Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

Can the Minister give us an idea of how regularly they are doing this? It should not be the case that they have a look occasionally when something goes wrong or is dragged to them. That really will mean that you have this horrible process of trying to dig out why something has gone wrong, being given an example, saying, “Oh, really? It’s been there a while”, and then coming back to it. Some way of doing what is suggested in this amendment on a regular basis without requiring politicians to dive in, jump up and down and cause the Government to have a look—all Governments have been guilty of this—is what I would like to come out of this, because it addresses a real and ongoing problem.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

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

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

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

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

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

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

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

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 90C in my name. I apologise to the Committee that this is a rather late arrival and very large in scope. It arose from reflections on the earlier stages of the Committee’s deliberations about the narrow focus of the contributors to local skills improvement plans, particularly existing employers who are likely to be larger employers. As I listened to that debate, I was forced to reflect on how very old-fashioned and mid-20th century it all felt, even as we were talking about trying to get a wider range of the self-employed and others into the development plans.

We were talking about getting qualifications for work in a very direct, obvious way. Of course, for many roles in society that may still be the case. Brain surgeons inevitably spring to mind—pun unintended—here, but also if you are likely to be, say, a technician maintaining a complicated piece of medical technology, a Passivhaus qualified building designer or a permaculture garden planner, you may go directly to a course and get the job that follows on, but most jobs are not like that, even if we are thinking of this Bill as being only about employment. Most jobs and most lives require a range of technical and soft skills acquired by a mixture of education, training, employment and life experience.

I draw here the example of someone I know from the Green Party—I am going to anonymise this because I did not check with them about using it. They started as a volunteer with a set of technical skills—design skills for leaflets and graphics—but through their voluntary involvement they were drawn into the management of volunteers, fund-raising, administration and management. That eventually led that person into a very different professional job using all those skills. That is what life is like now in employment and well beyond.

On the community side of this amendment, particularly following a decade of austerity, many provisions and services in communities are now provided by volunteers. In the interests of politics, I shall park that to one side while I think about it, but the fact is that often volunteer-run, volunteer-led and voluntarily provided services need people with skills, and with the increasing pension age and the high levels of employment for women, many of the traditional sources of volunteer skills have been closed off. Having been at the centre of a wide range of community groups in some very different communities, I know how deprived, disadvantaged communities, which exist in central London as much as in the north of England, may not have those skills and urgently need them and need local skills providers to be able to help with them.

It is not my intention to press this amendment at this stage. It is a small gesture towards making the Bill about something more comprehensive: skills for life. I hope that the Government will reflect before we reach Report on their approach to the Bill and its very narrow, outdated view of the dividing line between life skills and employment skills, as though they are two separate categories.

My list—I agree that it is somewhat scattergun—includes parenting, which is a skill. One might perhaps include child and older care because those are roles that all of us may well have to fulfil at some stage. Budgeting reflects what we often hear in your Lordships’ House about the need for financial literacy in our increasingly complex world. Mental and physical first aid and practical skills in gardening and maintenance are things that people need in their lives. The last two sections of this amendment—community organising and community participation—focus on the idea of people as part of a community, as all of us are. It is not my intention to press this amendment, but I look forward to the discussion and the Minister’s response. I hope it will be fruitful.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it has always seemed odd to me that so many of us complete our education with extensive knowledge of maths, English language and literature, history, languages, the sciences and other academic subjects—in my case including Latin and Greek, much to my benefit—but with few, if any, of the skills listed in Amendment 90C from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, nor other rather fundamental skills such as cooking and household maintenance, generic skills such as communications, teamwork and self-presentation, or even typing and map-reading, which may still prove to be not entirely redundant, despite the impact of technology. Yet these are all valuable life skills that schools should be well placed to teach.

One of the skills listed in the amendment, first aid, could even be a matter of life and death. The figures I have, which may not be wholly up to date, indicate that 60,000 people suffer cardiac arrests out of hospital every year in the UK. Almost half of those that occur in public places are witnessed by bystanders, not infrequently children. With every minute that passes, their chances of survival decrease by about 10%, so teaching children quite straightforward first aid techniques at school, such as how to give CPR or use a defibrillator, can literally save lives, as well as being fun for the learners. The many countries in which such teaching is compulsory have significantly better survival rates from shockable cardiac arrest than the UK—as high as 52% in Norway, for example, against 2% to 12% in the UK, depending on where you live.

I will not labour this specific hobby-horse of mine, except to say that, in my view, it is just one of many strong arguments in support of the need for an assessment of current gaps in the teaching of non-academic but highly valuable life skills and how those gaps might be addressed, as suggested in Amendment 90C. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on how that might be achieved.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, we are very much in favour of Amendment 90C. I endorse the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in moving it and those of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare.

The life skills set out in the amendment are all essential building blocks in a developed, compassionate and forward-looking society. Many of these categories would fall under the heading of “social solidarity”, a concept that is, I have to say, anathema to many in the Conservative Party who still hold to the infamous, and utterly fatuous, claim by Prime Minister Thatcher that

“there’s no such thing as society.”

If the past 17 months show us anything, they have graphically described how society has pulled together in ways that perhaps we have not seen before out of wartime. I should make it clear that I have seen no evidence that either of the noble Baronesses looking after this Bill fall under that heading, and I am perfectly happy to do so.

Not to accept that these life skills are necessary in ensuring that there are as few local skills gaps as possible once the locals skills improvement partnerships are developed would be, at best, to leave the Ministers open to the charge that they do not attach sufficient importance to them. In reply, the Minister will no doubt say they are unnecessary, but I believe that what this Government regard as necessary does not correspond with what most people have a right to expect in a civilised, advanced society.

Sadly, yesterday provided the latest example of that, with proposals for severe cuts to arts and creative subjects in higher education confirmed by the Office for Students. The Government claim that they want to redirect funding for high-cost STEM subjects, as well as medicine and healthcare. Nobody is denying that these are important subjects—indeed, priority subjects—but that does not mean that arts and culture subjects are not important themselves. They should not be abandoned.

Almost one in eight businesses are creative businesses. Some 2 million jobs in the UK as a whole are in the creative sector, worth a staggering total of £111 billion a year to the economy, and yet this Government of philistines are prepared to ignore those huge numbers and to seriously undermine the creative industries, which include much more than the arts—themselves a form of social solidarity, of course. Yes, film, TV, animation, video games, children’s TV, theatres, museums and orchestras are all included, but so too are advertising and marketing, design, graphic products, fashion, architecture and much more.

The damaging cuts will halve the high-cost funding subsidy for creative and arts university subjects—not next year but as soon as September this year, at the start of the new academic term. That is likely to threaten the viability of arts courses in universities and lead to possible closures, which may well be the Government’s ultimate aim. The universities most vulnerable are those with a higher number of less well-off students, so this will deny young people the kind of opportunities that my noble friend Lady Wilcox mentioned during the last debate.

The attack on culture seems to be just the latest example of the Government’s rather pathetic culture war strategy over recent months. I cannot imagine that the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, as someone who served at the heart of Theresa May’s Government, would countenance such deliberately divisive nonsense.

The Bill should oblige local skills improvement partnerships to consider the role played by the creative industries locally and ensure that they are central to skills development plans. Equally, they should cover the life skills specified in the amendment. For that reason, we are fully in support, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

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

The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, this broad group covers many of the crucial features of the lifelong learning entitlement. I will confine my remarks to Amendments 92 and 95, covering the availability of the entitlement and learners’ eligibility for it. The lifelong loan entitlement and the lifetime skills guarantee are absolutely at the heart of this Bill and the framework it seeks to create. To achieve the more highly skilled, productive and ambitious nation that we seek, people—not just some people, but all people—need to know that there are great opportunities available to them, whether they desire new skills, higher skills or refreshed skills, and they need to know how to find out how to pursue them. That is where careers information and guidance come in and why they need to be properly covered in the Bill.

People also need to know that the training and educational routes to acquiring the skills to grasp those opportunities are realistically open to them, without undue or unreasonable restrictions or conditions. That is what will generate the enthusiasm and the actual take-up, so that the skills policy and the ambitions behind the Bill achieve the outcomes they deserve. Both the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, have mentioned incentivising learners to encourage them to take part, which may not need to be in the Bill itself but needs to be a central part of the strategy.

If I have always nursed the desire to retrain as a bookbinder—or perhaps as a graphic designer, as in the example of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, also a classicist—but I find that loans are available only for specific skills not including bookbinding, or that they do not apply to my age group, or do not include any allowance for living expenses I might need, or are not available to me because I already have an equivalent-level qualification, or are ruled out for other reasons, I may well decide to drop the whole idea as an unrealisable or impractical aspiration. If I get the impression from the outset that there are likely to be such barriers or limitations to accessing the entitlement, I will probably not pursue it at all. But if the lifelong loan entitlement actually means what it says, it could unleash a wave of energy and creativity, as people embrace it to expand their skills and pursue their goals—and indeed their dreams. The suggestion of noble Lord, Lord Johnson, of a proper economic assessment, with that in mind, of the ELQ requirement and the limitations on creative and arts funding, would be very welcome.

The lifelong loan entitlement and the lifetime skills guarantee—LLE and LSG—should be the twin banners for a skills revolution, or a skills crusade, not just sets of rules, regulations and legislation setting limits on training availability. So I enthusiastically endorse Amendment 92 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and the somewhat similar Amendment 95 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and, again, the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, in their aims to establish a truly all-embracing and inspiring entitlement with a minimum of limitations, driven, above all, by learner aspiration, enthusiasm and desire. The LLE and the LSG together offer a real chance to make education and skills exciting and exhilarating, as they should be. I hope the Government will take that chance, even if not by accepting these amendments.

I wish the Government every success in making progress with this important Bill and with the strategy underlying it. Since this will be my last contribution in Committee, I would like to commend both Ministers—the noble Baronesses, Lady Berridge and Lady Penn—on their contribution to this Committee. I wish them an enjoyable and, I hope, restful—though possibly not, in the case of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn—and very happy recess before we get to grips with the Bill again.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, we have had some really interesting speeches in this group already, but I am afraid that this is the end of that trend. I am merely going to talk about the government amendments, and my noble friend Lord Watson will cover the interesting bits at the end.

They government amendments represent some of the wiring in the basement of higher education that are going to be needed when the Government unveil their renovation plans in the form of the detail of the lifelong loan entitlement. The Minister moved the government amendments in just over two minutes. I want to unpack them a little, so we can understand their potential implications. I confess I may have a suspicious nature, although I am encouraged, having heard the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, that I am not alone in that.

