Technical and Further Education Bill

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Lord Lucas

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just said. As the House knows, I run the Good Schools Guide. We do what we can to spread information about apprenticeships, but that is extremely difficult because the amount of information available is not good. For universities, by comparison, there is one single source of information. Now, I do not wish the Government to hire UCAS to do apprenticeships, because UCAS is an extremely difficult organisation to deal with and does not let data out to anyone, but something like it which was a single point of information would really help schoolkids and schools because ordinary teachers, let alone career teachers, do not have time to learn their way around 150 different university apprenticeships, let alone all the others. They need a coherent source of information. There is a habit among employers of letting information out only in the two weeks when they want to hire apprentices, rather than all around the year when potential apprentices want to be looking. They are not adjusted to that kind of marketing yet; they are recruiting in penny numbers rather than the tens of thousands, as universities are. There are all sorts of reasons why we need more information and support.

If you want to know where children have gone on to from school, schools will give you—at least English schools will; Scottish schools are more tiresome—a long list of university courses that their students have got on to. Nowhere can you find those data for apprenticeships. You can get data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency so you can publish information from there if you want, but there is no equivalent available for apprenticeships. That makes the whole business of upping the status of apprenticeships, and of technical education generally, much harder than it needs to be. So while I hold no brief for the exact drafting of the two Labour amendments, I am very much with the spirit of them.

On the amendment that followed from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, there is scope for upping the prestige of the Institute for Apprenticeships in this way. It gives it that much more visibility in public, that much more right to comment and that much more right to be heard. At a time when there is going to be a lot of change, a lot of difficult decisions taken and a lot of need for what is going on to be in the public eye so that things that are not quite right get caught early and commented on early rather than being relegated to the pages of a few specialist magazines, an increase in prestige, as suggested in this amendment, is an excellent idea.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, we have not had very much information about what the annual statement from the Institute for Apprenticeships will be. As the institute is a quango, it will certainly produce an annual report—there is no question about that—and it is the usual practice of such reports to be debated in one way or another in the House. So we should accept that as a given, as it were.

As to the content of the report, I am encouraged by the fact that the quality of the directors will mean that it is not going to be a soft quango at all; it will be a very tough and well-informed one because they will be very aware of the fact that it is a great new departure in the education system to concentrate on apprentices, and they will want to ensure that the apprentice system that the country develops will be effective for both employers and students. So I expect the Institute for Apprenticeships to take an interest in nearly all the points mentioned in paragraph 1.

Whether that is needed in the Bill, I very much doubt. The best way to do it would probably be for the Secretary of State to formally write a letter to the chief executive of the institute when one is appointed, which I hope will be soon, indicating the range of information that the report should contain. That might be the best way out of it because the nature of the information will change over the years and you do not necessarily want to keep amending this part of the Bill. There are all sorts of other interesting things that the report should contain. I think the time has come for the Minister to make clearer what he thinks will be in the report. If he cannot do so today, perhaps he might be able to before Third Reading.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

There has been a problem with apprenticeships, at least historically, where people have wanted to include qualifications within them. I would be very grateful if my noble friend would make it clear that this has now passed and that the idea of including qualifications within apprenticeship qualifications, or indeed within qualifications at FE colleges, is now fully accepted. Generally, this is to the advantage of the learner. If I am doing a qualification within one of the 15 proposed Sainsbury routes, and that apprenticeship involves getting to know cybersecurity, I do not want to have a haberdasher’s qualification in cybersecurity: I want to have something which will be recognised in every single industry which might require that skill. The same applies to accountancy, marketing and other skills which are common across the routes, where these are things that you might wish an apprentice to learn in the course of their apprenticeship, or have experience of. It also applies particularly to technical qualifications in IT, where you would expect an apprentice to follow one or more international qualifications produced by the likes of Microsoft because that is what the industry as a whole demands and that is what produces a young person who can move from job to job because they have the qualifications that are recognised in their next job and not just those which are appropriate for the particular patch where they did their apprenticeship.

