Young People: Alternatives to University

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Monks—a leading member of the trade union movement—for focusing the attention of the House on this grave problem. He highlighted that we are all suffering under the mantra of the education system, and that mantra is three A-levels and a university. That seems to be the only pathway to success. Indeed, the previous Labour Government, as one knows, set that as a target for 50% of young people. I look on this debate as the last funeral rites of that particular policy, because that is not a sensible policy to have.

This policy has led to a great deal of graduate unemployment. If you look at the number of graduates who left in 2012, and ask what they were all doing six months later—how many were working in retail, catering, waiting or bar jobs—you will find that, of those who studied fine arts, 29% were working in those jobs; media studies, 26%; performing arts, 23%; design, 23%; sociology, 22%; law, 19%; and foreign languages, 15%. Only when you come to engineering do you get very low figures of 4% or 5%. There is therefore a huge mismatch between what students are studying and where their jobs are going to be. When you consider that students are going to leave with debts of £40,000, at some stage in the next five or 10 years reality will break in, but it will take a long time to do it.

The biggest problem facing the next Government is going to be filling the skills gap, which in our society is absolutely enormous. The Royal Academy of Engineering has estimated that we will be short of 45,000 STEM graduates a year for the next five or six years. That really is a shatteringly high figure. When it comes to technicians and professionals, the numbers are even larger. British industry is short at the moment of 850,000 of those. At the same time, we have 750,000 youngsters who had 11 years of free education and cannot get a job, so something has to be done. The skills gap can only be filled by a major change in schools, FE colleges and universities. I will deal first with schools.

As a result of recent policy, many schools are now dropping technical subjects below age 16. One of the adverse and painful effects of the Wolf report was to throw out a large number of technical subjects. I agree that some should have been dropped: they were rather casual and not very good; but the baby has gone out with the bath water. A range of students at 16 are now just doing basically academic GCSEs. There is a slight movement towards design and technology, but only a third of GCSE students take that exam, and most of them do the soft options of food and textiles. Only a quarter of that third do resistant materials. These figures there are really very shattering, but when it comes to other technical subjects it is worse: electronic products, only 1.4% of students; and systems and control, 0.6%. We have to give more technical, practical education to pupils below 16. It is a major priority for us.

The reason for that was touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Monks. If you compare the countries in Europe, in our country, 30% of students below 18 have some experience of technical education. In Germany it is 60%. In Austria it is 80%; Austria has the lowest level of youth unemployment in Europe and the lowest number of NEETs. It does that by stopping the national curriculum at 14 and having a series of specialist colleges. As the main founder and proponent of the national curriculum, I would now argue for the national curriculum to stop at 14 and for having specialist colleges—something to which more educational specialists are coming to agree, including Michael Wilshaw.

It has to start in schools, and this is one of the reasons why, six years ago, with Ron Dearing, I set up the process of establishing university technical colleges. I was very glad to have had the support of the noble Lord, Lord Monks, on those. These are large colleges with 600 to 800 students operating a working day from 8.30 to 5, with shorter school holidays. Crucially, for two days a week, the students make and do things with their hands and design things. I believe that learning by doing is just as important as studying. We are proud that one of the advantages of these colleges—we have 30 open at the moment, and another 30 will open in the next two years—is that, so far, not one of our students leaving at 16 or 18 has joined the ranks of the unemployed. They have got either a job or an apprenticeship, stayed on at the UTC to do A-levels, gone to another college or gone to university. That is a record that any school in England should be very proud of, and we are actually achieving it.

Alongside UTCs, we now have career colleges, which were announced last year. They deal with the non-STEM subjects. Already, within a year, three of those have been established: one in Liverpool doing catering and hospitality for students 14 to 18; one in Bromley doing catering and hospitality; and one in Oldham doing graphic art and digital technology. I ask the House to consider—and this is not really accepted by the education system so far—that we now have an education system that stretches from age four to 18; if you have that, you first have to say to yourself, “Why have exams at 16?”. There is really no need for GCSEs. The only reason for a 16 year-old exam was that was when you left school. I had to have a thing called a school certificate in 1950, and that proudly showed what I achieved. I showed that to any employer whom I went to talk to. You do not need that now, with education going on to 18. This gives us a chance to resurrect the concept and importance of the 14 to 18 stream in our schools, something that Labour almost grasped last time with the Tomlinson report.

Finally, I turn to apprenticeships. I agree very much with several of the things the noble Lord, Lord Monks, said. There are far too many apprentices between the ages of 20 and 30 at the moment. Apprenticeships are about people from 16 to 18. There, the records are, frankly, not very good. The figures on that are that at 16, there are 20,800 apprentices; it sounds like a lot, does it not? The Whips are waving to me, but if they hang on just a moment, I am about to finish. They should not be anxious; I am only the second person to speak in this debate. I will be quick. The 20,800 figure is only 3.2% of the age group. At 17, the figure is 40,000, only 6% of the age group; at age 18, the figure is 55,000, only 8.4% of the age group. Those numbers are going down. The funding system has to be looked at again to ensure that those numbers go up. Certainly, UTCs can take apprenticeships; they are the only schools in the country that do that: 50 are at the JCB Academy and another college next year is Dartford, which is going to have apprenticeships in January.