Currently, the different bits of legislation that frame the regulation and funding of higher education are predicated on the unit of education being a course made up of academic years. The Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998—THEA—governs which HE courses attract funding via the student loan system, by referring to the Education Reform Act 1988, while HERA governs which bits of HE are regulated by the Office for Students and are subject to fee limits and more besides. But of course the lifelong loan entitlement is intended to cover not just university degree courses but courses and modules in further and higher education. To make that possible, Clauses 14 amends the regulation-making powers in THEA to allow for the funding of courses in FE and modules in FE and HE, to set a lifetime funding limit, and to allow for funding based not only on the academic year.

The Minister explained that Clause 15 amends the definition of a higher education course in HERA to make it clear that the regulatory regime applies to modules of courses. The way it does that is to say that an HE course is either a course mentioned in Schedule 6 to the Education Reform Act 1988 or a module of such a course, whether or not undertaken as part of such a course. So a course is either a course or a part of a course—I confess I wrestled for a bit with whether a thing could be itself or part of itself. But then government Amendment 91C now distinguishes between a full course and a module for the purposes of HERA. A full course means a higher education course that is not a module of another higher education course. A module is a module of a full course, but which is undertaken otherwise than as part of those courses.

I know, on the face of it, that that sounds like a circular definition, but I have decided the only way I can understand it is as a set of Russian dolls: a smaller Russian doll counts as a module if she fits inside a bigger one and is a part of that set; an identical Russian doll that is not part of a set at all would not be a module; and a full course is the biggest Russian doll which does not fit inside any other Russian doll. I am grateful to the Minister for giving me access to some very clever and kind officials to help me try to understand this regulation—although I should say that their language was rather more precise, and there was no mention of dolls. I hope she can tell me whether I have got that right.

Why does it matter? I think that is up to the Minister to tell us. On access to student finance, can the Minister confirm whether this means that a module can be funded only via the student loan book if it is part of a full HE course? Is it right that the student does not have to be registered for that course, or indeed any course, while taking the module? Could I, say, draw on my lifelong loan entitlement to take the “Introduction to Christian ethics” module, which is part of a theology degree at Lindchester University, without being registered for that degree, or indeed any degree? If so, that raises another question. Modular degrees generally have a limited number of pathways that can be taken through them to reach a qualification, in order to ensure there is a coherence to a degree and that certain essentials are covered. Could a student take a series of modules, each of which is part of a full course but which taken together will never add up to a full course, and therefore could never lead to a qualification?

Do the Government intend to prescribe the size or shape of a module further, either for funding or regulatory purposes? There are lots of modules around: short, intensive modules and long, less intensive modules; modules worth 10 credits and others worth 15 or 20; and modules at level 4, level 5 and level 6. Clause 14 provides that two or more modules can count as a single module—for the purposes, I presume, of student finance. Is that a hint that the Government may want to set a minimum credit value that will be eligible for support under the loan? If the centre gets too stuck into defining what a module is, does it not risk both the autonomy and, crucially, the flexibility of providers—maybe even getting in the way of the innovation the Government say they want?

There are so many more questions that need answering, about choice, compatibility, comparability, funding and lots more. I suspect the Minister will say we need to wait until she brings forward more amendments on Report, but there is one matter she needs to address today: the changes these amendments would make to the powers of the Office for Students. By switching the unit of HE from just a course to either a full course or a module, these amendments would empower Ministers at a later date to allow funding for modules. But it seems to me that they immediately allow the Office for Students to regulate at the level of a module as well as a course. Amendment 91B does place some limits on that by saying, for example, that the OfS cannot request information on modules more often than courses. It also means that the OfS is not obliged to publish information on fee limits for modules, as it is for courses.

But can the Minister tell the Committee if the effect of these amendments is that the unit of higher education can be a module for the purposes of regulation? What will that mean for the way the OfS regulates quality in higher education? Currently its key metrics are student continuation rates, completion rates and progression to managerial and professional jobs. How does that work for modules? If a student takes modules at several different providers, who is responsible for her outcome? Is it the last one she happened to stop at?

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly support the amendment moved by my colleague and noble and learned friend Lord Clarke of Nottingham. We are both members of the House of Lords Select Committee on Youth Unemployment, as are the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who is a supporter of this amendment, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who speaks for the Liberals. We are exploring all ways in which we can improve skills training in our country, which is pretty dismal at the moment and compares very badly with many European countries.

One aspect that the Government boast of is the lifetime guarantee. This affects in particular those people who do not have A-levels and decide in their 30s, 40s or 50s that they would like to take an A-level course. To do that they will have to pay a course fee of about £5,000 to £6,000 a year, for which they may require a loan. As they are studying, they could not apply for the minimum wage or universal credit so, if they are unemployed, they would almost certainly have to take out a maintenance loan of another £6,000 or £7,000. So we would be asking unemployed people to pay £12,000 to acquire an A-level qualification that, had they stayed at school, they would have got for free. It is simply outrageous and unacceptable, and it makes a complete farce of what a lifetime guarantee is.

I am very hopeful that the Government will accept this amendment. Why am I hopeful? Well, about four weeks ago, the Government announced a skills fund on which they are going to spend about £2.5 billion. They suggested four items on which the fund could be based, the first of which was £93 million for free A-levels. They have now said that they want to go into consultation on the skills fund, which means that those original four proposals are on ice. I suggest that they should think very carefully and put the first item back in. That would be a way for the Government to fund this. Can the Minister tell us whether the four items of expenditure on the skills fund are on ice? They have spent most of the £2 billion among them.

I would go further than my noble and learned friend has done. If you go to an FE college at 18 and you get to level 3, you will want, if you are able enough, to go on to level 4, the higher national certificate, or level 5, the higher national diploma. This is where the main skills gap in our country is. If you analyse the skills gap in digital, in engineering or in the creative industries, you see that it is greatest at levels 4 and 5. These are two qualifications just below degree level—you would describe those taking them as high-quality technicians—and we have a huge skills gap in that area. We should be promoting levels 4 and 5.

A course at level 4, which currently costs about £6,000 or £7,000, should be free. If an unemployed person is doing that, they will not be able to claim the living wage or universal credit, so they will need a maintenance grant of probably £6,000 or £7,000. So someone who wants to study at level 4 today for whom the alternative is unemployment has to find a loan of £12,000, which by the time they finish will be £15,000. I do not think that is at all reasonable. Strangely enough, neither did the Department for Education about nine or 10 months ago, because it put to the Treasury the proposal that level 4 should be free for unemployed youngsters, as should level 5, the higher national degree, which is just below level 6—a degree. The Government should consider this proposal and I hope our Select Committee will consider it as well. We have to stimulate real growth at levels 4 and 5. If we do not, our country will fall behind technologically.

I am sure the Government will accept my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke’s proposal today because it would be totally illogical and unfair not to accept it, but I hope they will think a little wider and broader because we have to upskill our country and catch up with Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. We are so far behind. This is a moment at which we can make significant changes for generations of young people to come.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I support both amendments in this group. I put my name down mainly to speak on Amendment 76, which has been so powerfully moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, and to focus on Section 3, about apprenticeship funding for young people before the age of 25, which is badly needed.

The question I am asking myself is, how will this affect the overall funding of apprenticeships and how will it help to deliver, as stated by the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, a stronger focus on levels 4 and 5 as well? Where are those apprenticeships going to come from, and what is going to persuade employers to provide those opportunities? Many employers, of course, have limited capacity to take on new staff, particularly young people coming directly from education without previous working experience, however much they might wish to do so if they could. The result has been that those employers tend to use their levy funds to upskill or reskill existing employees—although, as I have mentioned before, even that may use up only a limited proportion of their available levy funds. That creates yet another incentive for them to recast what training they need in the form of apprenticeships where they can.

So, I strongly support the amendment. My question is, where are those apprenticeships going to come from and what impact are they going to have on the ability of employers to focus on reskilling and upskilling at the same time? I suspect that a significant number of apprenticeships for young people are likely to come from SMEs, yet many are put off from offering apprenticeships because of the bureaucracy involved and a lack of time and resources to manage the process, despite the generous incentives available. I encourage the Government to look at offering specific, more generous incentives to SMEs to take on young people aged 25 or under for level 2 or 3 apprenticeships, including help with their administration and simplified arrangements for fee-paying employers to transfer part of their levy funds to SMEs for this specific purpose. There are such arrangements but they do not seem to be as effective as one might hope.

I always fail to understand why there cannot be more specific support and encouragement for apprenticeship training agencies to run apprenticeship programmes for SMEs, perhaps as a specific element of the local skills improvement plan for a particular area. That would seem a useful way in which an LSIP could contribute to the take-up of apprenticeships in its area, specifically among SMEs and new entrants to the job market, and maybe with a slight slightly broader applicability of the apprenticeship levy than it currently has.

I very much support the provisions in Amendment 80 putting the lifetime skills guarantee on a statutory footing. One of these days, I look forward to hearing an explanation of why the skills guarantee is “lifetime” and the learning entitlement is “lifelong” and what the difference may be; it would make many lives much easier if we just used one term. I hope the Government will accept the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, in particular and explain how they want to achieve a better balance between younger apprenticeships and level 4 and 5 apprenticeships, for example.

[Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is an honour to speak in this group with many noble Lords who have made an enormous and outstanding contribution to the education system in this country. I support both Amendment 76, tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, and Amendment 80, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie. Both amendments seek to provide skills training for those who do not hold level 3 qualifications, and I thank both noble Lords for tabling these important amendments to the Bill, which I believe really enhance it.

The amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, would ensure that a person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to level 3, supplied by an approved provider, if they have not already studied at that level. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has a similar intention but would provide this training only to people between the age of 19 and the state pension age. Given the number of people who continue to work over the state pension age, and given that the Equality Act 2010 makes age discrimination illegal, I prefer the wording of the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke. I also support the work of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, on level 4 qualifications.

The issue of skills training at all ages is important in our changing economy. It is estimated that 35% of current jobs are at high risk of being replaced by automation by 2040, if not earlier. This impacts on workers of all ages, but we must understand that for people who have been made redundant the situation is very difficult. According to figures from the Centre for Ageing Better, over 1 million people between the age of 50 and state pension age are not working but would really like to. One in four men and one in three women in that age group have been out of work for over five years. Many older workers find it very difficult to participate in skills training, and much more so if they left school without gaining qualifications. We must do all that we can to support older workers to participate in training.

The other component of the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, is that an employer receiving apprenticeship funding shall spend at least two-thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at level 2 and 3 before the age of 25. This specifically encourages the training of younger workers at a time when we know that the youth unemployment rate is 13.2%, compared with 4.7% for the whole population. Many young people struggle in our school system and, at the age of 16 and 17, may not yet be in the right mindset to complete their level 2 or 3 qualifications. A few years later, when doing an apprenticeship in an area where they are interested and see the potential to progress their career, is a much better time to gain the qualifications that they were unable to get at school.

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[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, and I support his amendment. If he has to bring it back, I will support it and join him in the Lobby.

