Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, on putting down for debate a subject in which the words “working class” and “education” are in the same sentence. For the past 10 years, I have promoted schools—university technical colleges—for the working class of our country, and I am proud to do so.

The youngsters whom we recruit at 14 are disengaged, disheartened, disobedient and entirely fed up with their schools; they are looking for a fresh start. We give it to them. First, we treat them, at age 14, as adults—that is simply not done in normal schools. They decide what uniform they want to wear—they invariably elect for business dress—and they usually call their teachers by their Christian names. It is a totally different relationship. Secondly, from day one, they make things with wood, metal and plastics and using 3D printers, and they realise that this is something quite different. When I speak to those classes, I say, “This is the first day of your working life, because you start at 8.30 am and go on until 5 pm.” These schools are transformational. We are proud of the record of our students. Frankly, 30% to 40% of our intake is challenging, but our principals do not give up, and they are very reluctant to expel the pupil. They work at it; we give the pupils additional training classes to catch up, and they do.

The destination data is quite striking. Every July, August, September and October, our heads have to determine what happens to each of their students. If you ask the head of a normal school, “What’s happened to your students?”, I guarantee that they will tell you how many went to university, and then there will be silence. They are not really very interested in what happens to the other students. But we track down each one. Last year, we found that 27% of our students became apprentices; a normal school has about 6% or 7%. Some 43% went to universities, which is similar but slightly better than for many schools. What we found striking was that 75% of them did STEM courses—double the national average. Those courses are where the skill gap is in our country. The rest either get a job or go on to other forms of education. When it comes to NEETS—unemployed—we had only 3% last July, whereas a normal school would have 8% or 9%. Undoubtedly, then, we have transformed the life chances of those many youngsters who joined us two or three years early.

The other thing is that, on the whole, there has not been much encouragement for these schools from the previous four Secretaries of State. Michael Gove did not like them, tried to close them down and cut our money, and the other three Secretaries of State had passing relationships with education. However, the present Secretary of State is very enthusiastic about UTCs. He did not go to a public or private school—he went to an ordinary school and then college—and I found out that his daughter is at one of the city technology colleges that I founded back in the 1980s in Telford. Therefore, I have high hopes of the Secretary of State. He has visited a UTC and likes it, and said that we can expand, so we have put in applications for three new ones, in Salford, Carlisle and Birmingham, and we hope to have that approved in the summer of this year. Another will open in Doncaster this September.

More than anything else, these schools show that you can transform the life chances of many of the youngsters we have. Your Lordships might like to know of a striking example, because it is the sort of thing you might remember. We have a UTC in Liverpool, which is right on the border of Croxteth, the area for the black community. If you were born in Croxteth in the black community, you have a 15% chance of going to university. Three or four years ago, we took in several students from that black community, and it is striking that 85% of them gained university places. That is very strong social mobility, and it will be technical education—

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I will finish in a moment; do not worry. The success of the Government in education over the next five years will depend on whether they manage to transform technical education fundamentally in our country and make it better. Remember: every attempt to improve technical education since 1870 has failed apart from UTCs, so they have a great task. That is the task on which they will be judged: not on the EBacc or Progress 8, but on whether technical education is better in five years’ time.