It is also important in this context that the specifications for apprenticeship should recognise that there are alternative qualifications in some circumstances. You may want your young person to be familiar with computer networking but there are two, maybe three, top-quality international qualifications in computer networking. Which one do you want to use? It will be the one that works with your business. However, the people in charge of the apprenticeship will recognise that these are equivalent and that either one can count and fit in place. I think this has been accepted now. There seems to be some residual difficulty reported to me. However, I would be very grateful for my noble friend’s assurance that the concept of embedding qualifications in apprenticeships or in further education courses is now fully accepted. I beg to move.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I support my noble friend’s amendment. I suspect that individual apprentices will work on the basis that he mentioned as certain qualifications in certain industries are not in the regular run of FE colleges, or universities for that matter, but have been accepted by the industry as the accepted standard. My noble friend mentioned Microsoft. Cisco does this as well. It is particularly the case in the whole area of computing, where various companies have established qualifications which have become the standard. In fact, the Cisco qualification for schools is more demanding than GCSE computing, and many people work towards that. We have to make sure that these qualifications do not disappear when the Institute for Apprenticeships clears out a lot of valueless qualifications. These are not valueless, particularly the international ones. Given that the digital revolution is happening so suddenly, a huge variety of examinations and qualifications in artificial intelligence may come our way. Each area will want to protect its own interest. I would hope that the Institute for Apprenticeships would take this message on board. I do not know whether a statutory measure is required.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Lord Lucas

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My Lords, I find these amendments very interesting because they pose the question of what sort of beast we are creating in the Institute for Apprenticeships. The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, exactly address that. In the Institute for Apprenticeships we have created a body with clear functions. It has to sort out shoddy apprenticeships and try to bring some sense to the maze of technical qualifications. They are very important jobs, but they are essentially administrative, functional jobs. Surely the Institute for Apprenticeships will not be spending government money in the future; it will be spending money provided by industry and commerce. Therefore, the Government should really take a back seat from then on. They should be concentrating on what they are responsible for—the skills gap. They have to devise policies that close the skills gap. The improved apprenticeship system will do a great deal towards that, but it cannot do it alone. Closing the skills gap also needs major reforms in further education colleges to improve their effectiveness. If they had been as good as they think they are, we would not have as big a skills gap as we do at the moment.

The Government’s other responsibility is to try to ensure how our education system can improve technical education, which in fact it is destroying in schools at the moment. Those are policy matters and the main policy of the Government in this regard is what they can do to close the skills gap.

Where does that leave the Institute for Apprenticeships? It leaves it as a much more independent body. It is not spending government money. The question that the Government should be asking the Institute for Apprenticeships is: what contribution are you making to closing the skills gap? They should not therefore interfere with the institute apart from that, in my opinion. The eight directors appointed so far are quite a feisty lot of independent people. The institute should become the main policy area for apprenticeships and should do the sort of things indicated in the Liberal amendment.

This is a very different body, I suspect, from the one the Government think they are setting up. They still want to keep their sticky fingers on the Institute for Apprenticeships even though they are not providing the money. The money is being provided by industry and commerce—by business. The steering wheel should be taken away from them, and the Institute for Apprenticeships should become an important body, reviewing each year whether the whole apprenticeship system is right. It should decide whether apprenticeships should start at 14, not the Government—which I happen to support. It should decide about approving new providers, the terms for which are set out in Clause 6, and I am sure it would do it in a very professional way.

This is quite an interesting group of amendments, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply. This is an area that should slip away from immediate government control because the Government are not putting up the money.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend has said. The Government are creating a very powerful body. It will own the intellectual property in all the technical qualifications for the routes described in the Bill. There will be no other institution with any long-term interest in evolving or maintaining those qualifications or in developing a name and a reputation that parents and others can rely on. Below the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, we have a series of short-term contracts. City & Guilds—I sit on its council, which everyone knows is nothing, but at least indicates affection—will disappear at this level. There will be no City & Guilds qualifications; they will become qualifications of the institute for apprenticeships. City & Guilds, being a charity, may bid for a seven-year contract to be an awarding organisation or to look after one or two of the routes, but it will not be awarding City & Guilds qualifications, rather it will just provide a function for the institute.