I will speak to Amendments 83 and 84, which would ensure that there is always an up to date careers advice strategy in England. I referred to this in my short Second Reading speech, saying that simply offering more further education and training courses alone, although clearly important, will not deliver on the levelling-up agenda and improve the UK’s skills picture. I made the point that advice and guidance on how to access courses and the pathways into certain careers are central to the Government’s ambitions and to the ambitions of the Bill.

In 2017, the Government published a careers strategy, which acknowledged that careers advice had for some time been unevenly distributed across the country, hindering opportunities for some groups to gain insights into different career options. Its aim was to make Britain a fairer place and promote social mobility by ensuring that everyone, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to build a rewarding career. It also promised to assess the breadth and effectiveness of current careers provision in schools and colleges on STEM subjects, and test new approaches if necessary.

The strategy provided a central role for the Careers & Enterprise Company—CEC—tasking it with co-ordinating support for schools and colleges across all the Gatsby benchmarks. It asked schools and colleges to meet the standards set out by the eight Gatsby benchmarks, and introduced the National Careers Service. Assessments of the impact of the careers strategy to date have highlighted the progress made in terms of careers provision in schools and colleges in England as a result of the strategy, and the impact it has had on young people.

A recent report published by the Careers & Enterprise Company, which looked at the impact of schools following the Gatsby benchmarks on post-16 destinations, found that there is a positive relationship between schools using Gatsby benchmarks and where young people end up post 16. The report asserts that improvements made in relation to the Gatsby benchmarks have led to fewer young people becoming NEET—I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, that that is a terrible acronym—saving the Government about £60 million a year in lifetime NEET costs alone.

A different report, by EngineeringUK and seven other STEM and careers organisations, and the Royal Academy of Engineering report, which I mentioned at Second Reading, also highlighted the importance of good careers provision in schools and colleges in England in the drive to encourage more and more diverse groups of young people to choose a career in STEM, and in particular engineering. For example, it praised the positive impact that careers hubs have had on STEM careers provision in schools and colleges. I will come back to that point in relation to Amendment 84. However, the report from the Royal Academy of Engineering also highlights some of the challenges that still persist. It shows that Covid-19 has had a profound impact on how schools can—and do—deliver employer engagement, for example, and it draws attention to the capacity and funding issues hampering the ambition to provide insights into the kinds of careers on offer in the STEM sector to all young people, rather than a select few.

For the Government to succeed in making the UK a science superpower, to achieve net zero and to experience economic success, they need young people and adults to know what careers are on offer and how to get there. As it stands, many pupils leave school unaware of the exciting career opportunities available to them, for example, in the STEM sector. A misunderstanding of STEM professions among many young people and a lack of awareness of the pathways that can be taken into STEM careers mean that many pupils, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, still do not visualise themselves being successful in these roles. In order for the Bill to succeed, we need to sort out the loans system, and make sure that the lifetime skills guarantee is truly that—but we also need to make sure that young people and adults have access to information, advice and guidance and are inspired to go into the careers that this country needs.

The 2017 careers strategy came to an end in 2020 and there is as yet nothing to replace it. Although the White Paper implies that the Government will continue with this strategy, I would like to know from the Minister what the plans are. My amendment aims to ensure that careers provision will continue to be considered an important piece of the education and skills puzzle, and will have the status and funding it requires to succeed. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, also mentioned schools and, although my amendment does not include schools or secondary education for skills advice, I think that should be included.

I will now move on very briefly to Amendment 84, which follows on from Amendment 83. The proposed new clause looks to ensure that all further education providers in England—and, through that, by default, all secondary education providers—will be able to access the support, training and guidance that careers hubs can offer. As defined on the CEC website, a careers hub is a group of between 20 and 40 secondary schools and colleges in a dedicated area which work together to deliver the Gatsby benchmarks. Collaborating with business partners, the public, education and voluntary sectors, they help deliver the Gatsby benchmarks and improve careers outcomes for young people.

As I mentioned in my earlier contribution, career hubs play a pivotal role in the careers provision landscape. Schools and colleges that are part of a careers hub generally perform better in the Gatsby benchmarks. They also fare better on certain aspects of STEM careers provision than those not in the hub. For example, among schools and colleges in careers hubs recently surveyed by EngineeringUK, 80% said their pupils received at least one STEM employer encounter every year, compared with 53% among schools and colleges not in the careers hubs. The Skills for Jobs White Paper, which predates the Bill, made a commitment to continue with the rollout of careers hubs in England. However, the White Paper was much less clear on timelines and the extent to which the network will be expanded. The Bill itself makes no mention of careers hubs, so I ask the Minister: is it the Government’s intention to continue with the careers hubs, and will they support the CEC in rolling out this programme? Will it be rolled out by the end of 2022?

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 83 and 84 in this group, from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and it is a pleasure to follow him. I will also speak in support of Amendment 78, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and Amendment 82, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. My approach tends to be the opposite of that of the noble Lord, Lord Baker; I tend to start with a written speech and then have to try to update it in line with what people have said before—which sometimes results in a greater degree of incoherence than might otherwise have been the case.

A comprehensive, well-informed and properly funded system of careers information, advice and guidance for people of all ages and stages should be an integral part of our education and skills system. Such a system needs to be based around professional advisers who, firstly, have a very good awareness and information about the opportunities and skills available in their area and, therefore, should be properly engaged in the local skills improvement plan process; and, secondly, are capable of giving personal advice to the individuals they work with. That means, firstly, being able to understand the interests and abilities of those individuals and, secondly—by no means the lesser part—understanding the different pathways and approaches to pursing those interests and achieving the aims that the individual seeks.

The Bill is designed to create the framework for the post-16 education system going forward. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, it would seem extraordinary if such a framework made no reference to careers guidance. The four amendments in this group seek to ensure that the proposed new arrangements under the Bill include essential provisions relating to careers guidance. The one I would perhaps add to those—or at least to the planned guidance on LSIPs—is a requirement for careers guidance professionals to be fully involved in the development of local skills improvement plans, along with the other partner organisations.

Amendment 83 would introduce a duty to publish a careers strategy for England, with updates every three years. As my noble friend said earlier, the careers strategy launched in 2017, which expired at the end of last year, has played an important part in improving the quality of careers guidance over recent years, largely through the efforts of the Careers & Enterprise Company, the National Careers Service and other bodies, including LEPs, careers hubs and the Career Development Institute, representing careers professionals. One of the key elements of that was including a requirement for employer engagement and workplace experiences, which again links to the Bill’s aims.

Careers guidance nationally is now less patchy than it was, and schools are making steady progress towards achieving the eight Gatsby benchmarks of good career guidance. I hope the Minister will indicate in response how that momentum will be maintained, with a careers strategy that properly integrates national and local needs and provides the resources and professional support to schools and colleges to deliver careers guidance in line with those needs.

Local careers hubs have been a central feature of the strategy and currently cover 45% of secondary schools and colleges in England, with a focus on areas of disadvantage. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned, they have proved highly effective in careers education delivery, with results better than those in areas that do not have careers hubs, and should be available to all education providers across England, as required by Amendment 84.

Other aims of a new careers strategy might include ensuring lifelong availability of personal, face-to-face, professional careers guidance for everyone who needs it; boosting the pipeline of qualified careers development professionals to provide that personal guidance—the Government have put resource into the National Careers Service, but other professional advisers need funding as well; increasing co-operation between the Careers & Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service—I would be interested to hear when we are going to hear some of the results of the work that Sir John Holman is doing in that area; and including the role of careers guidance in initial teacher training, so that new teachers are fully aware of the importance of that role.

Of course, the strategy would also need to ensure that there is adequate funding so that schools and colleges can access the support they need to deliver high-quality careers guidance. A while ago it was the responsibility of schools—it still is—but they do not have all the resources or skills they need to deliver it.

Amendment 78 would require Ofsted to take into account the careers advice provided by FE colleges in conducting its inspections, and further would make it impossible for a college to receive a good or outstanding rating unless its careers advice were also rated good or outstanding. This would provide an important incentive for colleges to give proper focus to their careers guidance efforts. I hope the Minister will either accept it or at least explain what other mechanisms the Government might use to ensure that careers guidance in colleges meets required standards.

Finally, Amendment 82 from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, provides another vital brick in the construction of a strong careers guidance system. As he said, the Baker clause inserted into the Technical and Further Education Act 2017 is honoured more in the breach than the observance, so Amendment 82 would make it a statutory duty for secondary schools to provide such access and is more specific about the precise form it should take.

The great majority of apprentices I encounter still have not learned about apprenticeship opportunities from their schools. This amendment could make a real difference in making more young people aware of the technical education, training and employment opportunities available to them, including apprenticeships, and I strongly support it. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government will ensure that high-quality career guidance will be an integral part of the system created by the Bill.

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I think that Kickstart is not over yet, but it needs to be reviewed. I hope the Bill and this probing amendment might make us think again about how it can be improved, expanded and give real opportunities.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I am a believer in the value of the Kickstart scheme and would like to see it extended in the manner suggested by Amendment 87, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Storey—Lord Storey-cum-Addington—and Lord Shipley, following a review of its operation and experience to date.

My own former employability training business was involved some years ago in the delivery of the Labour Government’s Future Jobs Fund, which, like Kickstart, enabled employers to take on young people for six months, with their salary paid by the Government. Many of the young people involved had never worked before and faced significant challenges in entering the job market, including lack of work-readiness and employability skills, poor educational attainment, lack of funds for travel or even suitable clothing, chaotic lifestyles, lack of aspiration, substance abuse, and records of offending and imprisonment. A period of six months’ employment, with employers willing to make initial allowances for their circumstances and much personal support from the organisations delivering the programme—including Barnardo’s and Nacro, by which we were contracted—was enough for many of them to acquire the skills and behaviours needed to become reliable and useful employees, often with those same employers they had been with for six months. This is not a low-cost approach and not for everyone, but I believe it is an effective way of enabling many young people in these specific circumstances to make a successful transition into work.

Kickstart has got off to a rather bumpy start, as we have heard from other noble Lords, with delays and difficulties both in employers being accepted on to the programme—initially through the gateway process, which has fortunately been removed, but there are still quite a few hurdles to get over—and, more particularly, in recruiting candidates through the rules of the Jobcentre Plus scheme. But I believe it offers the right approach for the young people in the target group I have described. I hope the Minister can tell us what plans the Government have to review the scheme so far and to consider whether, and in what form, it might be further extended to perhaps meet the specific needs of the most challenging young people within the overall skills system created by the Bill.

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I too am a fan of Kickstart, and I hope that the Government will consolidate and build on it. A review, as proposed in this amendment, seems a timely suggestion. I support a lot of what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, said, and I would add only two emphases. First, there are certainly some occasions when a Kickstart six-month placement ought to be combined with a course of training. For instance, if we employed Kickstarters to do environmental work, it would not do them much good if they had not achieved their chainsaw certification and other necessary qualifications to enable them to continue in the industry. Sometimes the Kickstart placement ought to be bundled in with training, and that ought to be made easy.

