Queen’s Speech

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak on education. I welcome the speeches from the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris and Lady Garden, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, and my noble friend Lord Holmes.

In the Speech yesterday, there were just two sentences on education. I thought it might have merited a few more, because youth unemployment is now at 14.4% and is rising. It fell to my noble friend Lady Berridge to fill us in on the changes this afternoon. The most significant change is that the Government will bring in a Bill for them to take control of FE colleges and to ensure that, in each case, local companies are involved in the creation of the curriculum and the courses taught. I fully support that; it is an excellent idea. In fact, university technical colleges have been doing it for the past 12 years. The governing body of each university technical college is in the hands of a majority of local businessmen and the local university.

The other thing that the Government are clearly committed to is that technical education should start at 16. There, I profoundly disagree. In schools for 11 to 16 year-olds, youngsters should be given the chance to learn some technical, practical, hands-on subjects. However, the present Government have set their heart against this. Since 2010, they have introduced a curriculum of nine academic subjects, the EBacc and Progress 8. All schools have to follow it, so lots of them have dropped other subjects. The biggest drop—70%—has been in design and technology, which involves electricity, making projects, handling metal and using tools and machinery. All that has been dropped almost completely.

What beggars belief is that, in 2015, the Government dropped one of the computing exams at GCSE. As a result, the number of students studying computing at schools for those aged 11 to 16 has dropped by 40%. That is extraordinary in a digital age. Whatever happens to those students, they will have to cope with digital skills, knowledge of coding and AI. The Government have simply ignored that.

The Prime Minister has said that he wants to arrest the brain drain of youngsters in the north leaving their schools and going to universities in the south. Well, UTCs do not support the brain drain at all. Essentially, they are local schools. Each year, we measure the destination of each student when they leave at the age of 18. Last July, we found that 55% of our students went to university, usually a local university because it had been teaching them for four years and they knew about it. Another 20% or so became apprentices—usually local apprentices—and most of the rest got jobs locally. They were essentially not part of the brain drain. Without any shadow of doubt, we need more UTCs in the north.

In fact, I have been approached by five MPs in the north who want UTCs in their constituencies. With them, we are preparing applications for UTCs. We specialise in just two subjects and get the commitment of the universities. I have spoken to the vice-chancellors in each of the five places; they are strongly supportive. We will present these proposals to Ministers before the end of the summer. This will be a real test of whether the Government believe in levelling up, because there is no question but that you have to level up in education.

Finally, I want to say something about the Baker clause, which I introduced three years ago with the support of the Government. It allowed providers of alternative education, such as apprenticeship providers, FE colleges and UTCs, to go in and speak to youngsters aged between 13 and 14 and 16 and 18 to tell them what they were doing. It was a massive improvement in career advice. I urged the Government to make this a duty for schools, but they said, “No, we will depend on a Minister’s letter. When it goes out, the schools will automatically follow it.” Well, the letters have gone out and the schools have not followed. More than half the schools have not provided any such opportunity. The Government are now slowly limbering up to do something about it; I think they propose to impose some sort of financial penalty if they do not. I ask my noble friend Lady Berridge to make quite sure that she is capable of writing a letter this September to all schools, reminding them that they must write to the parents and must institute those opportunities for such bodies to go in. I hope that my noble friend Lord Callanan will draw that to her attention later tonight.