This is an important debate. The country has to accept the fact that fundamental changes have to be made in all of this area of education. We are finding that some of the senior students at UTCs at 18, having got places at universities, turn them down. They turn them down to become higher apprentices: to go to work at Rolls-Royce or Network Rail or National Grid or Babcock, where they earn £15,000 a year and immediately do foundation for degrees. After 18 months it is up to the company to decide whether, at the cost of the company, to send them to a university for an honours degree. These are the sorts of careers that we must now be establishing in all our schools.

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[Lord Bhattacharyya (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Monks on securing this important debate. Along with many noble Lords speaking today, he deserves great credit for this issue having moved to the top of the political agenda. I declare my interest as chairman of Warwick Manufacturing Group at the University of Warwick. A university chair may seem an unusual interest to declare in this debate, but WMG has a strong focus on those who do not traditionally enter higher education. These young people can achieve extraordinary things. I think of Chris Toumazou, who left school at 16 without enough CSEs for sixth-form college, and has since progressed from City and Guilds to Regius professor. Although exceptional, his career demonstrates the transformative potential of technical education. As many noble Lords have said, we in Britain are, sadly, far behind our global rivals in realising this potential.

This is not a new problem. The Feilden and Finniston reports, and many others, said the same thing. Worse, as the Secretary of State, Vince Cable, has acknowledged, over the last 30 years,

“there has been a hollowing out of our post-secondary provision”,

against even that poor record. Too few young people are getting a good technical education and moving from there into well paid work. Today, businesses fear having to use scarce resources to train young workers in everything from basic literacy to technical skills.

Where then will we find the 830,000 engineers who, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, just said, we need to replace retiring technicians? I do not want him to blush but one solution is strengthening technical education before 18. Technical schools were the orphan of Butler’s tripartite system. The university technology colleges set up by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, now give us hope and a chance to rectify that mistake. This autumn, we at WMG opened our first UTC, with a curriculum designed by the university and supported by leading engineering firms such as Jaguar Land Rover. Jaguar Land Rover requires another 20,000 technician workers in the next five years and we cannot find them. We have recently received government permission to open another in Solihull. Businesses support the academy because they can see how it will prepare students for a career. Parents are enthused because they see the quality of education their children get from a top university. I believe resources currently dedicated to free schools should be redirected to extending the UTC programme, as a first step in restoring technical schools in the educational pantheon.

Once these students have reached 18, they need a clear path to a widely recognised vocational status, such as the German technical engineer. Today that path is hard to find. We have seen a 40% decline in the number of people studying for HNCs, HNDs or foundation degrees. I would not mind if this was the result of limits being put on these poor-quality courses. Sadly, we have seen falls in fields such as engineering and computing, precisely where we need growth.

Changing this requires a new approach to student funding in further education. What progress has been made since the Secretary of State agreed to reconsider student funding for quality FE courses? Will the Government commit to expand advanced learning loans to under-25s? To be fair, the Government are keen to support apprenticeships, as the Prime Minister’s announcement of 3 million apprenticeships demonstrates. However, increasing the number of apprenticeships while degrading the brand should not be a consequence of a focus on large numbers. We must prioritise extending the number of higher and advanced apprenticeships for under-25s. The key to achieving this is a greater partnership with small and medium-sized businesses. The Holt review showed that only one in 10 SMEs offers apprenticeships. The proportion offering higher and advanced apprenticeships is even lower.

To offer quality apprenticeships, smaller businesses need support to impart quality skills, with a curriculum that they own and help deliver. We therefore need to improve the skills provision of FE colleges and their reputation with local businesses. This is essential if we are to deliver courses that employers will value, pay for and send their young workers from the factory floor to college to complete.

Achieving this shift is a challenge not only for the Government, but for my own sector. If we want to change vocational learning, companies, FE colleges and universities must work together to give technical education a higher status. At WMG we do this by supporting modular degrees designed with employers, so apprentices can learn at their own pace and companies pay their full university salaries for that to happen. This creates broader access to degree and sub-degree courses. There is huge demand for these programmes, and the potential to expand such courses is massively clear, whether through FE colleges, in workplaces or online colleges.

Personally, I prefer the former two options, as they give a greater prospect of quality control and student interaction. In such a model, further education colleges would benefit from closer integration with universities in providing courses that have high status with students. Employers would welcome universities genuinely interested in helping them give greater opportunity to their workforce. Universities would be foolish to miss this opportunity.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Before the noble Lord sits down, may I give the House an opportunity to recognise the enormous contribution he has made to technical education in our country? Through the Warwick Manufacturing Group, he has driven forward the reputation of Warwick University to become one of the best universities in the world. He has also supported, I am glad to say, the university technical college, opened only last month, and he and I will visit it tomorrow. I thank him for his support because Jaguar now wants a second one. His personal contribution in the whole scale of technical education is quite remarkable.