Secondly, £1,500 for looking after a Kickstarter is really not much. You have to have spare employee time substantially beyond that value to make good use of a Kickstarter and to give them a really good experience. I hope the Government will review people’s experience on that front and consider what it would take to really recompense employers—particularly small employers, who often do not have a lot of spare capacity—for the effort they are making, day to day, looking after a Kickstarter.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

May I say to whoever’s job it is, it would be useful to have list of people who have withdrawn from speaking; it is really difficult to know when we are about to be called, but that is a different matter. I rise to support the amendments, particularly Amendment 24, and to agree with my noble friends Lord Watson and Lord Liddle.

I understand completely why the Minister and the Government want local voices to have a say in what the nature of the partnership should be. That absolutely makes sense. Our country is very rich in diversity, with urban areas, rural areas, clusters of villages and small towns. I can see that see that the same model for everyone might not work. If the starting point is trying to let local people feel that they have ownership of this, I can see that and I share that starting point. What I think is a recipe for disaster is not to offer any guidance and to explore with everybody exactly what the criteria might be to determine what the local partnerships are.

I am not sure whose job it is to propose what “local” means. Does it have to be negotiated locally? That could take some time. Anybody who has been to a constituency Boundary Commission review will know how tempers can rise when talking about anything that has a boundary. I am not sure who it is who comes up with the idea in the first place of what the local area is. I am not sure what the criteria are that they have been advised they should make their decision against. I am not quite sure of the process by which somebody somewhere says, “Yes, that local partnership is local and covering the right areas.” I am not sure what happens to any geographical area that no one wants and has not managed to get a place in any partnership. There are, very often, left-out areas. There will be some areas that are really popular, and everyone will want them in their area; there will be some that are really tough and challenging, and no one will want them. I am not sure how all that is to be sorted out.

What I would be looking for is to keep that idea of not forcing the same on everybody, but within a much stronger framework of guidance than we have at the moment and a clear idea of process. It puts me in mind of when, some years ago, the Government—I think it was the coalition Government actually—set out regional schools commissioners. They decided to have no regard to any existing boundaries. So, instead of following the local authority boundary or a government office boundary, they made it up as they went along. It was an utter disaster, and there were some poor people having to negotiate with more than one regional commissioner at any one time. All that happened was that bureaucracy flourished. With the number of hours that were spent by one local authority that had schools within two regional schools commissioner boundaries, it just was not a model to follow. The Government, very sensibly, got rid of it and, I think, made sure—I may be wrong about this—that it followed the government office regional boundaries. I may be wrong about that, but it certainly makes sense now, and I know we are not spending as much time trying to chase appropriate regional school commissioners.

Therefore, I cannot see any example of where this decide-it-yourself, let-us-see-what-happens, get-on-with-it model actually works. It might not be something people like but—to be honest—let us get on with the job. Let us not set up a system where we will spend hours fighting about the nature of the structure that delivers it, rather than using our resources, energy and effort on what should be delivered.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, has rather pre-empted some of what I intended to say in support of Amendment 24. I very much welcome the announcement of the first group of trailblazers. It is, of course, the intention that all areas of the country should, in due course, be covered by a local skills improvement plan. I very much agree with some of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, have said about how we make sure the whole system works.

Now that the first employer representative bodies have been designated, and the local areas for which they are responsible defined, it will surely still be necessary for the Government to provide and update guidance on the criteria against which further bids will be evaluated, as required by this amendment and as we learn about the experience of that first group. There needs to be a broad package of guidance addressing all the issues that we have discussed so far in our debates. That is not just on how local areas should be organised to ensure there are no not-spots, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but also on who should be involved in LSIPs, what their role should be, what resources are available to them, what reporting and monitoring is required and so on.

It remains rather difficult, at least for me, to assess the merits of LSIPs in the abstract. I was very taken by the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, last week that the Government might share one or two model LSIPs with us to help us in our scrutiny of the Bill. Will the Minister clarify as much as she can, in her response, what plans there are for guidance to be provided, not least in time for the next stage of our own debate?

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[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I support these three amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and others. It is particularly important that the views and aspirations of individual learners should be taken account of by LSIPs, not least those who find that their ambitions cannot be met by existing employers or employment opportunities within their current environment or circumstances, and those who wish to start their own businesses. LSIPs need to be aware of opportunities relevant to wider national skills needs, as Amendment 33 requires.

I was very struck by the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, last week on the views he had heard from unemployed young people. They may need specific personalised help and support to prepare themselves for work and get into the skills system at all after long periods of unemployment or, perhaps, no previous employment. This is most likely to be provided by independent training providers, often within the frame- work of schemes such as Kickstart, but it is not clear to me whether the Bill makes provision for funding such extra support; perhaps the Minister could say how she expects that need to be met.

I also share the view expressed by many noble Lords of the need for a national skills strategy to provide a clear and coherent framework for the education and skills system. The national strategic skills audit proposed by Amendment 85 would be an important part of developing such a strategy, and I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that the Government are planning something along those lines to underpin the new system which they intend to create and for which the Bill provides a framework.

I imagine that this may well be another part of the remit of the skills and productivity board, which the Minister has mentioned from time to time, so I found the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on his attempts to find out more about the board somewhat disturbing. I hope the Minister may be able to tell us more about that.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, as last week, I have added my name to Amendments 15 and 33 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and I support his Amendment 85. He set out very clearly why those amendments are needed and, on the principle that I do not repeat things just because I have not yet said them, I will not go into detail on that. We have already explained why potential students should be taken into account.

Amendment 33 would add a clause to ensure that the employer representative body is required to be aware of skills in demand nationally which may not be in demand in the local area. If young people or adults are enthusiastic to learn skills which may not be available locally but are in demand elsewhere, it is really important that national demand should be recognised and skills training made available, even if the skills are not, or not yet, required locally. If a young person or adult is desperate to become a farrier or an aeronautical engineer but there is nothing in their locality, they should be enabled to follow their talents and interests. We must have a national picture of skills training and, if need be, there should be help with travel for those who want to pursue their skills out of area.

The amendments make it clear that skills needs and shortages must be seen in a national context, even if that means that those training need to move to find work. Again, let us never forget distance learning, which can be valuable in such times and has no barriers.

The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, made the valid point that we must do some blue skies thinking about what will be needed in future, and Amendment 85 mentions medium and long-term national skills. Who would have thought two years ago that we would all have needed to become proficient in Teams and Zoom? It is quite a wonderful advance really, but I do not think anyone predicted it, and we must always respond to unpredictable events in future.

My noble friend Lady Sheehan has given our support to Amendment 85 in this group, because a national strategic skills audit would be an invaluable tool to assess how our skills shortages are being addressed, alongside the invaluable task of working towards net-zero future jobs. This need not be an excessively cumbersome or costly exercise, but having a body with an overview of skills is surely effective for jobs and training. I know that the Government are always reluctant to set up new bodies, but this one would have a co-ordinating role which could prove invaluable in generating skills in the right places. I hope that the Minister will see that this group of amendments is well worthy of government support.

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Moved by

[Lord Aberdare]

27: Clause 1, page 2, line 33, at end insert—
“(8) The Secretary of State must publish a response to the local skills improvement plans published by the local designated bodies across England.(9) The response must include—(a) a national skills map based on the skills needs identified in the local skills improvement plans, and(b) an action plan outlining how the Secretary of State will support local areas to address the skills needs in their area.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment aims to ensure that there is not only a feeding in of national policy into local skills improvement plans, but also that local information and information about skills gaps is fed back into national policy making. This is to ensure that government can identify national skills shortages more easily and more quickly, and act accordingly.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I am pleased to move Amendment 27, originally in the name of my noble friend Lord Patel, who is unable to be here this afternoon. He has kindly shared with me the points that he wished to make and I will make full use of them. I will also speak briefly to Amendment 30.

Amendment 27 aims to ensure that, in addition to national policy feeding into local skills improvement plans, local information about skills gaps and local skills challenges is also fed back into national policy-making. Real-time labour market data, as well as insights into what is happening locally around education and skills options for young people and those wanting to retrain, is vitally important to ensure that the Secretary of State and his department have the insights and evidence needed to make strategic national decisions about education and skills policy.

I hope the Minister can give us some more clarity about how the LSIPs proposed in the Bill will feed into the work of the DfE and BEIS to develop a strategic approach to addressing the skills gaps on a national level. How will information within LSIPs help shape and inform national industrial policy? How will the Government use the reforms in the Bill to identify and respond to regional skills needs important to the overall strategic goals of the UK, such as specialised engineering skills?

Several proposed amendments to this Bill aim to ensure that LSIPs will take account of national strategies and policy—as they should—but what is missing is a feedback loop from the local to the national, which is what this amendment seeks to achieve. Local skills improvement plans have the potential to provide rich insights into what is going on locally around the skills businesses need and the difficulties they may or may not have in accessing them locally. They should, one hopes, provide insights into how local areas will address any skills shortages and how effective these measures prove to be in the long run.

Local skills improvement plans will provide detail and data that should enable the Government to get a much better picture of the skills situation in this country and allow them to map out where there are potential issues. This will foster an understanding of whether particular skills gaps are localised, and therefore need to be addressed locally, or whether there is a pattern across the country that may require national policy interventions in addition to local action.

This amendment is asking the Government to provide a response to the LSIPs as a whole, including a skills map and an action plan. This is surely a reasonable proposal that can only help to further the Government’s ambitions around productivity and joined-up thinking. Ensuring that there is a functioning feedback loop from national to local and from local to national will enable government, both local and national, to identify and address skills shortages more easily and quicker.

Turning to Amendment 30, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which I also support, I am rather surprised that it should be needed at all and that the publication of LSIPs is not already in the Bill. Every LSIP needs to be available, not only to all interested parties in the education and skills system within the area it covers, as specified in the amendment—particularly providers of careers guidance—but also more widely, both so that others can learn from different approaches being taken and as input to national skills policy-making.

Apart from the essential publication of the LSIPs, as in the amendment, there needs to be a process for regular progress and performance reporting, not least to promote the sharing of experience and good practice, as well as for monitoring and accountability purposes. This is yet another element of the framework that is not clear. It is not clear if that feedback loop is going to be there, what sort of performance monitoring is going to be in place, and what happens if LSIPs do not reach the standard one might hope from them. I beg to move.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I find myself in a difficult situation with these amendments. I listened carefully to the Minister responding to the last group of amendments, and I feel that she was right: a lot of what noble Lords are rightly concerned about ought to appear in the guidance. I do not want the Bill to be overly complicated, with every prescriptive concern, but I do want an assurance from the Minister that the guidance will address some of the valid points made by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and others.

