Queen’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will try to get what I want to say into five minutes. What attracts me to the Speech are the things that are not there and one thing that is. The thing that is is the attention given to further education.

I was told when I first came to this House, well over 30 years ago, that we have a major problem with skilled staff at what I think was called executive or technician level—levels 4 and 5, in modern parlance. We have always had the problem that this group is not taken seriously because it does not fit into the regular strands of where we think people should go. We have always thought that there was up to decently skilled craftsmen and then there was A-levels. Our education system has pushed people in those directions.

There is no real argument here. The fact is that we spent so long saying that we must get more people into university—up to 50%—then we said we had slightly too many. We then rediscovered apprenticeships, which really do not have a good penetration rate at levels 4 and 5. We now have something that is addressing a real problem and it has taken us only several decades to get there.

To get this working properly we have a couple of things we have to address. The first is making sure that those people who should apply for these training programmes know that they are not a second-rate option. This can be achieved only by making sure that not only our careers service but parents and teachers know that decisions about levels 4 and 5, generally post A-level, are realistic and will actually get you fulfilling employment. They should be seen not as university-lite but as something different and worth while. This will take a structural change in the way that we educate our educators to pass on this information. We have to make sure that someone says that it is a valid way forward, that people get something out of it and that it is not a second option.

The Government have an idea about having a package—okay, it is not a loan. Just about everyone else who has spoken has said that it would be better if it was some form of grant or entitlement, or a package of money to spend on training, but it has to fit into a structure. The Government are talking about this, which is good.

Indeed, before I go on to this, I must declare that the Government have asked me to become an FE ambassador, I think due to my experience in special educational needs. I have something from this group, which has already had an initial meeting to feel out the ground. I mentioned special educational needs. It recognises that it has duties and commitments there, but there is one big problem: we are not even identifying most of those with moderate special educational needs in our system. There is no argument about this. The current set-up in schools—you have a budget that you can take out of the school once you identify a need—is working against this. To get an idea of what we are saying, 10% of the population are dyslexic. I am dyslexic. There are many other issues, such as dyspraxia, dyscalculia and autism. Those at the moderate end, who do not stand out and do not have the tiger parent ripping at the system, do not get identified because the system has very little incentive to make sure that they do.

To show how just how bad that is, there are lots of specialist legal firms to make sure that one gets the identification, but they struggle to get the education and healthcare plans that give one legal status to achieve it. When we put the legislation through the House, we assumed that many people would not need it in order to get assistance. Now they do. The Government lose between 85% and 95% of the appeals which local government spends more than £100 million fighting to achieve identification. There is a horrible hole here. I do not know how many of the population—perhaps 15% or 20%—are covered in this area but those groups will underachieve.

If further education is to get the best out of the system, one has to make sure that it works properly in order to get those people identified. If that does not happen, one runs into problems. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, is not here but we went through great pain, which I inflicted on the House, to make sure that, in order to get an apprenticeship, if one was dyslexic one received assistance in getting an English qualification. One had to write to get the qualification; and that could not be done by voice recognition technology because people did not know about it. I shall stop there.