Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, as many noble Lords have said, this report was inspired by the speed at which our lives at work and at home are being digitalised. We started work two years ago and reported eight months later, which was before the last election. The new Government, in their brief response, agreed with all our five modest recommendations. That is good, but we are still waiting.

In essence, we said that our economy called for national self-improvement in understanding the digital world and in acquiring the skills to deal with it. We also called for better infrastructure. Today, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee confirmed our view in its report. I hope that the digital economy Bill will deliver on these reports. However, as I say, we are still waiting.

This was a fascinating committee on which to serve. I am grateful to all our witnesses, who were evangelists for the cause of digital education. I am also grateful to Emily Greenwood and Aaron Speer, my noble friend Lady Morgan, who led us, my fellow committee members and our specialist advisers.

As my noble friend said in her excellent introduction, this is a huge topic, so we tried to deal with it in logical steps. We looked at learning digital skills at school, then the pathway from schools to work and higher education and helping those already at work to acquire these skills so that they could become more productive and employable, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said. When we looked at the world of education, I think we were rather surprised and encouraged by the number of initiatives. Since we wrote our report, these have multiplied and developed. In the debate on polytechnics a month ago, several noble Lords spoke about the importance of teaching digital skills at school. What came out of that debate was that many schools have discontinued design and technology in favour of digital skills. Apparently, this is partly because of teacher recruitment. We need both; it is not either/or.

However, there is good news. Since we started on our report, some 8 million schoolchildren have been given a BBC micro:bit or Raspberry Pi or something similar. Presumably, this is part of the BBC’s digital purpose, about which the noble Lord, Lord Foster, spoke. All this is being done to encourage children to learn coding and acquire digital skills. The ambition must be for this to be part of the school education of every child under the age of 16. However, it needs to be part of an overall scheme. Our report and that of the Commons both emphasise the importance of this hands-on skill becoming an integral part of education.

Helping this along is the European Space Agency—there is no escape from the referendum. Schoolchildren and adults are inspired by space travel. Thanks to the European Space Agency, every day you can see pictures of Tim Peake in his orbiting space capsule, which are specially prepared for his primary school’s project. He has become not only an astronaut but an educator, sending our children messages of encouragement. This is worth any number of lessons. Both he and the founder of Raspberry Pi—which is, incidentally, a charity—were both in the Birthday Honours List, and I hope noble Lords will join me in sending them congratulations.

As my noble friend Lady Morgan said, we also emphasised the importance of teaching the teachers. We welcomed the initiatives to provide this help, but recruitment is obviously a problem and we suggested solutions. The Commons report also speaks of recruiting problems. Reluctantly, I fear we may find that testing for these skills may be the way selected to help with teacher recruitment because testing always helps with recruitment.

In our report we spoke of the complicated and confusing pathway for non-academic students from school to work. This has been mentioned on many occasions in your Lordships’ House. The most recent was the report in April by the Select Committee on Social Mobility, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and what a good report it is. It describes the transition as,

“complex and incoherent, with confusing incentives for young people and employers”.

This is no way to ensure that these young people are properly equipped with digital skills—skills they are going to need whatever they do—and this transition needs urgent attention.

As other noble Lords have said, we made the point that these skills will be the basis of many new jobs. Indeed, since we wrote our report, estimates have been made that some 60% of the jobs that people will be doing in 10 years’ time do not even exist today. The Commons report speaks of 750,000 workers with digital skills being required in the next two years. We all agree that the way to future-proof our young people must be to teach them digital skills, so I welcome the new National College for Digital Skills, which starts work in the autumn—a nice but rather rare example of evidence-based policy-making, if I may say so—but more is needed. The Government need to appoint a Minister to bring all this together—a conductor, as the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, put it.

We spoke about including a digital element in all apprenticeship schemes. Since then, a target of 3 million apprenticeships has been set and there is to be a levy. I hope the levy will encourage employers to see that the digital skills relevant to their particular industry will be included, but are these skills included in the quality standards that the Government are setting for these apprenticeship schemes?

In our report, we spoke of the way companies, especially small and medium-sized companies, will use digital skills to become more productive, innovative and market orientated. We also saw some routine accountancy and financial work and medical diagnostics being done by machines programmed by clever experts. This has progressed far more quickly than I expected, using big data techniques. Indeed, the Management Consultancies Association says that one-third of its members’ work, both public and private, is now digitalising products and services, so they, too, need digitally skilled recruits. All this reinforces our argument about the changing nature of work and the need for digital skills—again, confirmed by the Commons report.

Like my noble friend Lord Knight and the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, what surprised me is the rapid development of artificial intelligence. The visit to Hartree hinted at this and what the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, just told us about Bristol confirms it. If artificial intelligence continues at the same speed of travel, as I am sure it will, perhaps we should have given more thought in our report to the moral, social and ethical values of these digital skills. These same skills can find the connection between our genes and a disease to cure our illnesses, as my noble friend Lord Maxton told us, but they can also send autonomous weapons into battle—a chilling thought. So let us learn from the campaign on the public understanding of science, in which many noble Lords participated. People want to understand as well as to benefit from these new digital skills, and we must explain as well as provide. We have learned that if the public do not want it, the technology becomes discredited.

Another area within the social aspect of digital skills that requires careful thought is the so-called world of transactional employment—that is, casual work done over the internet. Thousands of people now work full-time or part-time in this way. Upwork alone has 20,000 on its list. You would certainly need digital skills to operate on these work platforms. However, together with digital skills, the Government need to ensure that these people could work inside the social safety net, rather than outside it as they seem to be doing at present.

Ours was a timely report, hugely relevant to the modern worlds of education and work and backed up by today’s Commons report. But these worlds are moving on and developing fast, so the time cannot be far away when another committee will have to continue the work where we left off. Perhaps the time for the next committee to start work will be after the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, reports on technical education and after we have seen the details of the promised digital economy Bill. I think that it will require a committee of this House to ensure that society and digital skills keep in step and develop together, so that we will all benefit.