While I have the Floor, I am concerned about the view that, somehow, employers will not be looking ahead. That is not my experience of dealing with employers. They are concerned; they have had to look ahead. Like hanging, the pandemic has concentrated their minds wonderfully, but it was also happening beforehand. Look at all the work in establishing new standards, where employers are involved; they are taking into account their future skills needs and that new green skills will be required.

The Minister was right to remind us about the vitally important work that jobcentre coaches are doing. I would not say that I am absolutely satisfied they have got all of that right, but they are on the right track to ensuring that young people are aware of the skills that they will need in a job market that is changing significantly. We know what some of these are already; we know they need a reasonable standard of maths, English and digital skills—they are absolutely essential. Some of them are fully equipped, certainly on the digital skills front, while others will need some extra assistance and training. The Minister referred to lifelong learning, and we also have traineeships and Kickstart, so there are a number of things the Government are providing. Is everything working absolutely right? No, there are things that I believe—as I have said in a previous debate —need reform, and the apprenticeship levy is one.

I urge the House to be wary of trying to load up the Bill with every single detail. The Minister was right when she said that there is a role for guidance. If there needs to be a reference within the Bill to the fact that some of these points will be covered in the guidance, that is all well and good. I attach a lot of importance to the guidance.

I do not share the pessimism of some that this is a badly framed Bill that will not involve local people as it should. Of course we are going to go through a learning curve, as the participants in creating the local skills improvement plans develop the technique of doing this. What the Government should do on a national level is encourage best practice, looking at examples of where it has been done really well and passing that kind of information on. I suspect I may be in the minority here, but it is no bad thing to have a range of views. I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will take into account the points I have made—she has also made them before—about the balance of what is in guidance and what needs to be in the Bill.

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[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to be able to speak to this group of amendments relating to publication and response to local skills improvement plans. We expect them to be an important resource to inform decision-making by local providers, stakeholders and national policymakers.

On publication, in Clause 1(7) it is clear that a local skills improvement plan means one that has been

“approved and published by the Secretary of State”.

I presume that that will be on GOV.UK. I cannot prescribe that, but I do not think that we need to go into any further detail in relation to that, or to put such matters in the Bill. I am grateful for the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Young, about what we do and do not put in a Bill and what goes into statutory instruments—and then, of course, what is published in guidance.

Amendment 27 talks about how local skills improvement plans can inform national policy on skills. As outlined previously, we expect the plans to be informed by, and in turn inform, national skills priorities highlighted by the Skills and Productivity Board. This is envisaged to be a two-way relationship. In relation to the collaboration between employer representative bodies and the co-ordination point, which has been quite a theme throughout a number of amendments, the Secretary of State can set terms and conditions for the employer representative body and, should it be necessary, they can be used to mandate in the approval that they collaborate—but, obviously, one would hope that that will not be necessary.

On the point from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I hope that the trailblazers will reveal whether his doubts will materialise about whether the appropriate national skills priorities are taken into account.

On the approval process by the Secretary of State, it is not about the Secretary of State second-guessing the priorities and actions agreed by local areas but about ensuring that a robust process has been followed. In Clause 3, there are provisions that enable the Secretary of State to remove the designation if he sees fit: if terms and conditions have been broken, if the body is no longer impartial or reasonably representative or if it does not have regard to the guidance. Of course, when one talks about process, one normally thinks about judicial review—but, if a plan says that we are going to invest in coal mining in an area, for example, there might be a case for such a priority that is way outside. But it is a process that he will be looking at; he will not be second-guessing the choices and priorities decided by the employer representative body.

As I have said, we expect the LSIPs to complement the funding system reforms outlined in the Skills for Jobs White Paper. The consultation that I mentioned was launched today, aiming to give providers more autonomy to use government funding to meet the skills needs of local employers, including those articulated in LSIPs. We expect these plans to be a relevant factor for the Secretary of State to consider when making decisions about funding and support for local areas. Again, implicit in that is a co-ordination point as well.

Turning to Amendment 30, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, concerning the publication and distribution of LSIPs, I have mentioned Clause 1(7). The ERBs will lead the development of the plans, and the Secretary of State will approve and publish them. Obviously, if they are defective, there is the remedy I outlined for the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. They will be published on a website to ensure that relevant bodies across England can easily find and access them, and this will be publicised through appropriate communication channels. The department has good relationships with stakeholders, as I say.

I hope that my remarks in relation to these amendments have provided some reassurance to noble Lords. One noble Lord who requested a meeting—it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—in relation to these matters. Of course, I am happy to engage with any noble Lord to give further detail outside of Committee. I hope to be able to report to the House on the progress of the trailblazers, but they are not due to conclude until March 2022. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment and that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, will not feel the need to move his when it is reached.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken and the Minister for her response. This is a Bill whose aims I strongly support. It is absolutely focused in the right direction, and it has lots of great ideas in it. My occasional frustration is that I do not quite see how it is going to work in various aspects that have been raised by a number of noble Lords. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, that it may well make sense to answer a lot of these points in the guidance rather than in the Bill itself, but we do not have the guidance and we do not know what is going to be in it so all we can do is say “We want this to be dealt with somewhere” and keep asking how it is all going to work in practice. Having said all that, I live in considerable hope and expectation, and I am happy to withdraw my noble friend’s amendment.

Amendment 27 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is an unexpected pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington, with his straight talking. I rise to support the noble Lord, Lord Storey, in introducing a greater degree of flexibility in the use of employers apprenticeship levy funds.

I am particularly glad to see the involvement of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, who brings practical experience of what works from running a training business and of the red tape—my words, not his—of complying with regulatory conditions, which I fear this Bill increases too much. The backdrop to all this is a dramatic fall in apprenticeship numbers in recent years—exactly the opposite of what we wanted and promised to achieve. A great deal of effort has been put into improving the quality and level of apprenticeships but I fear that, perversely, this has excluded many who would have benefited from the discipline and recognition of a successful apprenticeship, for example in my old industry of retail. However, my noble friend the Minister may have a better explanation for the decline and be able to reassure us that the fall has come to an end.

I was at the birth of the apprenticeship levy as the Minister who took the legislation, the child of Nick Boles, through our House. As noble Lords may have sensed earlier, I am passionate about apprenticeships, which were beginning to be a lost art, but I did have some carefully disguised doubts about the design of the arrangements for administering the levy. The system is a bureaucratic one and was led by education, rather than employers, so bigger employers paid a substantial levy. This often came off their existing training budgets; they were then unable to fix their training into the mould laid down by the Civil Service, so the levy ended up as a tax.

Perhaps my noble friend the Minister can explain why things are better now. In particular, where a company has surplus levy credits, can these be allocated to their supply chain or pledged to other companies without the levy payer having to become responsible in any way for the training in that other firm? That requirement was a real barrier to good practice and spreading the levy into the supply chain. What is the current cap on the new arrangements in percentage or other terms? Has the inevitable move to digital made the system more efficient, with fewer requirements to keep unnecessary records for inspection and more trust in employers to lead and train their apprentices? Or have more requirements been laid down in the digital world because, in theory, it is so very easy?

Amendment 39 seems to suggest that the levy funds could be diverted in other ways, which I might be more concerned about if it led to pressure for a rise in the levy. Companies can ill afford a levy increase at present, especially those whose training budgets have been hit hard by Covid. Before we reach Report, I would like to understand better what is planned for apprenticeships. Apprenticeships provide a passport to mobility from one job to a better one. They provide a route to advancement to people who do not need or want to go to university and incur debt doing so. If we could massively increase their numbers and their status on the German model, that would contribute to happiness and to growth.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I suspect that her knowledge of apprenticeships is far greater than mine and I appreciate her remarks. I also strongly agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said at the beginning of this debate.

I have added my name to this important amendment because apprenticeships need to be an integral part of the new skills and education system which the Government are rightly seeking to create. They are employer-led and job-focused, and they cover all levels, from GCSEs up to degree level. Through the levy, they provide a mechanism whereby employers contribute to the cost of skills training—where, at times, they have been less than forthcoming.

However, as we have heard, there is a widespread recognition that the levy is not working as well as it should. Relatively few employers are able to use more than a small proportion of their levy funds. Even for major employers in the energy and utilities sector, it is only just over 50%. So, to maximise the funding they can recoup, they tend to use a high proportion of the funds for apprenticeships that are about upskilling or reskilling existing employees, rather than taking on or training new, young apprentices. This is perfectly understandable and, of course, reskilling and upskilling are good things to do—but the result is that the number of 16 to 25 year-old apprentices has not grown nearly as much as the number of over-25s. Although there are mechanisms for employers to transfer up to 25% of their levy funds to other employers who can use them, the process seems overcomplicated and take-up has been pretty low.

At the same time as levy payers are unable to use all their levy funds—with much of the unused funding going back to the Treasury—there appears to be a shortage of apprenticeship funding for non-levy payers. So the impact of the levy on the total funding available for skills training has been rather less than might have been hoped. It is not even clear whether the total amount of funding going into apprenticeships is significantly greater than before the levy was introduced.

The word that crops up most often in discussions with employers about the levy is “inflexible”. As I have said, apprenticeships will surely be a significant element of LSIPs and they need to be properly integrated. I have felt for some time that it would make sense to recast the apprenticeship levy as a wider skills levy—perhaps with a lower payment threshold to bring more employers into the net of contributing towards training. But, at least, if employers in an LSIP area are not able to use all their levy funds, why should it not be possible for those funds to be used for other, defined LSIP training priorities? In any case, what is needed is a review of the apprenticeship levy system in the light of experience to date. It must be clear how it relates to the wider post-16 education and skills system, as set out in the White Paper and now in this Bill.

Amendment 39 does no more than encourage the Secretary of State to conduct such a review. In my view, that is the answer to the argument that it does not belong in this Bill. Well, it does belong in this Bill—it is fundamental to it—and the review is to ensure that levy funds are used in a way that is integrated with the priorities of local skills plans and properly reflects employers’ needs. Of course, such a review must not reduce the amount of funding available for the apprenticeships that are so badly needed. It should seek to maximise the funding available from the levy and to optimise its use in pursuing local and national skills priorities. I look forward to the Minister telling us how this will be achieved—but the review proposed by the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, would be a very good place to start.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

We will go back to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, to see whether he wishes to participate.

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Moved by

[Lord Aberdare]

72: Clause 18, page 22, line 18, leave out paragraph (b)
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that relevant providers will not be charged further costs when a provider’s contract for services with the Education and Funding Agency already requires a contractor to maintain at its own cost a policy or policies of insurance.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, this is a probing amendment intended to explore more fully the Government’s intentions in respect of independent training providers—ITPs—and their role in relation to the provisions of the Bill. I was delighted that my noble friend Lady Greengross raised this issue right at the beginning of our debate, so it has in a sense been bookended by ITPs.

