Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, certain themes come across in trying to sum up what has been said in this debate. A clear one is the fact that we do not seem to have a handle on training for skills—a skill you can actually do in later life—or we have a dozen badly attached handles on it. We have an education system that is plugged into passing X number of little dots.

It is also an education system which says that getting your A-levels and going to university is what you should be aiming for, regardless of things such as how much money you will earn and what you actually want to do. You are taught by a group of people who have done this, which I am afraid is one of our problems: we have this conveyor going through. When it comes to skills and training et cetera, we know that you did things such as what used to be NVQ level 4 or HND level 5 when you messed up your A-levels. That was true when I was at a college doing my A-levels. Regardless of whatever you wanted to achieve in life, that is what you were supposed to do. It has become incredibly apparent that we have not thrown that off.

I do not know what hold the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has over the Whips’ Office, but allowing him to have the first dig at any debate means that an Education Minister really has to have a word with their friends. There has to be something here, but the noble Lord is essentially right. We have not taken skills seriously enough. They are secondary options. It probably goes back to grammar schools and secondary moderns, and beyond that, but that is what we have.

I have a couple of special interests that I should declare. I am dyslexic and president of the British Dyslexia Association. I also work for a disability assistance company, Microlink. One thing I have discovered, and indeed raised at many points, is that if you tell one group: “You’ve got to pass English, you’ve got to pass Maths”—which means remembering formulae, when all dyslexics have bad short-term memory; I think I have met one person who denied that in about 40 years—you have actually created a problem. Other groups have problems with it as well. Other people just do not learn because they do not think it applies to them, but you have still got to get English and Maths.

The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, spoke about how your phone has a calculator in it. The calculator has been around an awfully long time; it just happens to be in a convenient place now. There is something else on his phone he did not mention: the voice operation button. Every single computer that you buy today allows you to talk and turns that into text, then will read stuff back to you; it is built in. Twenty years ago, you had to plug the stuff into it, but now it is there. We have an automatic way in to allow you to access information. We are still not fully taking that on board.

Ten years ago, I had a long battle to allow people to take apprenticeship qualifications without passing a written English test—true, it was a tapped English test, but it still had to be a written English test. The examples of that were ridiculous in the end; it was basically that they had not thought of it. A lot of the briefing for this debate spoke about good standards in basic skills; if you are going to expand the base of people who will take these qualifications, you must allow other ways in. Many people struggle with English; it is a difficult language. If you want the academic reason why, the English got conquered by the French and created this non-phonetic structure that we pride ourselves on taking other words into—learn that without a phonetic route.

Going through, you must have a degree of flexibility. The Minister is probably the most informed person on this subject that I have seen sitting in that place in this House. I hope she will be able to give me some assurance that we will make sure that that barrier is not there in the future.

The second thing I should say here goes back to the point that we know what the education pathway is. We also know that the most important people for influencing what you will try to do are your parents; teachers come second. We know that if they had been a banker, for instance, you are likely to become a banker—or an actor or politician; in all those cases, you will think of doing that. If they are unemployed, that is what you think happens to you.

We have one big challenge: careers pathway advice in the future. We have spoken about this, and I believe the Government have been talking about it and doing things. It is a big challenge; do not underestimate it. The full benefits of any change now will probably not be seen for many years, possibly decades, but we have to start at some point. If we are to expand this to take in all the new technologies and developments, we must start now. Can the Minister give us some guidance about how this expanded knowledge of what is available is out there?

I will give a little example of where we need to do it. I am part of our DCMS team and we get presentations by the creative industries—film, et cetera. Do noble Lords know what happens to the back-room boys of the film industry? They are usually graduates, often in English, who decide that they want to go into the creative arts. Then they have to retrain, work on the job and spend time running around. They do not take HND or NVQ qualifications at level 4 or 5 in the subjects they need; they may be difficult to find. Indeed, there are local pathways for skills at this level, which is roughly the training, if I have it right—I have a nod there from the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who is retaking her place, so I will take that as a win. But that is a local pathway, not a national one, and this is a national industry. Surely, we should be expanding our national careers structure to take in level 4 and 5, and say where you can go, because there is a huge unmet need. That need is historic; the first time I heard of a lack of technician-level training in this House was well over 30 years ago.

We have got to start to address—the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, was the first to say it—the idea that we are not taking these things seriously. Unless you do that, you will continue down this path of ignoring where the demand is where you can generate a better than living wage, and go on to do other things.

I could have expanded on these points—a lot of the other information was about social skills—but there are just a few seconds left to me. Everybody says, “tell the teacher to do it”. Teachers have an awful lot to do. Are we encouraging children in our schools—for instance, in sports clubs and arts organisations—to get a taste in school, then go out to where they will meet adults they will have to talk to and interact with? You can acquire many social skills there in a non-professionalised way, with people they may look up to, not people they are forced to say “Sir” or “Miss” to in a classroom. That would be a better way forward.

We can try to make school a smorgasbord of trying things—trying a few essentials to go on and do other things to acquire more skills, inside and outside the structure. Unless we get out of the idea that we are just getting rubber-stamped to a certain level on subjects, then told, “Off you go, life is perfect”, we will continue to fail. It is quite clear that most of us do not learn that way, or we do not learn successfully. Unless we can embrace that at a more fundamental level than we do now, we will merely continue to make the mistakes of today.