We are creating something much closer to the German model. We are losing what remains of the lodestars that the British Computer Society, City & Guilds and others have been providing in terms of the name and quality of their qualifications and replacing them with a new structure. This structure needs to be more powerful and conscious of its role than it is described as being in the Bill. I would like to see the Government follow the logic of what they have produced in the Bill and create a creature which is capable of the long-term responsibilities being placed upon it. It may be that the Government need to acquire City & Guilds, which is after all a quasi-government organisation anyway. Perhaps they need to take it on board to provide the strength, history, continuity and the people needed to run the sort of thing that is being set up in the Bill, or at least to provide the engine for it. I do not see how dispensing with all that the good awarding bodies have created and providing a structure which does not have the power to do what is necessary is a safe way of proceeding with a very important part of our education system.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Lord Lucas

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Very often, if there is a good local school there will not be the creation of another school. If you have got a very good primary school that is satisfying the demands of the parents and children, you will not get another group of parents and teachers wishing to create a new primary school.

The noble Lord does not know how difficult it is to start a school. For the past three years I have been starting new schools—at first with Lord Dearing—the new university technical colleges. It is a hard row to hoe because many people do not want it. These are colleges for 14 to 18 year-olds—which is disruptive for an 11-to-18 system for a start—specialising in technological and academic subjects. When Ron and I started, local authorities were not very interested. They did not like them for all the reasons that the noble Lord gave: they hurt good schools. Now I find that local authorities are coming to my little team, saying, “We’d like one of those, please”. They have seen that it is a new model that they like; it is better. I do not believe for a moment that a good school is threatened—that is rubbish, if I may say so to the noble Lord. He should not get up; he has had his go. Only bad schools are threatened; that is the problem. I can tell the noble Lord that it takes enormous effort to get a school started—to get parents together, to get teachers together. Meetings do not happen. Who is the champion? Can they bring it together? Then we have a divisive curriculum. Then they have to find support and make it viable economically: they have to find a primary school for 150 pupils and a secondary school for 500 to 600 pupils. That is an enormous hurdle. All the hurdles that Members of this Committee have tried to put in the way of the new schools over the past few hours is nothing compared to the task that committed groups will have to take on. That is the reality of life. It requires enormous effort and a tremendous act of corporate activity. We should not try to hobble and hinder that activity too much.

I prefer working with local education authorities. For the schools that I am establishing, we talk first to the local education authorities. If you are creating 14-to-19 colleges, they have to accommodate the 11-to-14 pupils. They also have to accept that it is a very different body in their school organisation. But now I am finding that local authorities like it. It is novel; it is different; and it will be effective. It will be effective, because in every comprehensive at age 12, 13 and 14, you have a vast number of disengaged pupils who do not want to continue in their local comprehensive school. We are providing an alternative which the state system has not yet provided. It provided it back in the 1950s as technical schools, but they failed because they were skill by snobbery. That is why we get a university to sponsor each of our colleges.

I therefore say to Members who are anxious about all this disrupting our education system that the new academies, to the extent that they will exist in the future, will improve our education system. They will improve the standards; they will get the commitment of local people, which will be very energetic. Even the Liberal Party knows how difficult it is to get local people to do anything—even to vote for them occasionally. So let us imagine how difficult it is to get local people committed to establishing a new school. That is why the Government are trying to make it as easy as possible. We should not make it too difficult for them to do so. This is a very imaginative proposal by the Government and it should be welcomed. It will be welcomed first by the Liberal Party—obviously; it will be welcomed reluctantly by the Labour Party, just as it came to welcome the city technology colleges and the grant-maintained schools. It is only a question of time. It is still in the mode of fighting the last election. When it starts fighting the next election, it will begin to realise that what we are saying is really rather attractive, responsive to the needs of people and beneficial to the education of our country. I cannot wait for the day.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I do enjoy this coalition politics, but I think that my noble friends on my left are looking too much at institutions and too little at parents. They should think in terms instead of the interests of parents and the pupils. They are taking too static a view of the schools system. Schools are changing and jostling for places all the time. In a town with three or four secondary schools, the least popular may suddenly get a good new headmistress who makes a great difference and the school becomes popular again. Pupils flow to her away from the other schools. This is a naturally dynamic system which can easily absorb other levels of change. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, the Government have lots of levers to deal with any problems that develop as a result of change—we will come to that when we talk about inspections and how we watch the way which the system is going. We are talking about a change which results in parents being happier, pupils doing better and provision being much more closely aligned with the best interests of pupils and parents. Yes, there may be a few bumps in the road, but if we are careful as a Government, we will make sure that they do not hurt people. That must be the way we should go, rather than sticking with what we all agree is a system with a very large proportion of unsatisfactory, or at least sub-optimal, provision.