According to the Bill’s impact assessment, there were 3,737 ITPs in 2019-20, about half of them small businesses. Some 700 of these are members of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, delivering vocational learning and employability support to 350,000 employers. They train around three-quarters of apprentices and young people on traineeships, as well as delivering adult education and programmes for the unemployed.

Some ITPs are large and well resourced, but the great majority are small, demand-led specialist businesses, often in towns and rural areas not served by colleges. There are 1,186 towns in England, I gather, but only about 170 FE colleges. Employers choose them because they are responsive and fleet of foot, as my noble friend Lord Bichard pointed out at Second Reading, and reach the parts other training bodies cannot reach, filling gaps in available training provision. The quality of their training is evidenced both in Ofsted reports and in employer and learner satisfaction surveys, with generally higher ratings than FE colleges. As such, they are an extremely important part of the education and skills landscape, and should be fully involved in the development and delivery of LSIPs. They should also receive a fair share of the funding available under government-supported schemes, whether directly or, more often, as subcontractors to larger providers. This is by no means always the case: frequently the funding available to ITPs is capped or reduced, with the result that they are unable to deliver the level of training for which they have capacity, for which there is demand, and on which their business plans have been based.

The main focus of the Bill, in respect of ITPs, is on protecting students from the effects of providers making unplanned exits from the market and failing to complete delivery of contracted training. There have of course been such failures, some of them high-profile and resulting in learners being left with debt on their loans but no course to complete. Again, according to the Bill’s impact assessment, 60 ITPs made unplanned exits in 2019-20, but there are many reasons for unplanned exits and it is not clear how many involved scandal or fraud, or what impact there may have been on learners. I have seen little evidence to justify the unduly negative reputation of the ITP sector, nor am I convinced that the measures proposed in the Bill would resolve the problems that exist. On the contrary, I fear that they might have the opposite effect, by forcing providers out of business, or discouraging new entrants to the market, thereby reducing innovation, competition and availability of needed training. The Government’s own impact assessment for the Bill admits that the measures

“are likely to have a significant impact on small or micro businesses from a resource and cost perspective.”

There was no mention of a list of providers in January’s White Paper, and there has been no consultation on the proposal, although this is promised for next spring, by which time the Bill will no doubt have been passed. The Bill would create a new list of relevant providers, and to be eligible to receive government funding an ITP would have to be included on this list, which would require it to meet a series of conditions and to pay a fee. I have no problem with the idea of such a list, nor with its being a prerequisite for receiving government funding. There is already a register of apprenticeship training providers, including many ITPs, and a broader register of training organisations that, somewhat ironically, is being decommissioned at the end of this month.

I do worry, however, about the specific conditions likely to be required for inclusion on the list, and the fact that they appear, albeit only as possibilities, in the Bill before there has been any consultation. These conditions include requirements for student support plans, for insurance cover, for providers to be fit and proper persons, and for the provision of information to, and taking action on directions from, the Secretary of State. The Bill also makes provision for fees to be charged for entry on to the list. Some of these conditions seem perfectly acceptable, and indeed are already required under existing ESFA contracts—which is where I believe they are more appropriately based—but I would argue that imposing this additional level of centralised regulation and cost is disproportionate and potentially damaging. It is based on the idea of a unified system of protection for all learners, without recognising the substantial differences between small independent providers and more established publicly funded bodies, such as FE colleges and schools.

There are particular concerns over the possible insurance condition. ESFA rules already require providers to maintain a range of insurance cover, including professional indemnity, employers’ liability and public liability insurance, but the Bill’s impact assessment seems to envisage a new form of insurance to offset costs to the Government in the event of a provider failure. Such insurance does not currently exist, and it is not clear how it might work in practice, let alone what it might cost. My amendment therefore proposes simply removing the mention of insurance cover from the list of example conditions in the Bill.

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[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for the agreement in principle that a list of independent training providers is a requirement, as I believe it was suggested in this House in previous legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, is correct: the core focus of the list is to protect learners and reduce the significant disruption to learners that provider failure can cause. We value highly the role of relevant providers, including independent training providers and in particular those small providers noble Lords have mentioned. We are not unduly negative at all about their role in providing a diverse and innovative learning offer. They provide a great deal of variety to many learners.

The provisions in Clause 18(7) include a requirement for a provider to have insurance for examples of conditions that may be specified in regulations that providers must meet in order to be on the list. In a similar way, subsection (10) gives examples of provisions that may be specified in regulations in connection with the keeping of the list, which would ultimately help deliver a well-functioning, transparent and fair scheme to all those involved.

We propose that the student support plans we envisage providers having will, subject to consultation—which I will mention further—follow the approach in the HE sector, where the Office for Students requires a statement of the level of risks to the continuation of study. We must remember this is study paid for by the taxpayer, and obviously it is in everybody’s interests that that course of study is completed.

I would like to allay the fears of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox: as the clauses require, we will consult on the conditions and provisions for being on the list, prior to making the first set of regulations, to help ensure that those conditions manage and mitigate the risk of disorderly exit. That consultation will allow us to fully take into account the views of those affected by the scheme, particularly the small providers noble Lords have outlined.

I turn to the specifics of the amendments. Amendment 72 is intended to ensure relevant providers will not be subject to further costs relating to obtaining insurance cover. The introduction of insurance, or an equivalent, may be useful in preventing or mitigating the risk of provider failure and assist with learner transfers at that point. If we were to introduce a condition in relation to insurance, the aim would be for learners to benefit from greater continuity of provision. Clause 18(9) allows different conditions to be applied for different descriptions of providers. It is not one size fits all. This would ensure that, where appropriate, we could make the scheme as flexible as possible.

Amendment 74 is intended to probe how the charging of fees in connection with entries on the list will be regulated. It is reasonable to expect that some fees may be necessary to recover the costs—I emphasise “costs”—of administering the list. It is important that we retain the ability to introduce fees if they are deemed necessary to run an effective and fiscally responsible scheme. I can, however, offer an assurance that this would be the sole purpose of any fees. They would be set to a reasonable level, with reasonable notice and with consideration of the impact on providers of all sizes. There would be no intention to make a profit at the expense of providers.

Regulations to create the list are subject to the affirmative procedure, so there will be further opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny of any conditions or provisions specified. This includes regulations relating to any requirements for providers to have insurance or an equivalent, if proposed in the regulations following consultation, as well as any requirement to charge fees. If regulations setting out the basis for charging fees were to change again in the future, those amending regulations would also be subject to the affirmative procedure.

I therefore hope the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment and that the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, will not feel the need to move her amendment when it is reached.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, who made some good points, very strongly. I entirely agreed with her.

Despite the Minister’s hope, I am rather less comfortable with her response. This is going to have a very big impact, particularly on the smaller ITPs. The Minister talked about it being designed to avoid significant disruption to learners. What is this “significant disruption” and where are the examples? I have heard of two major cases, and a lot of others where nobody can produce any evidence at all, so I am not clear whether the problem being addressed justifies the scale of the sledgehammer being used to address it. I appreciate that the conditions in the Bill are examples, but the fact that they are there seems to make it very likely that they will turn up as conditions when the actual contracts get written. I would much rather see that left to the ESFA or the contracts, or whatever.

I think the Minister also mentioned that the approach was based on the higher education sector, but there is no comparison at all between a university and some of these small ITPs. It is just ludicrous to have the same sort of requirements placed on them as would be placed on a university. I very much hope that this consultation will be serious and deep, and taken great account of when it happens. I also hope that the fee will indeed be reasonable.

Before I withdraw my amendment, as the only Back-Bencher left standing I congratulate those on the Front Benches who remain in place, and particularly the two Ministers, on their efforts today, unhappy as I am with this final response. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 72 withdrawn.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

I do not know what the inspection and transformation regime for colleges of further education will be, but, as part of the politics of place—which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly mentioned—we should have a conscious policy, and a mechanism, to try to ensure that every reasonable-sized town has a decent further education college at its centre. How do we get that, and how do we sort things out? There is already a lot of good there, but there is also quite a lot of chaff. How we get rid of that, and how we amalgamate where necessary, and get co-operation, is a question that needs to be answered in these debates. We need to know much more about how the proposed arrangements will work. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked the Minister the right questions, and I hope that she will answer them.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I very much support the aims of the Bill and of many of the amendments in this group, which seek to ensure that local skills improvement plans embody a partnership approach involving all participants in the education and skills system. The two overriding requirements of a successful education and skills system are that it should meet the national need for skills to deliver UK-wide goals and priorities, and that it should give individuals the attributes and skills to identify and pursue their own career aspirations and personal fulfilment. Reconciling those two aims is the challenge that the Bill seeks to address

I very much agree with Amendment 1, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It is essential that learners have a voice in the development of LSIPs—as I will call them; I hope noble Lords will forgive me—in their own areas, and that LSIPs should take proper account of national strategic priorities. They will need to find a way of balancing actual opportunities in their areas—the jobs that are there now, in health, in care, in retail and in hospitality, in existing businesses—with future needs for green jobs, for STEM, for digital jobs and creative skills. They may also need to be aware of the views of significant national employer groups about their specific current and future skills needs, such as those in the energy and utilities sector, which faces enormous skills challenges.

I hope the Minister will be able to tell us something about how the planned trailblazers or pilots will be used to develop guidance. Ideally, they will blaze a series of trails to respond to varying local conditions and circumstances. Different local areas will rightly have to take different approaches, led by different employer representative bodies. There may be many areas where chambers of commerce do not have the right focus or qualities to lead the local partnership, and others where the plan would ideally be built on existing work by LEPs, skills advisory partnerships and other such groups. What is needed is guidance on general principles for successful LSIPs and ERBs. What is absolutely not needed is any sort of over-prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach to such bodies.

I shall try to follow the excellent example given by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, by not feeling that no point has been properly made until I have made it myself, so I will now move on. I welcome the fact that Amendment 2 in this group, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, would require the needs of potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed to be considered. Of course, those groups include numerous entrepreneurs, who also need special skills. The Future Founders report in 2019 revealed that 51% of British young people aged 14 to 25 had thought about starting, or had already started, a business. We should ensure that the Bill addresses their needs; we should certainly not be focusing only on the skills needs of existing employers. One of the last places to look for the potential unicorn businesses of the future is within the ranks of existing large-scale employers.

One other specific area of need not mentioned in the Bill, about which I feel strongly, having been involved with it for some years, is improved work readiness and practical skills, particularly for young people aged about 14 upwards.

I applaud the recognition in Amendments 20 and 21, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, and the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, that much valuable skills training will be provided remotely —as we have learnt during the pandemic. Distance learning providers are an increasingly important category of independent training providers, not least in remote areas and areas less well served by colleges, and local plans should take account of what they can offer.

