a City law course that the City wanted. “Wait”, we said, “we’ll do that”. Of course, it is all the same law but it was specialist. We did that and not some other bits of law. I can imagine that being the outcome still: some City firms want varieties of law taught that nobody else cares about, as in shipping law, and some accountants want things that nobody else much cares about taught, as in shipping finance. Are we to end up with an agreed set of standards to which we must adhere, but around which we can wrap something that employers might want, or not? I am arguing for a setting of outcomes and standards by the institute but with a little deviation allowed, provided those apprenticeships include the basic standards and outcomes. Will the Minister tell me about that?

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I share the concerns that have been expressed about a single awarding body. I would have thought that the idea would be to have the sort of single recognised qualification that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, is looking for, but delivered in slightly varying ways by two or three highly qualified, well-regulated and well-managed organisations. Having all one’s eggs in a single basket worries me from the point of view of what happens if it does not work and what happens if you want to change the franchisee.

Amendment 17 would require,

“at least one recognised technical qualification”,

in the outcomes. I very much welcome the fact that standards are to be employer-led. That should ensure that they are focused on skills for which there is a market and which will lead to jobs, but it is also very important to ensure that the needs of the learner or trainee are properly reflected. One of those needs is to acquire portable skills and attainments that are transferable to the different jobs or activities that trainees might move into. Having recognised technical qualifications included in the standards is a way of doing that. Many of those qualifications already exist in the form of NVQs, diplomas and what have you; new ones will no doubt emerge under the new process.

When I used to run employability training programmes for young Londoners not in employment, education or training, we quickly learned the value of including recognised qualifications in our programmes. Many of the young people we worked with had what you might call relatively chaotic lives and did not necessarily follow what might be considered a well-organised career trajectory. The fact that at the end of the programmes they could demonstrate achievement of some specific qualifications, whether in English, communications, basic employment skills, or ASDAN qualifications, which we also used, or health and safety or creative skills, gave them something to work with when it came to taking a new and possibly quite distinct step into a job or a career.

The noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, mentioned that her courses are geared to what employers need, but the employers which tend to be predominant in defining those needs are the larger employers. Very often the requirements do not necessarily reflect the needs and realities of SMEs and the sort of young people seeking jobs in SMEs, as I define them. For that reason, there is great value in the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, this is an important part of the Bill because this is how the Government clearly intend the institute to instil some rigour in technical qualifications and apprenticeships. The method they are using is set out fairly clearly. There are two words which need clear definition in this part of the Bill: one is “standards” and the other is “outcomes”.

On standards, as I understand it, you have to choose your occupation. Let us say it is plumbing. The institute would then say, “We are going to do plumbing today”, so it would get a group of plumbers together to determine what the standards should be. Are the standards likely to have labels 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5? I assume that the department has worked out what a standard would look like. Could the Minister give us an example or write to us about it? It does not look as though the department have prepared them. It would be interesting to know what a standard would look like. That is not clear from the Bill.

Then there are outcomes. Can the Minister give us an example of what an outcome would be? Is it the same as on the next page of the Bill, “an approved educational qualification”? What will the outcome be of this operation? Will the institute say, “We have studied all the plumbing qualifications and we think the one from BTEC is the best”? “Outcome” means a specific something so that someone can say, “That is the end of it all”. It would be very helpful to have some explanation of how this system is to work.