Finally, I strongly commend Amendment 18 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, to require local skills plans to give due regard to

“coordinating careers information, advice and guidance provision across education providers”

in their area. High-quality careers advice and guidance, available to all who need it, is fundamental to the success of any skills plan so that young people especially have a clear idea of what opportunities, meeting their own abilities and interests, are realistically available to them and what pathways they can follow to pursue those opportunities.

Although considerable progress has been made as a result of the 2017 careers strategy, which ended last year, careers education is still underresourced in terms of funding and of there being enough well-qualified careers guidance professionals to meet the needs of schools, colleges, universities and other training providers. This is one strategic skills shortage that needs to be addressed, preferably by a renewed careers strategy, but its complete absence from the Bill is concerning, so I welcome this and other amendments seeking to ensure that it is appropriately covered.

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[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I would very much like to support what the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has just said, and I hope that the Government will find a way of bringing forward amendments that take into account the spirit of all the amendments that have been tabled. This is self-evidently necessary.

We have a great debate going on in part of government about how on earth we are going to replace our gas boilers, and there is a big debate about who is going to bear the cost. Is it going to fall disproportionately on the poor? Well, it is all very well having this theoretical debate, but what I am sure of is that there are not the people available with the skills to do this job within the five-year, 10-year or 15-year timeframe that has been talked about. The Government have to be more joined-up about these things if they are serious about addressing the climate challenge.

But there is a more general point here that exposes another potential weakness in this Bill. The emphasis of the Bill is on local skills improvement plans. This is looking at the present local situation, not at future requirements, and there has to be some means of injecting future requirements into the preparation of these local plans. The noble Baroness talked about the productivity and skills that are going to do this job for us, we hope. I welcome this, because I wholly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, said: it was a great mistake to abolish the UKCES; it was a very good body that produced very good work.

There are things such as skills gaps, and the fact is that, particularly with Brexit, with leaving the European Union, you would have thought that a Government determined to make a success of us having left the European Union would be looking at the skills consequences of our exit for the future. But what evidence is there that this is being done? We need to have a serious think not just about new skills required by climate change but about new skills that are necessary in our economy as a result of the changes we have imposed on ourselves.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly on this group to express my support in particular for Amendment 25, in the names of my noble friend Lady Hayman and others, about the requirement for approved LSIPs to take account of “any national skills strategy”. I think the clue is in the “any”. I fully support that idea, and I am wondering how it could actually be met. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, pointed out some of the challenges in the absence of such a plan. I wonder whether the Minister can tell us anything about what sort of national or central co-ordination there will be and how that might work in terms of alignment with LSIPs. What sort of processes or feedback mechanisms will there be to ensure that there is that alignment, and indeed that it is clear what the LSIPs are seeking to align with? My noble friend described it as “joining the dots” with national strategy. What is the flow of communication in reporting and monitoring between LSIPs and the centre?

My noble friend Lady Hayman also talked about a cross-cutting, long-term, aspirational skills strategy, which would be splendid. The word that struck me there was “aspirational”, because the main challenge when I used to work with young Londoners on employability skills was their lack of aspiration and lack of knowledge of what to aspire to—which is why I was so passionate about careers education. Yet it is aspiration that has driven most successful education strategies in the past and created forward movement. This Bill is essentially an aspirational Bill, and that is why I welcome it quite strongly. So I suppose the question—which I am not sure whether I am asking the Minister or myself—is: how will it actually raise aspirations? And how can it build on young people’s enthusiasm, which the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, mentioned, for issues relating to climate change and biodiversity to create momentum that will feed in, hopefully, and perhaps through the LSIPs, to drive the objectives of the Bill?

The only other point I wanted to make is that I am rather less enamoured of Amendments 73 and 75 in this group, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and others, which would require independent training providers to have a climate change and sustainability strategy and a delivery plan. Many of those independent training providers are SMEs: they can be very small; they tend to specialise in certain areas; they are often operating with limited resources on extremely narrow margins. I am already concerned about some of the other conditions being suggested for them to be on the list, and this seems potentially disproportionate. I would certainly encourage them to have such a plan as far as it is relevant to them, but putting it on the face of the Bill would seem to be overkill.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, as a member of Peers for the Planet, I rise to support all the amendments in this group, for the reasons so eloquently given by the movers and to simply emphasise two points. First, as many other noble Lords have said, students themselves want to take part in reaching our zero-carbon targets. Arguably, they are more committed to this than the generations with power, like ours. These amendments would increase their motivation for further education and training, and their confidence in politics and democratic participation.

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, following the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, may I say that this potentially most useful Bill seems to have been drafted in ignorance of the most long-lasting world crisis of our time: the climate emergency? Surely, all government departments must play what part they can in avoiding climate-borne disaster and in adapting to climate change. There is scant evidence that the targets set out by the Government have been taken on board by all departments and integrated into all their policies. These amendments would go far to assist the education department in fulfilling this aim.

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[Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, whose experience of chairing a LEP is extremely valuable; I believe that he has a lot to offer to the consideration of the Bill.

I will comment briefly on Amendments 13, 16, 32 and 35 in this grouping. Much has been said already during this debate that overlaps with other amendments, so I want to reinforce some of the messages that have already been made very strongly by other Peers. To reinforce what I said at Second Reading, I still think that there is a risk of confusion between the various bodies involved and a potential overlap between the agencies. Clarity is essential, and I hope that the Minister will take that on board.

I have two overriding concerns, one of which has been stressed a number of times already this afternoon; that is, in devolving responsibility at a local level to local groups, there is consistency with the national skills strategy and regional priorities. It seems obvious that there should be a very strong conduit between the regional bodies, the LEPs, the combined authorities and the mayoral authorities. I hope that the Minister has recognised the strength of feeling there is on this now. As reinforced by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, to leave out the mayoral authorities and not work with the LEPs, with the experience they have and the networks they have established—to throw that away and not build on it—would seem foolish. So I hope that the Government will take those messages into account.

I am also slightly concerned that if this does not happen, we will see a patchwork of disconnected skills groups paddling their own independent canoes. Co-ordination is vital for skills providers to develop appropriate courses to meet regional and local demand. The Minister was reassuring on that point earlier this afternoon, so I hope that is the case.

The critical balance is to achieve local ownership within a framework of national and regional priorities. I restate that regional involvement is essential. My second concern with this grouping is highlighted in Amendment 32, and in Amendment 35 from the noble Lord, Lord Patel. Too often, SMEs and, in particular, rural interests are ignored in designing skills strategies. The SME sector has a weak voice.

Large industrial employers have the resources to engage in consultation exercises. They can devote personnel to sit on boards and, in doing so, influence outcomes. It is a good thing that they do. However, SMEs have difficulty in devoting the time to engage in what, to them, seems like numerous consultations and time-consuming exercises. They do not have the time to sit on boards but their voice is essential. Too often, one has a willing volunteer within an area or region; they get overloaded and do not necessarily represent the SME sector. I am really concerned about the influence of the SME sector in helping to design policies that will work for all.

I conclude by highlighting the importance of the rural sector, which has been mentioned once or twice. There is clear evidence that economic success in rural areas has been hampered, held back and constrained by skills gaps. This will be perpetuated if it is not addressed. The gap between rural and urban will continue to grow. Skills provision is critical, if levelling up is to be achieved even in a modest way, to reduce this rural/urban divide. Too often, government policy has been focused on cities. The large industrial areas are the ones that influence skills strategies. The SME sector, and particularly the rural sector, are the ones that get neglected. As was said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the Government are going to have to work really hard to engage with this sector and make sure that the local skills bodies embrace this challenge, and do not once more neglect the rural sector.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, my name was initially omitted from the list for this group. My reaction when I found I had been reinserted at number 17 was, “be careful what you wish for”. I am not sure I have a lot to add to what has been said. I very much welcome the amendments that seek to ensure that the voices of independent training providers, SMEs and the self-employed are heard in the LSIP process. I particularly await the Minister’s response to Amendment 40 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which would require the Secretary of State to report annually

“on the performance of employer representative bodies.”

This seems to raise important questions of the accountability of ERBs, and indeed LSIPs. I hope the Minister might tell us what sort of reporting will be required for LSIPs and how their performance will be measured—against what criteria and by whom. What will happen if they are seen not to deliver the results expected? Much more fundamentally, I strongly echo the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about how the system will actually work in the real world, as described by both those noble Lords.

I also notice that the Bill includes quite a few duties and requirements for colleges and other education providers to meet—there are all sorts of things that they have to do—but these seem somewhat less prominent when it comes to LSIPs and employer representative bodies. I also welcome the paragraph (b) proposed in the Amendment 36 of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, which goes a little way to redressing the balance by enabling colleges and other providers to challenge LSIPs if they are not happy with them.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome this important Bill. Skills are fundamental to our future well-being both as a nation and as individuals. In order to succeed in an increasingly complex, competitive, technologically driven, net zero-targeting world, we need the right skills in the right places for the right people at the right time. The Bill includes many proposals to enable that. Most of what I wanted to say has been more eloquently expressed by other noble Lords, so I will confine myself to questions in three areas that I believe may need some further thought, relating to small businesses, independent training providers and careers education.

The Bill rightly focuses on ensuring that skills are relevant to local needs, mainly through local skills improvement plans, created and managed by local partnerships and led by employer representative bodies. The Government play a central role through designating the employer representative body for each local area and then through approving the actual plans. This sounds to me more like a top-down, centrally driven approach than a truly local one.

So how will LSIPs engage smaller businesses, particularly in areas with few major employers, where most employers are small? How will the Government ensure that LSIPs are not dominated by the views of larger, better-resourced employers in determining local skills needs and allocating available funding? How will LSIPs build on and work with existing local partnerships, such as LEPs, careers hubs, skills advisory panels and local digital skills partnerships?

On independent training providers, I have a rather different perspective from my noble friend Lady Wolf, who I am rather relieved to see is no longer in her place. ITPs provide a substantial proportion of skills training, including in the great majority of apprenticeships and traineeships. They are an essential and valuable part of the system. Many are small, but they bring much-needed responsiveness, innovation and competition to the skills training marketplace. Yet the Bill seems focused on constraining them through requirements to meet potentially onerous conditions for inclusion in the list of relevant providers.

Before joining noble Lords, I ran a small independent business providing employability training for young Londoners. Our work was commissioned by bodies such as the former London Development Agency, Barnardo’s, Nacro, schools, colleges and local authorities. These provided stringent supervision and oversight. But, as a small business focused on service delivery, we would have struggled to meet the sorts of conditions suggested in the Bill—for example, for insurance cover against possible cessation of training. Such a sledge- hammer approach risks penalising all ITPs for the failings of a few.

So how will independent training providers be more positively engaged in the development and delivery of local skills improvement plans? Will the Minister commit to ensuring full consultation before details of the register of training providers and of the conditions ITPs have to meet are finalised?

Many noble Lords have emphasised the importance of impartial, independent, expert and personal information, advice and guidance, including the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, just now. Careers education and guidance have improved significantly in recent years, helped by the careers strategy launched in 2017, which ended last year. But there is still some way to go to ensure that everyone has access to high-quality careers advice, that its provision covers all ages and circumstances and that it is provided by well-trained, highly qualified professionals with an understanding of the skills scene, both locally and nationally, including pathways for acquiring skills in areas such as creativity—as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam—and entrepreneurship, which we have heard rather less about. Yet the Bill makes no reference at all to careers information and guidance.

Will the Government consider including a right to professional careers guidance as part of the lifetime skills guarantee? Will the provision of good careers education be made a formal requirement for colleges to achieve high Ofsted ratings? Finally, will the Minister commit to producing an updated careers strategy to support the aims of the Bill, including the extension of career hubs to cover the entire country?

I support many other suggestions made by noble Lords, including the desire to see the Baker clause given statutory force and a more flexible apprenticeship levy. I fervently hope that the Bill, when it leaves this House, will be even better crafted to create the skills system we so badly need. I like the description of the Bill by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, as a “down- payment”. Will the Government complement it with a comprehensive, overarching, cross-departmental, long-term education and skills strategy, so that the Bill will prove to be much more than just another of the regular reorganisations of our education and training furniture that have so signally failed to deliver in the past?

As my new noble friend Lady Black of Strome suggested in her splendid maiden speech, we need to create an education ecosystem that brings together the talents and energy of all participants in delivering the skills we need, including SMEs, ITPs and careers professionals.

Secondary Schools: Arts Subjects

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord just heard me outline, we fund through many of these projects, such as the national youth music orchestras. The forthcoming national music plan, with its one-year extension to the music hubs, will take the matters that the noble Lord outlined into account.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, many secondary schools can provide performing arts education only with the support of specialist external arts teaching practitioners, particularly for dance and drama. Many of these are linked to awarding organisations, validated by the Council for Dance, Drama and Musical Theatre, which offer Ofqual-regulated graded examinations. What plans do the Government have to promote the use of such specialist performing arts teaching by schools, thereby broadening their access to these highly regarded qualifications? How will the education recovery plan ensure that all schools can offer the balanced curriculum that the Government require?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, it is correct, as the noble Lord outlines, to say that schools need those specialist teachers. Recruitment of trainee teachers is up by 23% and we have no information about a gap in the recruitment of those teachers. Schools are free to use the £650 million universal catch-up and recovery premium as they see fit. If they wish to spend it on the type of provision that the noble Lord outlines, we hope that they will do so.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak about the skills and post-16 education Bill, and briefly on the building safety Bill. The skills Bill will legislate for a number of important and valuable initiatives outlined in January’s Skills for Jobs White Paper, such as putting employers at the heart of post-16 skills, including through local skills improvement plans, creating a lifetime skills guarantee and a lifelong loan entitlement, and providing greater support for further education. These are welcome extensions of existing policies on apprenticeships, T-levels, careers education and guidance and the Kickstart programme, which seems to get less attention than it should.

What really matters, as we have seen from the vaccination programme, is the actual delivery—whether all these initiatives succeed in delivering the right skills at the right time in the right places and to the right people, especially for young people seeking to enter the jobs market at this challenging time. An overarching skills strategy is needed to ensure they complement and reinforce each other, rather than creating a complex and confusing tangle of options through which those seeking new skills, upskilling or reskilling struggle to find a suitable route.

First, there need to be clear, flexible and well-defined pathways allowing learners to follow different routes according to their interests and abilities, with options to combine academic and technical elements and to include short, modular courses where appropriate. A well-resourced, well-qualified cadre of professional careers advisers will be essential to help individuals to identify and navigate the best pathways for them, and needs to be part of the strategy. Why could there not be a UCAS-like online service providing information about the whole range of technical and vocational training available and how to access it?

Secondly, the apprenticeships levy should be made more flexible. A significant proportion of levy funds is apparently going unspent. As part of an overall skills strategy, the scope of the levy could be broadened to cover a wider range of much-needed skills training activities —a skills levy, rather than just an apprenticeships levy.

Thirdly, much more needs to be done to promote the Skills for Jobs strategy, especially to three groups: parents, who are often the most important careers advisers; schools and teachers still not aware enough of the technical options available and, as we have heard, not complying enough with the Baker clause; and employers, large and small, who play such a crucial part and are among the greatest beneficiaries of a better skilled workforce.

SMEs need more specific help to play their part in skills training. They are particularly subject to the vagaries of cash flow and depend heavily on being paid for their work promptly and in full. Without that, their ability to invest, including in training, work experience and apprenticeships, is threatened—as, indeed, sometimes, is their very survival.

The practice of retentions in the construction sector, whereby larger contractors withhold a proportion of payments owed to their, usually smaller, subcontractors—ostensibly as insurance against possible defects in their work, but often it is an unreasonable sum or for an unreasonable period—is damaging to the performance and quality of the construction sector as a whole. Dame Judith Hackitt’s report following the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which the building safety Bill aims to implement, states:

“Payment terms within contracts (for example, retentions) can drive poor behaviours, by putting financial strain into the supply chain. For example non-payment of invoices and consequent cash flow issues can cause subcontractors to substitute materials purely on price rather than value for money or suitability for purpose.”


The Government have been promising for some years now to address the issue of retentions, on which there has been numerous consultations and reports but no action. In fact, I find myself sitting next to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, who committed to provide one of those reports during the passage of the Enterprise Bill in 2015. It is high time for the Government to act, and I hope that the building safety Bill will prove to offer the legislative vehicle that is needed.

Skills for Jobs White Paper

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, in relation to special educational needs, I will go back and look at that. We are into the second procurement phase of the bootcamps and I will make sure that he is given the details in relation to special educational needs. In relation to what we are trying to focus on with level 4 and 5 qualifications, employers will be in the lead on the standards. I want to be very clear to the noble Lord that if what they outline for that qualification is to give the learner the knowledge, skills and behaviours to do that job and there is no additional English and maths requirement, that will be the framework. I hope that encourages the noble Lord that it will not be the case that “You must have passed x exam”. With the employer in the lead looking at those qualifications, if they say those are the functions and what you need for the job, there is to be no additional English and maths requirement.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

I was pleased that the White Paper recognises the importance of high-quality, impartial careers advice and guidance and seeks to create a clear careers system catering for all ages. Can the Minister tell us about how the Government will bring about the proposed alignment between the Careers & Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service to achieve this, including the four principles they say they plan to follow? What plans are there to provide the funding required, so that everyone who needs it has access to qualified personal careers guidance—something notably missing from the White Paper—perhaps as part of a new lifelong careers strategy?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, as I have outlined, there is going to be £100 million invested in the enterprise advisers—which I believe are part of the Careers & Enterprise Company—and more into National Careers Service guidance and a new website in relation to that. One must not forget as well that nearly £1 billion has been invested in work coaches at the DWP, who are also a vital part of the careers strategy.

We are aware through the Careers & Enterprise Company that, particularly in relation to technical education, it is important that local employers are brought into our schools, so that all the opportunities available, particularly careers and apprenticeships that might not be part of the secondary school workforce experience, are brought in front of young people so that they know all the options that are open to them.

Lifetime Skills Guarantee and Post-16 Education

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Tuesday 6th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that there is no snobbery in the Department for Education; we want to promote parity of esteem for vocational and technical qualifications across our sector. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State are behind this Everybody has a role to play in ensuring that these skills are seen and respected; television programming over the last 10 years has shown the importance of construction in many of the programmes that they have chosen to produce. We have also invested £900 million in work coaches, who are essential to getting alongside people on a one-to-one basis to help them into work. There is £17 million for the new workplace academy programmes, which are helping people with their CVs and job interviews.

The noble Lord is correct: one of the things we have to do for young people is this review, particularly of level 4 and level 5 qualifications, of which there are over 4,000. I remember sitting with the noble Baroness on a Select Committee and seeing the plethora of avenues and qualifications that were there, so that the pathway is clearer for young people and they get a qualification that an employer says is relevant and equips them for the job that they want. I can only draw attention, once again, to the £2 billion for the Kickstart scheme, which is about jobs for young people who find themselves on universal credit at the moment.

[Lord Aberdare (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the Statement sets out a range of laudable and important aspirations and I very much hope that, unlike so many previous attempts, these will actually be delivered. I have two questions for the Minister. First, the Statement includes funding for extra careers advisers. Can she assure us that this will form part of a comprehensive approach to investing in professional high-quality careers advice and guidance to all who need it, from primary school children to adults of all ages without the gaps that currently exist? Secondly, what will the Government do about the perverse incentives that currently lead schools to try to keep young people in formal education rather than encouraging them to consider apprenticeships?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, yes, the funding that has been announced for the National Careers Service—that is the adult careers service. The Careers & Enterprise Company is available in schools and I know that additional funding has been given to that to ensure that young people are made aware of those opportunities. In relation to apprenticeships, as I have already outlined, through the Careers & Enterprise Company we are assisting schools to promote those. Fire It Up was our campaign to make sure that young people are aware of those apprenticeships. We are encouraging schools to know their destination data: it is important to know where those young people go on to, so that the best opportunity for the young person is put first by our schools and colleges.

Employment: Young People

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Aberdare]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that the young people due to leave school in the current academic year are prepared for work in a post-COVID-19 environment; and what changes they have made to careers support and guidance provision to achieve this.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)]

My Lords, we are investing around £100 million this year in careers guidance for young people and adults. We are supporting schools during the Covid-19 pandemic to develop virtual careers activities for students, including the successful My Week of Work event. The National Careers Service offers impartial careers guidance and advice through a website, web chat and helpline, and it will operate an exam results helpline this summer. We will keep this support under review and assess its impact.

[Lord Aberdare (CB) [V]]

My Lords, 800,000 young people are currently leaving education and hoping to join an already overcrowded jobs market. Good careers advice, including personal guidance from qualified professionals, will be essential to ensure all that talent does not go to waste. How will the current careers strategy be renewed and expanded to meet this need, and will the Government introduce a careers guidance guarantee, complementary to the opportunity guarantee, to ensure that all young people can access professional, personal careers guidance to help them identify and pursue suitable careers pathways?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, during the pandemic, the Careers & Enterprise Company, alongside teachers, has had to review its delivery strategy. Much of its training and support has therefore been delivered virtually, so we have seen virtual mock interviews and virtual CV preparation sessions. Of course, the expectation on schools is that they deliver a personal interview to students at 16 and 18, and we have advised that that should take place virtually rather than by telephone. More than 70% of schools are delivering that interview at age 16 to the majority of their students.